What's Wrong with NATO and How to Fix it. Mark Webber

What's Wrong with NATO and How to Fix it - Mark Webber


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This is a view we reject. NATO certainly has its problems, but to do away with the organization would worsen and not improve the security position of its members. Reforming NATO, rather, is the more realistic and preferred course of action. Occasionally, political leaders have intimated at withdrawal from the Alliance, but none of NATO’s members has advocated its dissolution. Any argument for doing so is unpersuasive. The alternative case presented in this book, for a reformed NATO, is framed by five starting assumptions.

       NATO is not in terminal decline

      Declinist views have characterized much commentary and scholarship on NATO. But time after time, such views have proven wrong. During the Cold War, the Suez Crisis of 1956, French withdrawal from NATO’s integrated military commands in the 1960s and differences in the early 1980s between the Reagan administration and some European governments over how to deal with the Soviets were all seen as evidence of internal corrosion. However, as Wallace Thies has convincingly argued, the Alliance’s ‘self-healing tendencies’ of democratic membership, internal democratic decision-making and institutional complexity ensured the accommodation of its members’ interests, and with it ongoing resolve in facing down the Soviet bloc.15

      An organization whose purpose is to protect the security of its members will necessarily have to confront its enemies and face down threats. Dealing with crisis – whether in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Libya or on NATO’s eastern flank facing Russia – is simply part and parcel of what NATO does. To infer from such a state of affairs that NATO itself is ‘in crisis’ is a mistaken leap of logic.18 Time and again, the Alliance has proven its naysayers wrong as it has responded, rather than surrendered, to some of the tough security challenges of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

       NATO is unique

      Ostensibly, NATO is simply a treaty-based alliance of states, a fairly conventional category in international politics. It is, however, much more besides. Since the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949, the number of NATO allies has grown (from the original twelve to thirty today) and, in parallel, NATO has developed a sophisticated institutional set-up. NATO, consequently, is as much an international organization as it is a military alliance. We will have more to say on this in Chapter 1. The point here is that these ‘institutional assets’, although initially developed during the Cold War, have proven flexible enough to ensure significant NATO adaptation in the three decades since.19 Adaptation has, operationally speaking, not always generated the right results; it has also been painful as NATO has had to learn by doing in the field of operations. Yet adaptation has certainly been dramatic. In the Balkans, Afghanistan and Libya, NATO laid down a series of firsts – in terms of its willingness to work with non-NATO partners, its ability to provide massive and sustained concentrations of force on land, sea and air, and the expansion of its geographical area of operations.20

       There is no substitute for NATO

      The particular institutional form the Alliance has taken marks it out from other organizational alternatives. The EU, the United Nations (UN) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) can all lay claim to promoting security. None, however, is possessed of the institutional and military assets described above. None would have been capable of mounting combat operations in the Balkans, Libya and Afghanistan, or of replicating NATO’s Readiness Action Plan to provide reassurance to the Baltic States and Poland in the face of Russian military might.

      Three other points are also worth making by way of comparison. First, the


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