NATO’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington July 11, 2024. Photo, OSV News/Leah Millis, Reuters. When US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, on the occasion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) 75th anniversary meetings in Washington DC last week, wrote an article for the New York Times entitled ‘You Can Count on a Strong NATO’ my alarm bell started to ring. If NATO were as ‘rock solid’ as the narrative about it would have one believe, why would Sullivan need to write such a piece? Admittedly, NATO has had its share of disastrous endeavours over the years, though like ‘eaten bread’ they seem to be ‘soon forgotten’ – think Libya (2011), think Afghanistan (2021).
The NATO narrative is that the alliance has been re-invigorated and galvanised by the actions of Russian President Vladimir Putin in launching an invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Moreover, NATO has gained two important new members, Finland and Sweden, surely a sign of growing strength? NATO has played a crucially important role in helping Ukraine to defend itself against the Russian aggressor – albeit see John Bolton’s critical remarks below. Ukraine itself is desperate to join NATO although this still seems a distant prospect.
Last week’s summit, President Biden’s gaffes apart, went smoothly enough. However, NATO faces a number of challenges, and in this article I shall focus on four of them: one existential, two geopolitical and one sociological-societal.
Existential: The Trump Factor
First, and most importantly, there is the ‘Trump factor’. This relates to the possibility that former US President Donald J. Trump will be elected again in November. It is widely known that he holds NATO in very low regard, and he caused consternation in NATO circles in February of this year when at a campaign rally in South Carolina he said he wouldn’t protect NATO members who didn’t pay their bills from an attack by Russia and would even encourage Russia to do ‘whatever the hell’ it wanted.
The possibility that Trump would pull the US out of NATO is not at all remote. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs entitled ‘NATO Cannot Survive Without America’, Binnendijk, Hooker and Vershbow wrote that “former US officials who worked closely with Trump on NATO during his tenure…are convinced he will withdraw from the alliance if he is re-elected.”
Bolton believes that this would be a ‘catastrophic mistake’ by the US because it ‘would introduce instability even into the North Atlantic area’”
A similar view was expressed by former US Ambassador to the United Nations and Trump’s former National Security Adviser John Bolton, speaking last week in an online interview with the Washington Post. In his remarks Bolton was highly critical of both Trump and ‘the gaffer’ – aka President Biden – and he doesn’t propose to vote for either one in November. Bolton believes that the Biden administration didn’t make a serious, sustained effort to deter the Russians before the invasion took place. He added that during the course of the war the US itself had been deterred – by Russia’s threat of a wider war – from providing assistance and advice to Ukraine in a really strategic way so as to defeat the Russians.
Bolton said he was very much afraid that a ‘new’ President Trump would decide to withdraw from NATO. Bolton believes that this would be a “catastrophic mistake” by the US because it “would introduce instability even into the North Atlantic area. It would call into question American alliance commitments around the world. It would undo the most successful politico-military alliance in human history, all for no purpose whatsoever.”
It’s worth entering one caveat in relation to any desire on Trump’s part to leave NATO were he to win in November. Speaking at an event in Australia in May organised by the Centre for Independent Studies, University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer said that, second time around, Trump would try again to leave NATO, but the question to ask is this: can Trump beat the ‘Deep State’ which thwarted him during his first term? As a structuralist, Mearsheimer said he believes that structure limits how much agency someone like Trump has, so Mearsheimer is betting on the Deep State with regard to NATO – i.e., the Deep State will keep the US in NATO irrespective of Trump’s ‘best’ efforts. However, if the assassination attempt on Trump at the weekend contributed to a landslide victory in November, that would strengthen his hand even more.
Geopolitical A: The Decreasing Importance to the US of the Transatlantic Relationship
Writing in Foreign Policy last week Professor Stephen M. Walt of Harvard observed that the forces threatening NATO’s future go beyond the personal inclinations of individual leaders such as Trump. Walt sees the most obvious source of tension as being ‘the shifting distribution of world power.’ In this context he highlighted the emergence of China as a ‘peer competitor’ of the US. He described as ‘chatter’ the idea that NATO would take on a greater role in the Indo-Pacific. Words matter, or at least they should. If an organisation is called ‘North Atlantic’ should it not just ‘do what it says on the tin’? By all means let it be aware of China in a security context – e.g., in regard to China’s support for Russia’s war effort – but seeking an actual role in the Indo-Pacific seem both literally and metaphorically far-fetched. Elbridge Colby put it succinctly in a recent NATO-related event. Co-founder and principal of The Marathon Initiative, which is focused on developing strategies to prepare the United States for an era of sustained great power competition, he said that European forces in this day and age are not capable of projecting significant military power in the Pacific. Therefore, and with due respect, the Lithuanian Foreign Minister’s views on Taiwan, for example, don’t matter one way or the other.
It would call into question American alliance commitments around the world. It would undo the most successful politico-military alliance in human history, all for no purpose whatsoever”
Geopolitical B: NATO’s Lack of Readiness for a ‘Multi-Order’ World
In an article published in the special section on NATO at 75 in the March 2024 issue of International Affairs (IA) Professor Trine Flockhart of the EUI’s School of Transnational Governance in Florence wrote about NATO in the context of the emergence of a ‘multi-order world’. It is one thing for NATO to have lasted 75 years, but Flockhart is concerned that NATO isn’t keeping up with changes in what she calls global ordering architecture. She worries that, going forward, NATO may take decisions which are unlikely to meet future needs, owing to not understanding “the character and complexity of the ordering architecture that is emerging”. What are these orders? In her article she mentioned the international order led by the US; the Russian-led Eurasian order; and the Chinese-led Belt and Road order. I met with her in Florence last week and she gave a further example: Daesh/ISIS which has been described as ‘a transnational Salafi jihadist group and an unrecognised quasi-state’.
She expressed concern in her IA piece about the gap within NATO between liberal internationalism on the one hand and national illiberalism on the other. NATO contains member countries whose views are not compatible with the values as expressed in the Treaty preamble, thereby undermining the alliance’s cohesion. She calls for the alliance to get its own democratic house in order – but as I am sure she would concede, that’s easier said than done.
Sociological-Societal
Here I come back to Professor Walt again. In Walt’s view, “familiar cliches about shared values and trans-Atlantic solidarity do not resonate as powerfully as they once did, especially for younger generations”. The percentage of Americans of European descent is declining, he continued, and young people are more worried about climate change than power politics. In summary, Walt sees the US and Europe drifting apart.
A brief but related digression: this waning interest applies also to the US-Irish relationship. One example: in 2018 a ten-term Congressman of Irish descent was roundly defeated in the Democratic primary in New York’s 14th Congressional district by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Latina.
NATO is indicating either that it simply doesn’t care about the Israel-Gaza conflict, or that referring to it wouldn’t serve its purposes”
Mentioning young people and the issues they care about, we have seen in recent months that young people on both sides of the Atlantic – especially on university campuses, including that of the European University Institute where I am based – have been greatly agitated by the war in Gaza, with the huge levels of death and destruction there. Yet this immensely worrying conflict did not merit a single reference in NATO’s Washington Summit Declaration last week. By not even including a bromide about it in its summit declaration, NATO is indicating either that it simply doesn’t care about the Israel-Gaza conflict, or that referring to it wouldn’t serve its purposes.
Michael Sanfey is a visiting fellow at Robert Schuman Centre, Florence