Can NATO survive Europe?

E. Wayne Merry's essay, "Therapy's End", in the Winter 2003/04 issue of The National Interest advances a controversial proposition: "The main instrument of the Cold War now inhibits rather than encourages transatlantic cooperation and should be eliminated." The National Interest has asked four distinguished scholar-practitioners to provide their opinions and responses to this argument.

Getting Real An Unromantic Look at the NATO Alliance

John C. Hulsman

AS Alexander Pope explained, "If folly grow romantic, I must paint it." Which brings me to E. Wayne Merry's piece. I have enjoyed Merry's company for a number of years. Yet there has always been something about his aversion to NATO, more in tone than anything else, that has failed to ring true. With this piece, at last I have it. For Merry, all outward appearances to the contrary, is a romantic about the alliance, failing to see it for what it is genuinely in the process of becoming.

In this line, he follows a long and noble historical pattern. Members of the first postwar generation, which invented NATO, were also romantics, seeing the alliance as the elixir that would save them from the ghastly European history of the first half of the 20th century. Statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic--giants like Adenauer, Bevin, Churchill, Acheson, Truman and Eisenhower--felt that, come what may, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization must be supported as the last, best chance to avoid either the Armageddon of World War III or slavery under the Stalinist system. All differences, problems, national rivalries and controversies (and, as now, they were legion) were paltry in comparison to this wholehearted commitment.

In a very different way, the generation that followed (of which Merry is a member) oddly echoed the romantic proclivities of their fathers. Men such as Gerhard Schroder, Joschka Fischer, Javier Solana, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair grew up during a time of rebellion against the cozy consensus of their predecessors. If the older generation could get Vietnam so wrong, so the thinking went, perhaps even more vital foreign policy calculations were also flawed. In their youths, such men rebelled against the alliance, seeing it as little more than a symbol of American domination. The Sixty-Eighters (as they came to be known in Europe) instead looked to the increasingly growing European Economic Community as a long-term antidote to perceived American hegemony. In a queer reverse manner, Merry is merely echoing the views of a number of European leaders, held particularly in their youths, that America (and by association its Trojan horse, NATO) was preventing "Europe" from emerging as a third pole of power to challenge both the United States and the USSR. The Sixty-Eighters may have reviled De Gaulle and helped to end his reign, but they subconsciously echoed his critique of the bipolar era. The problem with this latter view is that it misunderstands what NATO and "Europe" really are and what they are becoming.

I am the product of the third postwar generation, a realist Hegelian synthesis of the romantic notions of NATO as everything on the one hand and NATO as imperialist tool on the other. For my generation, NATO is just one politico-military tool of many, to be used when both operationally and politically applicable. For the simple fact is that NATO is again evolving to meet the challenges of the post-9/11 world. For there is little doubt that Merry does not understand what NATO is and does. In fact, nowhere does he mention perhaps NATO's greatest strength: to serve as a clubhouse, allowing fractious states on both sides of the Atlantic to calibrate diplomatic positions privately, coordinating such positions when it becomes practicable. This absolutely vital political function would have to be reinvented if the alliance ceased to exist. For in a world where "Europe" does not yet exist, it allows the United States to cherry-pick allies issue by-issue and case-by-case, a comfortable middle diplomatic ground between going it alone on major strategic matters and allowing chronic divisions in Europe and elsewhere to grind American foreign policy decision-making to a halt.

NATO ITSELF has operationally been in the process of reinventing itself (as it did in both 1949 and 1952) to deal with the more diffuse post-9/11 era. Up until recently, members of the alliance had only two decision-making options: either agree en masse to take on a mission or have one member block the consensus that would allow such a mission to proceed. Fortuitously in April 1999, NATO governments ratified the new Combined Task Force mechanism (CJTF) that adds a needed dimension of flexibility to alliance operations. Through the CJTF mechanism, member-states can decline to participate actively in a specific mission if they do not feel their vital interests are involved, but their opting out of a mission would not stop other NATO members from participating in an intervention if they chose to do so.

This new modus operandi is a two-way street. In fact, the first time it was used (de facto) involved European efforts to head off civil conflict in Macedonia. The United States, sensibly enough, noted that Macedonia was, to put it mildly, not a primary national interest. However, for Italians, with the Adriatic as their Rio Grande, the explosion of Skopje would have had immediate and direct geostrategic consequences, in terms of both the further destabilization of a nearby region and the consequent refugee flows that were bound to follow in its wake. By allowing certain European states to use common NATO wherewithal, such as logistics, lift and intelligence capabilities (most of which were American in origin) while refraining from putting U.S. boots on the ground in Macedonia, the Bush Administration followed a sensible middle course that averted a crisis emerging in the alliance. This operational evolution for out of area missions, far from amounting to "a silent, political coup d'etat", as Merry's fevered, romantic imagination would have it, merely signifies the primary reason NATO works: its ability to adapt to changing global structural conditions. Contrary to Merry's assertions, this is the stuff of robust alliances.

Likewise utopian is Merry's incessant reference to "European interests", to Europe acting as a coherent entity in the politico-military realm. Merry's second fallacy, a misunderstanding of what the EU is and does, and what it wishes to be, is as equally a flawed assessment as is his misunderstanding of today's alliance. One has only to look at the seminal issue of war and peace during the past year--what to do about Saddam Hussein's Iraq--to see a complete lack of coordination at the European level. Initially, the UK stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the United States; Germany's militant pacifists were against any sort of military involvement, be it sanctioned by the UN or not; and France held a wary middle position, stressing that any military force must emanate from UN Security Council deliberations. It is hard to imagine starker and more disparate foreign policy positions being staked out by the three major powers in Europe--and all of them based on their own specific national, rather than European-wide, interests. As the diplomatic crisis went on, what the Iraq crisis showed to all the world is that beyond comforting EU communiques, the reality is that Iraq was not about European governments versus the United States. It was about European governments versus European governments. The Europeans are light-years away from developing a common foreign and security policy (CFSP). While doubtless Euro-federalists will say, as they always do, that this specific diplomatic failure will galvanize them to collective action, what we have here is a faith-based view, nothing more. On the high politics issues of war and peace, national interests still come first. Until this changes, the "Europe" to which Merry alludes will remain little more than a romantic fantasy.

PARENTHETICALLY, if the Europe of Merry's imaginings does not exist, there is little reason to suspect that America would do better if it did. The United States finds itself in a difficult social situation regarding greater European efforts at...