THE END OF NATO?

'Hallelujah. Never again will your fates be tossed around like poker chips on a bargaining table.' So said US Secretary of State Madeline Albright in 1999 to the leaders of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland as their states joined NATO. It was an exciting time. And yet the fate of all of America's European allies is now being tossed about casually by the incumbent in the White House.

Trump, on social media last Tuesday, effectively announced the end of US involvement in NATO. He told allies: 'You'll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won't be there to help you anymore, just like you weren't there for us.' He was lambasting them for not sending support to open the Strait of Hormuz. His Secretary of State Marco Rubio weighed in, calling the alliance 'not a very good arrangement.'

Then Trump was expected to trounce the alliance in a speech late last Wednesday. I wondered if the scheduled timing, 3am Central European Time, was a deliberate ploy to ensure Europeans were fast asleep at the time of a major policy announcement. One could be forgiven for thinking he was about to state officially that he wishes to begin the process of quitting the alliance. In fact someone seems to have talked him out of it. Or he never had anything so significant planned. In any case he did not mention NATO in his twenty-minute speech.

For sure, much of Trump's rhetoric is 'noise', most of which is best ignored and not worth getting exercised about. But here in Europe we should not dismiss his threat to withdraw from an alliance that he has berated constantly, from calling it 'obsolete' in 2016 to his repeated claims that European allies 'do nothing' for America, to the manner in which he talks of it as something separate from the US that only makes demands on Washington and gives nothing in return.

We need to acknowledge that it is the US's prerogative to leave the alliance. It is therefore vital that Europe prepares for the possibility; it should not rely on the hope that such a decision would not gain the necessary two-thirds majority in a Congressional vote to become reality. Trump spares little to get his way, after all. This (long) post recounts the post-cold war history of NATO and indicates three policies Europeans should prepare to adopt now.

'Out of area or out of business'

The North Atlantic Treaty, signed in 1949, aimed to deter the Soviet Union from attacking western Europe. In essence, the United States committed itself to Europe's defence. With the end of the cold war three decades later, the demise of the Soviet Union, and a diminished threat from Russia, the alliance could have been disbanded. Many Americans wanted to disengage from Europe and withdraw US troops. But President George H. W. Bush believed that the US benefitted from maintaining a military presence on European soil. He understood that even in the absence of a Soviet threat, missile defences on the continent could aid America's defence against a Middle Eastern foe.

After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the decision that a unified Germany would be a member of NATO, which the Americans negotiated hard for in the first months of 1990, was in effect America's way of saying it remained committed to Europe. In the negotiations about Germany, the US negotiators wanted to ensure that the 400,000 Soviet troops stationed in eastern Germany would leave, whilst American troops in western Germany should remain. Persuading the Soviet leaders that Germany anchored in NATO was preferable to an unaligned unified Germany, the US Secretary of State James Baker agreed that the territory of the former East Germany would have a 'special military status' but nonetheless be inside NATO.

Bush's successor, Bill Clinton, faced demands from central and eastern Europeans to be admitted to NATO. Western European leaders were wary and there was resistance, too, from both the US State Department and the Pentagon. But Clinton, seeking to recast the alliance, connected central and eastern European states' membership of NATO to supporting their post-communist democratisation. A popular phrase in the first half of the 1990s was that NATO must go 'out of area or out of business.' For Clinton, 'out of area' meant enlargement. And so NATO reinvented itself and Clinton pushed ahead with its enlargement, despite the anxieties of western Europeans. Clinton picked up support, ironically, from hard-line Republicans in Congress who wanted to lock in the gains of victory in the cold war.

Plus ça change

NATO's 1999 summit in Washington, marking fifty years since the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty, saw the admission of the first eastern European states (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland) into the alliance. It also unveiled a new Strategic Concept which recognised that NATO henceforth might address security issues beyond its members' borders. It is relevant that the summit and its new concept coincided with NATO's bombing raids against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia). NATO was very much in business with the US in the driving seat.

Then came 9/11. The only occasion in NATO's history that its collective defence clause has been invoked. The US asked for assistance and Europeans willingly stepped up to its side. In the US-led intervention in Afghanistan that followed, part of the post-9/11 'war on terror', the US's NATO allies put lives on the line for America. (Admittedly the 2003 Iraq invasion strained US-European relations considerably.)

NATO experimented with out-of-area operations as it redefined itself in the post-cold war era. In Libya in 2011, backed by a United Nations Security Council resolution, a NATO-led coalition formed to enforce a ceasefire and maintain a no-fly zone. At its core, however, NATO remained a collective defence alliance focused on the North Atlantic area (i.e. Europe and North America, see my previous blog). Its new members in eastern and central Europe, both those who joined in 1999 and later additions, were primarily concerned about Russian revanchism. For them, NATO's main adversary remained Moscow and the collective defence commitment was the salient motive for being in NATO. Thus, at a point when the older members of NATO thought the alliance had found a new purpose, the new members reasserted the original one. NATO serves the defence of Europe and North America; it possesses the means to meet that end.

Harming European interests

Trump's choice to join Israel and attack Iran is not a NATO matter (see previous blog). The hubris of Trump's war is plain to see and it is apparent that things are not going fully to plan. The Iranian regime is not collapsing and the Strait of Hormuz is under its control. People are questioning earlier assumptions about the size of Iran's weapons stockpiles, conceding that it may be able to fight for longer than the US or Israel believed. Trump's administration sacked the US Army's chief of staff and two senior officers last week, hardly an indication of satisfaction with progress, and Iran knocked two US military aircraft out of the sky on Friday.

There were even rumours, albeit denied by US officials, that the White House was considering reallocating aid for Ukraine – already paid for by Europeans under the Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) programme – to the Middle East. Meanwhile, Trump and his War Secretary are gloating about plans to commit war crimes (and there is already evidence that US missiles hit civilian buildings on the first day of the war, both a school and a sports centre).

But Europe is suffering for the war economically, with higher prices at the petrol pumps and rising food prices. For sure, Europeans would like to see the end of the Iranian regime, but they have lived with it for 47 years and usually had a reliable supply of oil from the Gulf. Despite this, why would Europeans want to support a war started by Trump just weeks after he threatened to annex territory from a NATO ally? A war that, from Europe's perspective, seems completely unnecessary. In any case, the US seems to have moved away from regime change ambitions.

European leaders wisely do not react (much) when Trump lashes out at them. They know well the irascibility, insolence and ignorance of the US president and conclude his fury is best left to burn of its own accord. The risk is that his rhetoric becomes more extreme as he strives to provoke a response. Europeans know, too, that the White House's protestations about the coherence of its war aims in Iran very much prove the contrary. Yet, however often Britain's prime minister Keir Starmer rightly says to the British public that it is 'not our war', it is nonetheless becoming 'our' problem.

Europe's choices: Three policies

In the present situation, Europeans are raising the costs to the US of waging war. They are doing this through, for example, Spain outright denying the US overflight rights, Britain and France being cagey about the use of their airspace and soil, and Italy denying it use of a joint US-Italian base in Sicily. The Sicily base, Sigonella, is currently the main base for US naval operations in the Mediterranean; reports suggests Italy's decision is fully in line with the terms of the basing agreement. These are inconveniences to US operations, forcing them to fly longer sorties and use more fuel.

If the US were to quit NATO, then Europeans should ensure the US does not continue to receive the benefits of the alliance unless it contributes in other ways. The US has maintained an extensive military presence in Europe to this day. The scandal is that it pays next-to-nothing for many of the bases it operates. Under host-nation support arrangements, the host country usually provides the land and infrastructure, while the US pays day-to-day running costs. In effect, the US gets the bases in return for its security assurances to allies through NATO's treaty, assurances President Trump is loath to honour. If the US is not going to defend Europe, why should it benefit from such hosting?

First of all, at the very least, Europeans should look at charging increased rents to the US henceforward if it wishes to retain its military presence. (I note rumours that Trump wishes to withdraw US troops from Germany; that, it should go without saying, is also his prerogative.) Europeans could go further if the US leaves NATO and reassess whether hosting US military capabilities is too much of a vulnerability, risking entangling them in America's conflicts with others.

A second policy therefore could be to force some of the US bases to close. It might sound rash but we have another three years of a Trump presidency which shows little willingness to contribute to Europe's security. Europeans should not be detained by legal quibbles, not least when dealing with a US administration that is hardly a paragon of law-abidingness. Ad hoc laws can be passed to deal with any issues. They will have to develop the defence capabilities that they currently do not possess. No one is pretending that it will not be a very complicated process, not least when it comes to issues like continent-wide missile defence systems.

European governments, thirdly, should also put a block on signing new defence contracts with American firms as a way of boosting their own defence industries. Trump has only insulted European defence firms, for instance calling Britain's home-made aircraft carriers 'toys' (they are built jointly by Babcock, BAE and Thales Group; that is, two British and one French firm). The solution can hardly be to increase dependence on US defence companies if America cannot be relied on as an ally: what if it blocks the provision of replacement components or servicing? Europe's over-reliance on the US defence hardware includes some maintenance.

Europeans should use Trump's invective as a motivation to invest in their own defence companies. France, which recently announced it will increase its stockpile of nuclear warheads and extend its nuclear umbrella to partners, is leading the way. A ban on new contracts with the US would considerably affect America's firms; 38% of US arms exports went to Europe between 2021 and 2025. Above all, Europe must look forwards even if that means letting America shoot itself in the foot.

Big changes happen in international politics and they often happen quickly. It is the US's prerogative to quit NATO. Whilst I do not wish to see the alliance disbanded, I understand that it becomes a strong possibility if the US withdraws; or if the alliance survives, and it would be in Europe's interest to retain it rather than start institution-building from scratch, it will have to look very different so as not to go out of business. Above all that means ending the continent's dependencies on the US military-industrial complex. Europe must turn Trump's truculence to its advantage, even if that means going it alone on security.

Footnotes:

[1] The Albright quote in the first paragraph is cited in the preface of Ronald Asmus's book Opening NATO's Door: How the Alliance Remade Itself for a New Era (Columbia University Press, 2002). The summary of NATO's post-cold war history that follows is derived above all from Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice's Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Harvard University Press, 1997) and Mary Sarotte's two books, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe (Princeton University Press, 2009) and Not One Inch: America, Russia and the Making of the Post-Cold War Stalemate (Yale University Press, 2021).

[2] The US continued to set NATO's agenda. At a summit in Bucharest in 2008, the French and German leaders, fearing Russia's reaction, cautioned George W. Bush against offering Georgia and Ukraine 'Membership Actions Plans' (a framework document setting out a path to joining the alliance). The resulting compromise saw NATO declare that the two states would one day be members without offering any specific timeframe or process: many in Russia interpreted this as an indication that NATO was determined to absorb the two former Soviet republics into its ranks; many in Europe, by contrast, interpreted it as empty rhetoric and non-commital about the future. (The bombing campaign in Libya, I concede, was not driven by the US; President Barack Obama was reluctant and bowed to pressure from Europeans and regional actors in the Maghreb and Middle East).

[3] Declassified UK recently published a good account of the secrecy surrounding basing agreements between the US and the UK. According to its account, the US Department of War claims to own facilities in the UK, whereas the UK government insists that the US Department of War owns no facilities in the UK. To describe the arrangements as 'murky' is an understatement and the UK would find it particularly hard to disengage from the US given the depth of intelligence and security ties. Bases in the UK, as well as the Sigonella base in Italy mentioned in this post, allow the US to make exceptional use of them in 'emergency' situations, without it being clear what constitutes an emergency; it would stretch credibility to claim that the US war in Iran constituted such an emergency, given it is one of the US's own making.

[4] On Monday, Trump claimed his feud with NATO allies 'began with Greenland. They didn't want to give it to me, so I said "Bye bye".' He also replied to a question about war crimes: 'I'm not worried about it,' he said dismissively; 'You know what's a war crime? Having a nuclear weapon. Letting a sick country with a demented leadership to have a nuclear weapon.' He was not talking about his own country.

[5] On arms sales to Europe, The Guardian provides a superb data resource freely accessible. Were NATO to survive following a US withdrawal, there will also be challenges of developing European command-and-control arrangements. NATO's top military officer in Europe, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), has always been an American, which reiterates, contrary to Trump's evident belief, that the US retains an ultimate say. A European has always held the public-facing Secretary-General role.