3 Ways Americans Get NATO Wrong

3 Ways Americans Get NATO Wrong

U.S. leadership requires strong alliances.

The March 22 Zaventem airport and Maalbeek metro attacks in Belgium thrust America’s commitment to Europe, and NATO in particular, into high relief as a political issue for 2016. It’s an odd note at a time of mourning for Europe. But in some ways, NATO offers a pretty illustrative prism of the leading candidates’ worldviews.

What is the anatomy of NATO support in the United States? There is, to put it delicately, a plurality of views regarding the United States’ outsized NATO commitment. That commitment has been maintained with eternal vigilance by a small, bipartisan cadre of statesmen, from Harry Truman to Scoop Jackson to John McCain. They have been willing to fend off the tripartite onslaught of America Firsters, dovish progressives and those who see America’s strategic future more clearly reflected in the waters of the Pacific.

 

Three Traditions of American NATO Skepticism

The strains of resentment toward the Atlantic alliance—and what Obama called its “free riders” in his interview with the Atlantic—have a long history. This is particularly true in Congress. Consider this: In 1966 and 1971, Democratic leader Mike Mansfield led dogged, and ultimately unsuccessful, efforts to reduce U.S. forces in Europe in favor of more troops in the Middle East and the Asia Pacific. The Clinton administration’s 1998 push for NATO enlargement to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic was met with withering opposition from both parties’ ideological flanks. At the time, John Ashcroft called it “treaty creep.” In 1999, the Republican House majority voted overwhelming against U.S. participation in the NATO-led peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. Members of Congress are fond of citing Robert Gates’ 2011 valedictory proclamation of NATO’s “dim if not dismal future” if European alliance members do not spend more money, and better.

The three forces of American ambivalence toward NATO are at work in the 2016 presidential election as well.

On the front of nationalist isolationism, Donald Trump is bringing his own brand of erratic punditry to NATO’s future and, as you’d expect, it seems incoherent, contradictory and amateurish. He dived in, calling for a reform of NATO’s mandate: “N.A.T.O. is obsolete and must be changed to additionally focus on terrorism. . .” On combating ISIS, Trump’s bite-sized Twitter doctrine is “take the oil, build the wall, Muslims, NATO!” Even though Trump is building this plane midflight, it’s clear where he’ll eventually touch down: on the landing strip of resentment and isolationism, in line with the virulent strain of populism he is trying to tap into. Trump stated ominously that it was “time to renegotiate” the U.S. NATO role along with bilateral alliances with South Korea and Japan, hinting at a drastic drawdown in commitment.

Trump’s perception of the U.S.-European relationship is transactional at best and dissociative at worst. He bemoans how NATO allies—Germany, in particular—have abdicated responsibility in Ukraine to the United States. Apparently his plucky band of foreign-policy advisors have not had a chance to tell Trump that Germany and France led the Normandy format negotiations that produced the Minsk agreements; that European assistance to Ukraine is over $11 billion, compared to $760 million from the United States; or that it was the prospect of trade and EU association that sparked the Maidan protests in the first place. The July 2016 Warsaw NATO Summit will likely be a target-rich environment for his id-driven invective.

On the dovish progressive front, there’s Bernie Sanders, whose reflexively antimilitary and more accommodating view to Russia taps a tradition stretching that includes Paul Wellstone, the Nation magazine and Henry Wallace. While he has not made NATO a major issue in his 2016 presidential campaign, he opposed NATO’s eastward expansion as an unnecessary affront to Russia and, in 1996, was one of a small group to vote against the act to facilitate NATO enlargement to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Today, Sanders is against NATO expansion to Ukraine, Georgia, Macedonia and Montenegro. More recently, at Georgetown University in November 2015, Sanders called for a new NATO-like organization that includes Russia to “confront the security threats of the 21st century.” The aim of his NATO 2.0 to tackle violent extremism through greater emphasis on economic opportunity is at once more relaxed about great power authoritarianism and less focused on defense.

On the Pacific-first front, there is President Obama himself, whose second-term recommitment to NATO belies an earlier, more honest boredom with the alliance’s strategic logic and exasperation with the free-riding and tedium of European allies. For many in the Obama orbit, the NATO club looks more like a Kiwanis Club with nukes—passé in a world of rising powers and new threats like climate change. Sure, there was the box checking. The 2010 National Security Strategy dutifully states that NATO is “the preeminent security alliance in the world today.” But the real action—economically, militarily and romantically—is in young, dynamic, vibrant Asia. The Obama administration’s so-called Pivot to Asia, with its military drawdowns in Europe and trade-deal sequencing preferential to TPP rather than TTIP, looks like the Mansfield Amendment repackaged.

All that has changed recently. After Crimea, the Donbass, Charlie Hebdo, the migration crisis, Paris, San Bernardino and now Brussels, the Obama administration’s commitment to NATO stiffened. The administration requested a fourfold budget increase to the European Reassurance Initiative. U.S. negotiators at the 2014 NATO Wales Summit were able to curve trend lines in defense spending upward; Germany, the UK, Estonia and Poland have all boosted their defense budgets since then. An American even serves as president of NATO’s parliamentary assembly.

Today’s alliance trajectory dovetails well with the foreign policy inclinations of Hillary Clinton, whose muscular internationalism draws on the Cold-War liberalism of Scoop Jackson and the New Republic. In her March 23 remarks at Stanford University, in front of a crowd who tend to look toward the Pacific for an American geopolitical future, Clinton made an arresting endorsement of NATO’s continued strategic importance: “NATO. . . is one of the best investments America has ever made.” The hard-nosed realism underlying that commitment was also on display: “Both Moscow and Beijing know our global network of alliances is a significant strategic advantage they can't match.”

Clinton sees the United States’ security, prosperity and democracy as almost indistinguishable from that of its allies. That worldview has a distinct power. First, Clinton’s clarity on NATO gives her credibility. It allows her to quickly tack to a critique of ally policy in a way Trump or Cruz—a latecomer to the NATO debate—never could. At Stanford, Clinton challenged NATO allies to increase information sharing between and within states, up the law enforcement game, give ISIS foreign fighters a one-way ticket to jail on return to Europe, and make passport controls and migrant registries stricter and more professionalized. She also called for the EU to end the European Parliament’s maddening dithering and pass an obvious agreement that would allow EU member states to share flight-passenger data.

Second, by embedding U.S. leadership more deeply in alliance structures, Clinton shows greater confidence in pursuing a more proactive anti-ISIS strategy. At this year’s Brussels Forum Sen. Jeff Sessions, the chair of Donald Trump’s foreign policy team, said of his counterterrorism approach: “we use the phrase like the George Kennan containment strategy. . . to contain violent extremism.” At Stanford, Clinton took aim at this assertion: “Walls will not protect us from this threat. We cannot contain ISIS—we must defeat ISIS.”

 

Articulating Participatory Leadership

Carly Fiorina, former GOP candidate and CEO of Hewlett-Packard, was fond of mocking Clinton’s State Department tenure on the campaign trail, saying, “flying is an activity, not an accomplishment.” What Fiorina fails to appreciate is how Clinton’s almost one million sky miles reflect her distinct brand of participatory leadership. Her work at State—her travel; her work to incorporate Cuba, Myanmar and South Sudan into the international community; her push to reestablish the UN as an institution with a legitimate role in high geopolitical conundrums, like Iran and Libya; her efforts to extend rights and protections to women and girls, the LGBT community and religious minorities; her push for community-centered models to combat terrorism and violent extremism and promote civil society, anti-corruption, open media and Internet freedom—come together as a sort of shared ownership of the international system. For Clinton, U.S. leadership only makes sense when it’s embedded in a web of interdependent alliances and commitments. As she articulated at Stanford, unambiguous support for NATO is at the heart of that doctrine.

Tyson Barker is a Security Fellow at the Truman National Security Project and a former State Department official. 

Image: Flickr/U.S. Army Europe