Don’t Believe the Doomsayers: NATO Has a Future

ANXIETY ABOUT the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) future is older than the actual alliance. Its founders worried about the prospects for its survival before the Washington Treaty was fully drafted, much less signed and ratified. Today’s concerns about NATO’s future are, in a sense, old hat.

From another perspective, however, the NATO of 2019 is profoundly different from that of 2009, 1999 and 1989, not to mention the newly-minted alliance of 1949. In fact, 1989 was the true turning point for NATO, and we are only now confronting the accumulated consequences of haphazard U.S. and Western policy choices over the past three decades, which help to explain why NATO faces the problems it now confronts, including challenges to its mission, its capabilities and its values.

On November 21, 1990, the United States, the Soviet Union and the nations of Europe adopted the Paris Charter for a New Europe. The document symbolically closed the Cold War by pronouncing enthusiastically but in hindsight prematurely that “the era of confrontation and division of Europe has ended.” The Warsaw Pact formally dissolved itself the following year. No one expected NATO to disband so swiftly, given that Europe’s security environment remained unsettled as the Soviet Union disintegrated and Yugoslavia exploded into civil war. Yet both Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President George H.W. Bush spoke of a “peace dividend” in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse. The United States began to slash defense spending, while Western Europe accelerated the process towards deepening and widening European integration, as epitomized by the signing of the Treaty of Maastricht creating the European Union (EU) in 1992.

The Soviet Union’s collapse rendered obsolete NATO’s primary mission to deter a Soviet invasion, and failing that, to defend Western Europe. NATO member states saw diverse new dangers elsewhere, initially in Yugoslavia’s civil wars but later from broader global problems like terrorism, migration and climate change. Established as a defensive military alliance, NATO was ill-suited to address many of these newer transnational challenges—most of which affected some members more than others—and struggled to define a coherent new mission that could hold together the alliance. A few wags rechristened the “NATO” acronym to stand for “Now Almost Totally Obsolete.”

At a series of post-Cold War conclaves, notably the 2002 Prague “Transformation” Summit, the alliance members argued about the desirability and feasibility of reconfiguring NATO as a “rapid reaction force” that could be deployed anywhere in the world to tackle global “hot spots”—particularly failed and failing states. At the same time, the United States encouraged other NATO members to spend their defense budgets not for European territorial defense, as in the Cold War, but in developing the deployable specialties expected in a post-Cold War world—mobile hospital units, chemical weapons decontamination squads, security force trainers or specialized counter-terrorism units—that could be sent beyond the European theater to tackle challenges before they metastasized into new threats to the security of the trans-Atlantic world. The U.S. effort to push the transformation of NATO into a global security provider, however, ran into significant resistance in a number of European countries that were leery about becoming enmeshed in America’s worldwide military operations.

The collapse of the Soviet Union also coincided with the third wave of democratization. For most of its history, the ideological glue that held together the Scandinavian socialists, continental Christian Democrats, British Tories and a series of military rulers in a single alliance was opposition to Soviet Communism, not a commitment to secular liberal pluralism. By 1991, however, fifteen of NATO’s sixteen members were considered to be consolidated or restored liberal democracies, and Turkey’s own process towards democratization was considered to be irreversible. Some believed that NATO could then evolve from being an alliance of collective defense against a Soviet threat based on geopolitical imperatives into an alliance to promote shared values where ideological criteria had superseded hard security considerations.

Of course, Russia itself had not disappeared. The West received a momentary shock when, at an Organization for Security Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) meeting in December 1992, Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev appeared to announce that Russia would seek to reconstitute the Soviet Union. Kozyrev’s stunt, designed to alert his audience to the dangers of Russian revanchism, temporarily raised hackles but was ultimately ignored as, during the 1990s, Russian military capabilities precipitously declined while the Boris Yeltsin administration seemed to acquiesce to the policies of the West and accept the guidance of the United States in terms of international affairs. Indeed, the prevailing assumption was that Russia would cease to have any significant differences of opinion with the West on any international issue, and, even if it did, it would not matter, because Russia had ceased to be a great power in any meaningful sense.

Thus, after 1991, for many of the legacy NATO members, particularly those along the southern flank, a post-Soviet Russia was no longer a central security concern. Over time, instability in the Middle East and North Africa became a much more pressing issue. For many of the major Western European states like Germany, France and Italy, no longer worried about the prospects of a Soviet invasion, the goal was to push for closer Russian political and economic integration into Europe. No longer seen as an existential enemy, political leaders in Rome, Berlin and Paris now viewed Moscow as an emerging partner in the east—while at the same time showing some reluctance to becoming involved in Russia’s disputes with its other, post-Soviet neighbors. But throughout Western Europe, the prevailing sentiment was that, once the Yugoslav wars were over, the prospect of major armed conflict breaking out on the European continent was negligible. Secure in that knowledge, most legacy NATO members allowed their defense spending to wane—while the United States increasingly shifted its focus of attention to the Middle East and Asia, with Europe viewed primarily as a staging ground for American operations elsewhere in the world.

Conventional wisdom is that the Ukraine events of 2014 brought all of these problems with NATO into stark relief. Not so. NATO already had a clear warning of the problems that were accumulating when the alliance experienced a mini-crisis in February 2003. As it became apparent that war was imminent in the Middle East, Turkey requested that the alliance take concrete steps to defend its southeastern frontiers from any spillover that the coalition invasion of Iraq might generate. France, Germany and Belgium—which opposed the George W. Bush administration’s plans for Iraq—did not want the alliance to be drawn into any aspect of a Middle East conflict, even if a NATO member was attacked; in essence, this was not the war they believed NATO members had signed up for. Among the new members and the aspirant countries, the so-called “New Europe” (in the formulation of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld), there were offers of support for the U.S. coalition—but quietly, the Turks discerned that when it came to NATO, Eastern Europe wanted no distractions from the focus on Russia. Ankara invoked Article IV of the Washington Treaty which obligated the alliance to hear Turkey’s security concerns, but this was the start of Turkey’s gradual disengagement from NATO. Subsequent events over the next fifteen years would reinforce a suspicion in Turkey that, despite the ritual bows to the sainted Article V, any security threats to Turkey—Iraq, Kurdish terrorism, spillover from the Syrian Civil War, even a possible confrontation with Russia—was not really of concern to its allies. In turn, the dramatic shift in Russia-Turkey relations—from Turkey’s traditional position in retarding Russian access to the Mediterranean towards a close partnership with Moscow—made it clear how old assumptions were no longer valid. It also signaled that Ankara, like other legacy members of NATO, was not going to subordinate Turkish interests in Russia to any sense of NATO solidarity.

The evolution of Turkey’s position should have been a warning that the alliance needed to reconceptualize its role for a post-Cold War world. Instead, NATO continued to drift, in search of a strategic rationale for its existence. But a NATO that could define its role or missions in a post-Cold War world could therefore not define the criteria that should guide the admission of new members. This has meant that, in contrast to Cold War period of NATO expansion, since 1989, strategic considerations would be replaced by political ones as the drivers of NATO enlargement.

WHEN THE Soviet Union collapsed, the George H.W. Bush administration touted a continuing role for NATO in European security but saw no need to enlarge the alliance to continue its mission. This inclination was buttressed by Pentagon assessments that highlighted the decrepit state of post-Warsaw Pact militaries and concerns about strategic overstretch. At its 1991 Rome Summit, NATO invited the former Warsaw Pact states to begin a dialogue about using the OSCE—which included NATO members as well as Russia and the former Warsaw Pact states as members—to extend security across the continent. The summit communique declared that NATO would “cooperate and consult” with its new partners, a message confirmed at the summer 1992 OSCE summit in Helsinki. While the emerging European Union committed to broadening its membership, NATO promised only to establish “patterns of cooperation” with former Soviet bloc states. However, the implication was that NATO would extend a zone of security over the entire continent, even if specific countries were not members. At the same time, while the EU began to lay out a process for enlargement, the criteria agreed to at Copenhagen would require extensive reforms and were expected to take many years to be completed—meaning that the first generation of post-Communist leaders in the former Soviet bloc would have to endure the uncertainties about their future position in Europe—and the risk of being assigned to permanent second-class status in shaping the destinies of the continent.

Presidents Václav Havel of the Czech Republic and Lech Walesa of Poland, however, made the case for rapidly enlarging NATO to U.S. president Bill Clinton in April 1993. They did not want the Central European states to be grouped together with former Soviet republics and Central Asian nations in the OSCE. Instead, they wanted something else—firm commitments that they would be brought into the main institutions of the Euro-Atlantic world. If the EU would not expand quickly, NATO membership would serve as an important benchmark for “rejoining Europe.” Moreover, in contrast to what the Bush administration had vouchsafed, they did not want vague security assurances but concrete guarantees that being a NATO treaty ally would bring. Their main point was that only NATO membership with its Article V commitment could protect their countries if Russia returned to its dangerous Soviet (or even imperial) ways. Considering the Soviet Union’s 1956 invasion of Hungary and 1968 intervention in Czechoslovakia, as well as its earlier collaboration with Nazi Germany to carve up Poland in 1939, this was not an unreasonable concern. Havel, Walesa and other Central-Eastern European leaders also made it clear that they did not trust the assumption that Russia itself would become a part of the West nor did they accept the assessment that Russia was permanently finished as a great power. They wanted to be embedded in the major security and economic institutions of the West as full members in the event of a hostile Russian resurgence.

In short, the former Warsaw Pact states wanted to use the breathing space created by the collapse of the Soviet Union to enter the pre-1989 NATO—an alliance of collective defense, at a time when the other existing NATO members either did not view Russia as a threat, saw new threats coming at Europe from other directions or wanted to recreate NATO as a political alliance based on shared values. Within the United States, the debate centered around the question of whether enlargement would add or lessen burdens for the United States.

After Walesa and Havel had made their initial pitch, two objections were raised, both within the U.S. government as well as among the members of the alliance. The first was that the security threats to the Euro-Atlantic world increasingly came from the south—the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East and North Africa—so enlarging the alliance in an eastward direction did not make strategic sense in terms of meeting the new challenges to the Euro-Atlantic world.

The second was there was no urgency for rapid enlargement. Russia did not pose a threat. There was no pressing security reason to enlarge, and premature expansion of the alliance before the Russia relationship was settled could disrupt efforts to forge a lasting partnership with Moscow. At the same time, Russia appeared to be a declining power, so what was the urgency? The Germans, in particular, made the case that if Russia began to become unfriendy, there would be adequate time to make preparations.

Advocates for enlargement relied on a complicated set of somewhat contradictory arguments to create the consensus necessary to support expansion. To opponents of enlargement, they stressed that Russia was not a threat and that NATO enlargement would not be threatening to Russia since the Cold War was ostensibly over. The original members of NATO would not have to forego the peace dividend or to jeopardize their newly-emerging relationships with post-Soviet Russia. Aspirant countries would get the formal Article V guarantees that they sought, but were never expected to cash them in. The addition of new members to the alliance would decrease the burden shouldered by the United States. Finally, the desire of former Soviet bloc states to enter NATO signaled their acceptance of Western values as defined by elites in Western Europe and the United States: post-nationalist and secular. It would also give the EU more time in processing applications of new members, since politicians in aspirant countries could point to NATO membership as a landmark on their overall “return to Europe.”

In practice, however, leaders in aspirant countries were asking their voters to check the right boxes in elections and referenda; they were not asking voters to change fundamental social and cultural norms. The existing European members of NATO were happy to extend security guarantees—on the triple assumptions that they would never be invoked, that accepting new NATO members would not require them to spend more on defense, and that enlargement would not jeopardize their burgeoning economic and political ties with Russia. But they, in turn, tended to view enlargement not through a security lens but as an expansion of the European project and in furthering societal transformation throughout the former Soviet bloc. One critical assumption behind rallying support for enlargement of both NATO and the EU in the West was that aspirant countries were committed to a liberal democratic, post-nationalist, secular path, and needed only to have the initial encouragement spurred on by NATO (and then EU) conditionality to keep progress moving in the right direction. For Americans, enlargement would validate the Western ideological victory in the Cold War but, more importantly, add to the number of NATO members who would take on more of the burdens both for European defense but also for global security.

With objections overcome, NATO, only six years after the Rome summit, issued official invitations to the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland to join the alliance in 1997, with these three countries entering the alliance in 1999. Seven additional members—Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, plus the three Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—would join NATO in 2004. The alliance had grown from sixteen to twenty-six members—but without achieving any clarity about the alliance’s purpose or future role. And whereas in the past only the isolated northern frontier between Norway and Russia brought the alliance and Moscow directly in contact, after 2004, NATO’s eastern and Russia’s western security zones would now not only touch but overlap. With NATO’s attention focused eastward, major consequences from the war initiated the previous year in Iraq were emerging that would, in coming years, destabilize the southern flank of the alliance—and help to unleash a crisis in Europe that would call into question whether the alliance was indeed characterized by “shared values.”

POST-COLD War NATO enlargement as a cost- and consequence-free decision was based on two assumptions: that there could never be strategic enmity and rivalry with a post-Soviet, post-Communist Russia, and that Russian weaknesses were long-term and would preclude any resurgence of Moscow as the dominant power in Eurasia. While a realistic gamble during the 1990s, developments during the 2000s and beyond under Vladimir Putin’s tenure should have called into question whether these were realistic bases on which to base NATO policy.

Even as Central European states explicitly (and understandably) sought protection from a revanchist Russia, existing Western European NATO members could marshal political support to admit them to the alliance only if such a threat didn’t exist. Having just become accustomed to the benefits of peace, few on the continent were prepared to contemplate commitments to go to war with Moscow if such a war seemed remotely possible. As a result, Western Europe’s large economies—the only non-American economies that could assume strategically material financial responsibility for Europe’s defense—had no political basis to sustain or increase their military expenditures.

That NATO’s existing members did not see Russia as a near-term threat shifted their focus away from aspiring members’ military contributions to the alliance and toward pressing for political and economic reforms. Setting minimal standards of conditionality (first for NATO, then for EU membership) would set a series of achievable targets, but this meant that, for NATO, the focus shifted from hard geopolitical security considerations for a military alliance in favor of seeing NATO enlargement as “social work” to support democratization and “Europeanization.” Again, this could only occur in conditions where Russia was not seen as a real threat. It also shifted criteria for NATO membership away from concrete strategic considerations—including risks and liabilities for the alliance—to demonstrating support for political reform and support for shared values in aspirant countries.

Moreover, once NATO made the decision to enlarge, it had to reconcile the contradictory imperatives of reassuring Russia that the alliance posed no threat to Moscow, while conveying to the new members that their security would not be neglected.

The eighty-four miles of distance from the Estonian frontier at Narva to St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city and one of Russia’s main industrial, commercial and energy export centers and its de facto second capital, epitomized the problem. Any appreciable deployment of allied force in Estonia would raise the Russian General Staff’s blood pressure. However, to reassure Estonia (or any of the other new members) that NATO took its defense seriously, there had to be some realistic demonstration of NATO’s capacity to defend and reinforce its partners in central and eastern Europe. Even before the Ukraine crisis of 2014, it was very difficult to find a level of allied commitment that would not be seen as too threatening to Russia while reassuring the eastern NATO members that their Western European and American partners took their security concerns seriously.

At the same time, both the United States and Russia’s major Western European partners searched for a mechanism whereby Russia could be reassured by giving Moscow a substantive role in Western security matters without somehow involving an actual veto over decisions that would be seen by the new NATO members as compromising their security. Two attempts—the creation of the Permanent Joint Council in 1997 and its replacement, the NATO-Russia Council (established 2002)—both foundered on the irreconcilability of a “voice but no veto” for Moscow, which meant that Russia’s concerns and objections to NATO policy would never carry the day.

All of these solutions could only work if Russia was sufficiently weak not to register major objections, remained dependent on Western goodwill for economic aid and assistance, and lacked adequate power projection capabilities. But Russia’s economic recovery during the 2000s generated an extensive military reform and rearmament program. This, coupled with a sharp shift in the Putin administration’s thinking about the likelihood of a substantive security partnership with Europe and the United States, increasingly made Moscow much less willing to accept a Western agenda for continued NATO enlargement, while giving the Kremlin greater abilities to raise costs and risks—thus striking at one of the essential compromises that had permitted the first rounds of NATO expansion to move forward. As Russia began to draw its “red lines” against further expansion, European and Eurasian states, worried about being left on the wrong side of any new dividing lines, rushed to secure commitments for their own membership in NATO. Legacy NATO members such as France or Germany continued to support the admission of those new members who filled in “blank spots” in the Balkans (such as Croatia or Montenegro), but began to balk at plans to proffer membership action plans for former Soviet republics. Russia moved to adopt a strategy of more overt political interference and even stirring up conflict in places like Georgia (in 2008) or Ukraine (in 2014) both to make their possible candidacies less attractive but also to expose the hollowness of Western promises to future aspirants. In addition, Russia is probing the strength and depth of NATO commitments, which has had the unexpected consequence of strengthening alliance solidarity but also exposing the fragility of alliance cohesion.

THE UNITED States has always complained that European allies should be spending more on defense. During the Cold War, these jeremiads were kept in check by the reality and immanence of the Soviet threat. After the Soviet collapse in 1991, most NATO countries slashed defense spending.

Collapsing defense budgets in Western Europe thus produced a perverse situation in which expanding NATO simultaneously expanded the American share of NATO’s spending—in contrast to the implicit promises to American taxpayers that enlarging the alliance would expand the number of bill-payers for European security. While some newer members of the alliance may have been prepared to spend a higher portion of their gdp on defense, the smaller size of their economies did not, in absolute terms, reduce the size of the U.S. contribution. Today, the United States covers some 70 percent of NATO’s costs even though the economies of the EU members in NATO collectively is larger than America’s.

Even as new members of NATO pleaded for entry into the alliance, citing the perceived threat from Russia, most did not spend as if that threat was imminent. Even as late as 2016, two years after the Russian incursion in Ukraine and after the 2014 Wales summit whereby all NATO members committed to increase spending, only Poland and Estonia, of the post-Cold War new members, were meeting the 2 percent of gdp commitment. (Of the legacy members, only the United States, Britain and Greece were in compliance that year.) Moreover, alarmist calls that NATO, without the United States—despite having a population of more than 500 million people, a combined gdp exceeding $10 trillion and two nuclear powers—would be unable to withstand a head-to-head confrontation with a Russia that had only a fraction of its economy and population seemed to highlight less a Russian threat than a European hope for the United States to keep shouldering that defense burden.

U.S. officials have long recognized that this was not a sustainable bargain. The Washington Treaty’s rarely-cited Article III states that NATO members “separately and jointly, by means of continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid, will maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack.” It is telling that seventy years ago the Treaty’s drafters—among whom the United States was unquestionably dominant—chose to emphasize this commitment to adequate military spending by placing it before the well-known Article V commitment to mutual defense. They did so knowing that after the destruction inflicted by World War II, Washington would bear considerable responsibility for any “mutual aid.” Yet even then, America insisted that “self-help” must be obligatory.

Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defense in both the Bush and Obama administrations, was neither the first nor the last senior U.S. official to warn NATO allies that relative spending and capabilities were not sustainable. In 2011, when World Bank statistics showed the EU economy to be about 20 percent larger than that of the United States, Gates presciently stated that “future U.S. political leaders … may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.” Though he could not have predicted Donald Trump, Gates wisely saw that the European failure to address long-standing U.S. concerns could not but provoke a response.

The way America’s Atlantic lobby had presented its case for NATO expansion only exacerbated this problem. For example, during rather limited Senate debates on the later rounds of NATO enlargement, advocates never brought up the possible costs and risks of confronting Russia and instead insisted that expanding the alliance would bolster American efforts in the war on terror and in military missions in the Greater Middle East. While it is true that Central European states and other aspirant countries like Georgia provided forces to U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they did so in a transparently transactional manner, hoping to secure American support and protection against an increasingly problematic Russia—precisely because they knew that NATO’s major Western European members likely lacked both the capability and the will to confront Moscow if needed. While the new members’ contributions may have had value, the relatively small size of their economies made substantial financial burden-sharing mathematically impossible. It should have come as no surprise that Americans would later wonder why their share of NATO’s upkeep should continue to grow—and how this has fueled a narrative in the United States that America’s NATO allies are “freeloaders.” In a series of tweets over the past two years, President Trump has suggested that continuation of American security guarantees to European partners rests, in part, not only on their increased defense spending but in taking actions on trade that benefit the U.S. economy, in order to justify American defense expenditures on their behalf—introducing a markedly more transactional tone into alliance commitments.

EVEN AS the absolute share of U.S. spending for NATO increased after the Cold War, the argument was put forward that Americans should not view this as a matter of dollars and cents but as an investment in spreading and sustaining liberal values and democratic governance. In the 2002 Wriston Lecture explaining the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy, Condoleezza Rice made the case why nations like the United States would have to bear greater burdens in order to create and sustain the balance of power that would favor freedom and the expansion of democracy. When it came to NATO, writing in these pages fifteen years ago, Radek Sikorski defined the alliance as the armed guarantor and defender of Western civilization.

If post-Cold War expansion of NATO was supposed to solidify the triumph of liberal democracy throughout the continent, then, as Celeste Wallander has written, “NATO is in peril” as “[m]ultiple members are dismantling the institutions and practices of liberal democracy...” Indeed, the nongovernmental advocacy group Freedom House rates Turkey, a key member of NATO and one of its largest contributors in military power, as “not free.” Freedom House describes two other NATO members as only “partly free” and charts a dramatic decline in commitment to democratic governance and liberal values across central Europe. A widely-cited televised exchange between Péter Szijjártó, the Hungarian foreign minister, and bbc News presenter Emily Maitlis in late June 2018 laid bare the growing divide between and within Euro-Atlantic societies over democracy and democratic values amid a contest between liberal internationalism and populist nationalism. Even in legacy NATO nations, populist parties with antiliberal, authoritarian tendencies have been gaining in strength.

What has happened? What to make, in the years after 1989, of repeated pledges and commitments to democracy and “shared European values” on the part of Central and Eastern European political leaders and parties that deployed such rhetoric to support their applications for EU and NATO membership? For one, contrary to what many claimed at the time, Central European experiences with democracy between World War I and World War II may not have created a sufficient foundation for rapid democratization after the Cold War. Realistically, there was likely very little continuity between halting interwar efforts to create liberal polities—only Czechoslovakia survived as a functional democracy until its destruction by Nazi Germany in 1939—and the post-Soviet successor states. A thirty-year-old Czech parliamentarian who watched Hitler’s stormtroopers march into Prague in 1939 would have been an eighty-year-old retiree (if still alive at all) during the 1989 Velvet Revolution. Even with a smattering of interwar survivors plus the assistance of emigres and their returning descendants, notably in the Baltic States, the process of creating sustainable democracies would be a generational project. Running the hardware of democracy, in the form of democratic institutions, without the software of a democratic political culture has rarely succeeded.

It is also important to know what words mean. For thirty years, politicians all across Europe and the United States have spoken nearly identical scripts about freedom, democracy, and “Western” or “European” values. That does not always mean that they have shared similar definitions. In fact, after years of carrying out opinion surveys throughout Europe, the Pew Research Trust, in 2018, was compelled to note that the term “European values” no longer had a single, consistent definition:

“Leaders often cite European values when defending their stances on highly charged political topics. But the term “European values” can mean different things to different people. For some, it conjures up the continent’s Christian heritage; for others, it connotes a broader political liberalism that encompasses a separation between church and state, asylum for refugees, and democratic government … challenging the notion of universal assent to a set of European values.”

It is important to recognize the extent to which Soviet control over central-eastern Europe was an ideological juggernaut which suppressed local political traditions and deprived the nations of the Soviet bloc of self-determination. As Soviet control receded, widespread and enduring opposition to Soviet Communism and Russian domination was subsumed under their supposed antonyms—the banners of “Western democracy” and “European values.” Democracy was about restoring the rights of the nations of the region to actual self-determination, while, particularly for the states of what might be termed the “post-Habsburg space,” the Europe that they sought a return to was the promise of interwar modernism, not postmodern secular liberalism.

Finally, it is important to consider how and why Central European governments implemented the reforms necessary to secure acceptance as emerging democracies and membership in the NATO alliance. Throughout the region, in the 1990s and through to the early 2000s, political leaders faced extreme political difficulties in pursuing free market and democratic reforms, the more so since the European Union was proceeding very slowly in considering its own expansion. As a result, they argued, the only way to sustain public support for painful reforms would be to guarantee full membership in the Euro-Atlantic community. A visible and credible path into NATO would signal that the West was firmly behind their “return to Europe.”

The deal that emerged would allow leaders in aspiring NATO member states to tell their voters that only by supporting and enduring controversial reform measures could they secure NATO’s protection from Russia. The argument was at its core a powerful nationalist case for accepting new and disruptive procedures and policies: to preserve the nation, support reform. Meeting Western conditionality was the price that had to be paid for securing NATO membership and the economic benefits of the European Union.

A common theme heard throughout the region was that, in return for embracing reforms that were imposed from the outside as conditions for membership, NATO (and then the eu) would have to deliver on concrete benefits—a view shared not only from the right-wing but also from centrists as well. In 1996, for instance, Piotr Nowina-Konopka, the foreign policy spokesman for the Freedom Union party in Poland, noted that

“After five years of climbing we can see the peak, but the people are now tired. At the last stage you can’t slow down, you must speed up … NATO, along with the European Union, should give us a hand up the icy slope. There’s a limited window of opportunity, and we’re losing time. We may not want to withdraw, but history may withdraw us involuntarily.”

Yet, as a senior German official lamented to me in 2015, many of the new countries treated conditionality as a ceiling, not as a floor. The legacy states of Europe assumed that, after securing membership, the new members would continue to reform, liberalize and democratize. What has happened, as many of these countries reached the “floor” of membership, they stepped off the reform elevator—or even began to look for ways to reverse those changes once membership had been secured, since there is no provision in either NATO or the EU for expelling members who engage in backsliding on reform.

But there should have been no surprise. In comments in the fall of 1998 on the changes implemented by Hungary in order to comply with NATO requirements, for instance, András Simonyi, who headed the Hungarian mission to NATO, noted that the government would “seek Hungarian solutions which are responsive to our traditions, views and interests.” The following March, Prime Minister Viktor Orban delivered an address to celebrate the accession of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to the alliance which celebrated NATO as the guarantee of the sovereignty, freedom and independence of its national members. Having described Hungary’s membership in the Warsaw Pact as something imposed from without on his country, he concluded as follows: “Our joining the North Atlantic Alliance is a watershed event in our national History. We have been members of this civilisation for thousand years. We belong here.”

Orban’s remarks made it clear that he viewed Central-Eastern European states as part of the West because of heritage and tradition. Reform was about stripping away an imposed and alien values system, but the states of the region did not become “Westernized” or “Europeanized” because of changes in governance. Orban’s perspective, in contrast to the more antiseptic language of conditionality standards put out by Brussels, became increasingly more of a mainstream position in Europe in the 2000s—the definition of Europeanness as culture, not governance.

This, in turn, changed the trajectory of NATO member Turkey’s bid to fully integrate with the Euro-Atlantic world. In 1963, Turkey had signed an association agreement with the European Community, and two years before the “Revolutions of ‘89” had formally applied to join. Ankara’s view was that a Turkey that had sacrificed blood and treasure to help secure Western Europe from Soviet domination ought to reap some of the rewards of the common market. The European Commission’s official response in 1989 laid out some of the further economic and political reforms that would be required for Turkey to be considered for full membership.

Space does not permit a full recounting of Turkey’s failed bid, but by the mid-2000s, Turkey’s progress in democratization and other reform measures that Europe asked for could not outweigh the sentiment that, as a Eurasian Muslim country, Turkey didn’t quite “fit” in Europe. As Turkey’s bid faltered, the government saw no reason to continue to aspire to meet Brussel’s standards of conditionality. Over the last decade, Turkey has swerved off the path towards secular liberalism. From overhauls to the country’s judiciary to an increased role for Islam, Turkey in 2019 is charting a “non-European” course in governance. No one now envisions EU membership for Ankara, but Turkey remains in NATO—although it now defines what its obligations vis-à-vis the alliance are, in terms of its commitments to democratic rule or in terms of Russia policy—by its own internal logic, rather than deferring to the wishes of other alliance members.

For central and eastern Europeans, Turkey’s evolution over the last decade is in the direction that leaders such as Orban also endorse. To the extent that Turkey remains a NATO member in good standing, therefore, it has set a precedent that the erosion of democracy in other NATO members, despite all the rhetoric about “Western values,” is not a particular problem.

IT IS long overdue for the United States—and other NATO members—to have a frank conversation about the type of alliance they want. For far too long, NATO spokesmen have toggled back and forth between NATO as a military alliance fielding concrete capabilities versus a political association supporting and sustaining liberal values in the trans-Atlantic space. What happens if both can no longer be operative at the same time among all members?

Russian president Vladimir Putin has provided one rationale for NATO’s existence in the twenty-first century: the need to confront a revisionist Russia that seeks to upset the post-Cold War order in Europe—especially if this occurs within the context of some sort of authoritarian entente with China to offset Euro-American leadership of the current international system. If containing Russia is the principal task, then, as during the Cold War, what kind of governments NATO countries have becomes less important than the geopolitical capabilities and advantages each country brings to the common task. In the struggle to contain the Soviet Union, the fact that both Greece and Turkey, at times, were ruled by military dictatorships, and that other NATO states were marked by degrees of illiberalism, was less important than the strategic real estate and capabilities different members brought to the table. This approach means that NATO would need to tolerate a much greater degree of illiberal democracies and soft authoritarianism within the ranks of the alliance if it meant retaining a high degree of strategic cohesion to deter and repel Russian advances back into Europe.

Re-establishing the old adage coined by Lord Ismay that the purpose of NATO was to keep the “Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down” runs into difficulties in other parts of Europe, where, even with concerns about Russian activities, there remains a continuing reluctance on the part of governments to spend more or resume a more confrontational stance vis-à-vis Moscow. Even in 2019, the existential threat from Russia that Atlanticists (particularly in the think tank sectors in the United States and Europe) see is not shared by many European politicians.

Certainly Putin—and the contemporary Russian Federation—have few friends in Europe. 2018 polling data from the Pew Research Center suggests that most Europeans dislike the Putin regime. This does not, however, automatically translate into viewing Russia as a deadly foe. Putin’s low approval ratings in Western Europe are still higher, with the exception of the United Kingdom and the Netherlands—two countries with upfront experience of Russian malfeasance—than those of Donald Trump. Moreover, even though a country like Poland sees Russia and the Islamic State as equal threats to its security, terrorism and climate change far outstrip Russia on the lists of the most critical threats in eyes of the French, German and Italian publics. And, in a worrisome sign, despite events such as the annexation of Crimea, the Russian incursion into eastern Ukraine, or election meddling throughout the West, the percentage of Germans who support using military force to defend fellow NATO allies in Europe’s east should they get into a tussle with Moscow remains stuck at 40 percent. The data is clear: the further south and west one goes in the NATO alliance, the less there is support for challenging the Kremlin.

And throughout the alliance, there is not much appetite for NATO helping to contain a rising China, even if Beijing is currently aligned with Moscow. Even the most anti-Russian states in NATO have shown less inclination to turn down investment from China or taking part in One Belt, One Road projects. The expectation of some American strategic planners, therefore, that in an eventual faceoff between the Euro-Atlantic west and the Russo-China authoritarian axis, that the United States will concentrate on Asia while the rest of NATO secures Europe may not prove to be a viable assumption.

If NATO, on the other hand, remains committed to promoting and strengthening democratic values, the alliance will instead have to develop procedures to impose penalties on members who do not live up to these standards. To be meaningful, these penalties will probably have to include suspension of a country’s Article V guarantees or even expulsion from the alliance. There are no indications that countries becoming less democratic are seeking to leave NATO—with the exception of Hungary, where some polling data suggests that the population may be more receptive to the idea of Russia as the country’s strategic partner—the decline in public support for Western-style liberalism throughout Central Europe has not been accompanied by any move to withdraw from NATO. The current “Law and Justice” administration in Poland has repudiated the eu’s criticisms about its changes to the country’s constitution, judiciary and governance and defended the country’s economic and political sovereignty. At the same time, Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki has stressed the vital importance of NATO—and a strong U.S. role in the alliance—to regional security. Central and Eastern European NATO members such as Poland or Romania seem intent on returning the conception of the alliance to a pre-1989 vision of a security community aligned against a threat from the east, with the goal of NATO not to promote a transnational, post-national Europe but the national sovereignty of European states.

On the other hand, the use of democratic criteria as a way to “purge” the alliance could be embraced by some of the legacy European NATO countries that have begun to regret the whole process of NATO enlargement. If, as the Washington Post labeled it in a July 2018 editorial, “democracy’s slow fade in Poland, Hungary and Romania” becomes the pretext for other NATO countries to question their continued participation in the alliance, the Western Europe part of NATO would not only be relieved of their obligations to defend these states in any conflict with Russia but would also remove one of the major barriers to the overall improvement of Europe-Russia relations.

Ahmet Berat Conkar, the head of Turkey’s NATO parliamentary assembly, came away from the 2018 Brussels NATO summit with the observation that the alliance is still struggling with internal conflicts and disagreements. NATO, he noted, needs to redefine itself, not to paper over, but to come to terms with those divergences. That is a process that will take time. There are, however, some measures that can be taken in the short term.

First and foremost, NATO cannot allow any doubt about the commitment of all its members to the Article V commitment for mutual defense. As Nicholas Burns, himself a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, has pointed out, NATO’s ability to deter aggression is only as effective as the perceived strength of that guarantee. “That is what deterrence is all about … [t]he other guy … has to believe in his heart of hearts that he cannot take aggressive measures towards NATO countries because [President] Trump and the other leaders would stand up to him.”

Reaffirmation of Article V, however, must occur hand-in-hand with a renewed emphasis on Article III: the self-help provision of the alliance. This is not merely a matter of increasing defense spending, although that is part of the process. It is also about NATO countries individually and regionally developing more robust “porcupine defense” structures that would make it difficult for any adversary to seek a short-term conflict, moving the alliance away from an overdependence on Article V as the source of security. Countries must also do more to increase their resiliency—of their militaries, economies, political systems and infrastructure. A greater investment on self-reliance, following the adage “Si vis pacem, para bellum” (If you want peace, prepare for war), would help to counteract the negative image of the freeloading ally which has taken hold in America.

Finally, it is time to dispense with the ill-conceived notion of “NATO as social work.” The Euro-Atlantic theater is once again a zone of conflict and instability. NATO’s primary purpose as a security alliance should take precedence over using the alliance as a tool for social change and reform. To the extent that democratization gains greater momentum in times of peace and security, then a return to first principles for NATO is surely the most sensible course to follow.

Nikolas K. Gvosdev is the Captain Jerome E. Levy chair in economic geography and national security at the U.S. Naval War College. He is also a Contributing Editor to the National Interest. The views expressed here are his own.

Image: Reuters