THE NORTH Atlantic Treaty Organization is one of the most successful alliances of all time, but after the cold war and the successful completion of its mission, NATO suffered an identity crisis. It now has three main functions and self-images that compete with each other. The first persona is the enforcer, the pacifier of conflicts beyond the region's borders; the second is the gentlemen's club for liberal and liberalizing countries of the West; and the third is the residual function of an anti-Russia alliance.

One must wonder why, with the end of the cold war, NATO did not dissolve. How do we explain the organization's transformation and vitality at the end of the twentieth century? NATO did not retire after victory because it was not just any old alliance. Rather, it had become a genuine institution, complete with transnational, integrated command structures, a permanent bureaucracy, buildings, regular meetings and ceremonies, its own logo, website and so on. Institutions take on lives of their own; they have a self-preservation instinct and successful ones especially want to keep validating their importance. This is the "March of Dimes" explanation for NATO's persistence after the collapse of the Soviet threat. And though NATO's attempt to survive might be expected, its evolution over the past twenty years is in many ways a paradox. In one of its personalities it became a more muscular and combative military alliance just when it least needed to be: after accomplishing its strategic purpose. In another of its personalities, however, it stopped taking its core military mission seriously. The tensions among these three personas may be less dramatic than in the famous film The Three Faces of Eve; with luck the West might easily live with them indefinitely.

But what if luck runs out? These identities are a potentially corrosive mix, particularly as they relate to Russia. And a hint of the possible risks to come was seen last August when Russia and Georgia came to blows over two separatist regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, raising worries in the West about being dragged into the imbroglio. Despite such a wake-up call, however, policy makers have avoided confronting NATO's identity issues; many do not even recognize them or see them as troublesome. Since the organization is still dominated by the United States, tensions among these personalities are, more than anything, Washington's problems. And if the problems come to divide European members from Washington, the epochal success of the organization will give way to overreach and decline.

THOUGH NATO was created to prevent World War III, it did this for forty years by preparing to defend and retaliate if the Soviet Union attacked any of its members, and it went on to win the cold war without once engaging in combat as an organization. However, within a dozen years afterward it had gone from having a purely defensive posture to adopting in effect, though not in principle, an offensive one, engaging in two hot wars, over Kosovo and in Afghanistan-or three, if the brief 1995 Allied Force campaign against the Bosnian Serbs counts. NATO's out-of-area enforcer identity was evolving. All of these combat actions have been against adversaries never envisioned at the time the organization formed and matured. The alliance's two actions in the Balkans were attacks initiated by NATO against countries that had not attacked any alliance members. In humanitarian terms, the war for Kosovo may have been defensive, but in terms of interstate relations it was anything but. In any case, the alliance's new slogan became, in the famous words of Senator Richard Lugar, "Out of area or out of business."

And here we see the first signs of trouble. Staying in business by getting into the Balkans was a mixed experience. NATO prevailed in Bosnia and Kosovo, but without a consensus that the price paid was worthwhile and without assurance to date that either of those places will not erupt again. NATO keeps biting off more than it can chew. The mission in Afghanistan, of course, is the biggest open question.

To be sure, invading Afghanistan was a defensive response to al-Qaeda's assault on the United States. After September 11, the European members gallantly rallied to their stricken ally and offered to participate in action against the Taliban regime. Ironically, the offer was not appreciated at the time because Washington did not want the allies getting in the way of the more proficient American military machine. But as the initial victory of 2001-02 has crumbled in recent years, the United States is asking for more help, not less, from the Europeans and Canadians, whose forces have outnumbered American troops in the country and borne a fair share of the burden of combat. More recently the European allies balked at American demands to do more. The alliance is looking less than united.

So, though this might be a clearer replica of the type of mission NATO was designed for-to protect an ally once it had been attacked-the unfolding of the dirty little war has exposed too the practical complications and limits of the most integrated alliance in history. Military operations in Afghanistan have been divided between two chains of command, one under NATO and one an independent American channel. Domestic political controversies within Europe over participation in the mission inhibit the types of operations certain countries' contingents perform and raise questions about how long all will remain engaged. If this were fully a NATO war, organizational logic would put the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) in charge, but practical strategic logic has made the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which encompasses Pakistan, the main overseer. This sort of managerial awkwardness can be handled, but if the strains of the conflict magnify disagreements among NATO capitals about how to fight the war, the symbolic unity of the alliance will fade. As the Obama administration reboots strategy for a stronger effort in Afghanistan, getting on the same page with the allies could prove to be less than a seamless exercise. This crisis of military identity is the most immediate issue on which NATO faces real problems to solve rather than triumphs to celebrate.

BUT THE organization has long indulged in triumphalism, most readily in its expansion post-1991. Even while concentrating on military defense during the cold war, NATO always had a secondary purpose of serving as a diplomatic vehicle for transatlantic political unity. After finally disposing of the Soviet Union, however, the political persona took over. In the years after the Berlin wall fell, NATO's main function became to serve as a political club, to celebrate and consolidate the democratization of the Continent by bringing the liberated countries of the Warsaw Pact into the Western fold. The organization not only declined to retire, it did not even stand down after victory. Instead it nearly doubled in size and rolled itself right up to Russia's door.

Though this political-unification function might seem to more naturally fall to the European Union (whose inclusion of countries from the old Soviet empire proceeded much less expeditiously) it was instead performed by NATO because the United States was simply not a member of the other continental club and so relied on the Atlantic alliance to keep Washington in the driver's seat. Through this mechanism, the United States extended its reach further into Europe. This was especially true regarding the new entrants to the organization in the East, what former-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called "the New Europe"-from Poland and the Czech Republic to Bulgaria and Slovakia.

This decision was made even easier because for the Europeans the EU was not to be the vehicle for political consolidation because the EU was serious business. To most politicians after the cold war, willingness to wage hot war to defend new members-the core of the North Atlantic Treaty, embodied in its Article V-was an irrelevant abstraction because the sort of war that NATO had been developed to handle had become utterly implausible. EU membership, on the other hand, involved money! For a long time it was more politically difficult to let Poland sell tomatoes in France than to give Warsaw a pledge to fight and die to save it. And here we begin to see the less immediate, but perhaps deeper, problems of the alliance's identity crisis.

The Bush administration and most of the foreign-policy establishment in both American political parties wanted to continue expansion through Ukraine and Georgia. Eventually the states were to follow the Baltics into NATO, even though Russian support for secession of Georgia's breakaway provinces, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, was well established long before the August engagements. What were they thinking? That the breakaway regions would voluntarily reintegrate with Georgia before the country was admitted to NATO? That Georgia would regain the territories by force without Russian intervention? That Georgia would be admitted without the two separatist regions and NATO would add a codicil to admission that its defense guarantee excluded them? Impossible.

Yet many observers still endorse Georgia's eventual admission as well as Ukraine's. And Ukraine, which involves much-bigger stakes, has potentially explosive internal cleavages as well: a Europe-oriented population in the western part of the country and a large Russian minority in the east. Somehow the idea that a country's membership in NATO obliges the United States to go to war with Russia should issues of Article V arise escapes much of the American political elite. Indeed, the alliance may have become a pacifying gentlemen's club, but its anti-Russia stance is where the only big danger lies. And so the idea of an expanding liberalizing elite starts to look less genteel and more aggressive.

THUS, AS NATO expanded, the tension between the alliance's goal of extending the transatlantic union to form a more inclusive liberalizing club and the unintended effect of reinforcing the original anti-Russia stance of the organization became all too clear. In traditional strategic terms, NATO expansion was a threat to Russia, but the West's leaders considered traditional strategic terms passé, antiquated concerns of outmoded realpolitik. Liberal governments, and especially Americans, tend to assume that their benign intentions are obvious to all and that their right to shape world order in a virtuous direction should be unobjectionable. To the Western establishment, post-cold-war Europe might not quite represent the end of history, but would at least not be unduly constrained by its lessons. NATO would make Europe whole and free.

Washington and NATO governments elected these initiatives out of post-cold-war triumphalism pure and simple, and were buoyed by the shocking ease with which the victory over communism had been accomplished.

One need not be an apologist for the regime in Moscow or its behavior, or sympathetic to Russia's national interests, to empathize with its resentment of this revolutionary overturning of the balance of power.

In a two-year whirlwind, one revolution after another strengthened NATO: the Berlin wall fell, the Warsaw Pact collapsed, Germany unified, the Soviet Communist Party was deposed and the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist. Stunned and crippled, Russia tumbled into decline.

Washington, and with its prodding other NATO governments, succumbed to victory disease and kept kicking Russia while it was down. NATO's ambitions escalated because it was spoiled and emboldened by the huge benefits attained at negligible cost in the denouement of the cold war. In no time at all the American political leadership took U.S. global primacy for granted as the natural order of things, a status to be used to set the world right wherever possible at a low cost in blood and treasure. The price of intervention in the Balkans may have been heavier than expected, but extending American dominance in Europe by moving NATO eastward continued to be accomplished at little expense. For twenty years Americans got all too accustomed to having Russians roll over belly-up for whatever they insisted on doing. For twenty years Moscow got no respect.

NATO blithely took in former Warsaw Pact allies of the Soviet Union and, with the Baltic states, even parts of the Soviet Union itself-without ever seriously considering inviting Moscow in. And while NATO's original members assumed that the end of the cold war was the end of deterrence, containment and opposition to Russia, new entrants like Poland or would-be members like Georgia did not. The anti-Russia personality of the alliance was becoming all too clear-at least, that is, to the Russians.

THERE WERE alternatives to the course taken over the past two decades-alternatives with their own risks, but still better bets than the ambitious projects that have so complicated NATO's identity. There were the collective-security (include Russia) and balance-of-power (do not expand) solutions for NATO. Either of these would have required restraint and respect rather than isolation of the West's former adversary. The regional collective-security option would have transmuted NATO from the alliance it was originally designed to be by making Russia a member of the club. This would have made the organization a primarily symbolic and toothless institution more than anything else. Perhaps it would have resembled a glorified Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), an institution built for talk more than action. But in a peaceful Europe that might well have been quite enough. Over the long run, it could have been a better solution for the United States, facing a rising China with Russia on our side rather than on Beijing's. This symbolic collective-security option would have been a long shot, but there was a window in the early 1990s when diplomatic magnanimity might have buttressed Russian liberalization and cooperation, helping make the country a fit partner. It certainly wouldn't have poked Russia in the eye the way hegemonic extension to its front door did.

If including Russia was unpalatable, there was the balance-of-power option, which would have kept the old NATO intact but more or less on ice, unexpanded, an alliance effectively in reserve in case things went bad again. Newly liberated Eastern Europe would have been left without the military embrace of the West of course, but separated from Russia by a buffer zone of new, formerly Soviet states fallen away from the old union's carcass. That buffer zone, in turn, would have been tacitly considered a Russian sphere of influence, in which the newly independent states would abuse the Near Abroad or Russian economic interests at their peril. In this scenario, we surely wouldn't have been fighting over Georgia. Yet at the time, the first alternative may have been too idealistic and the second too cynical for twenty-first-century democratic sensibilities.

Remember, in the post-cold-war euphoria, many did not realize the potential consequences of NATO expansion. From a security perspective, exploiting American primacy and NATO expansion to encircle Russia could have made clear that the former superpower simply had to accept that it could not play in the big leagues anymore and needed to accept indefinitely its status as a lesser state. Most adherents of realpolitik do consider balance of power more stable than hegemony, but there are other realists who believe the reverse, that an unambiguous pecking order precludes miscalculation and adventurism.¹ Leaving Russia a sphere of influence seemed to some to be a dangerous concession because the buffer zone would have been a power vacuum, and continuing to respect Russia's status as a great power would have left its strategic prerogatives uncertain-all in all, an invitation to inadvertent conflict. Keeping Russia permanently debased and isolated seemed to be strategically sensible. In the tragic world of international politics, where completely safe solutions are usually unavailable, there was something to be said for this logic. But the problem with that rationale, we have learned, is that it is difficult to sustain as Russia recovers. And the humiliation imposed during the triumphal period has only given the country's reentry to power politics a harder edge.

The liberals too had it wrong. Seeing economic and ideological enlightenment as a higher priority for stability than the distribution of power, they assumed a drastic reduction in Russia's military strength wouldn't be a problem for Moscow because liberalization and the "democratic peace" would make military balances irrelevant. In other words, we would all be one big, happy, liberal-democratic family. The problem with that rationale was (and still is) that its credibility depends on universalizing the Western political club-that is, bringing not just Russia's former allies into the NATO fold, but Russia too. Otherwise, nothing can negate the perception that NATO must remain implicitly an anti-Russia alliance.

But this was never possible because, simply put, Russian membership in NATO was never a serious option. If it didn't happen in the period after the cold war when the country seemed to be on the road to democracy, it is unlikely it will ever come to pass.

So, friendly rhetoric notwithstanding, and despite consensus that the cold war was and remains over, NATO is an implicitly anti-Russia alliance along with its other two conflicting functions. This was not a conscious choice by many of the original members. Indeed, most still believe that it is not true, that Moscow is being thin-skinned or obstreperous for no good reason. But the residual anti-Russia quality is the inevitable result of including all of Europe except Russia, and is made worse by the more forthright unfriendliness of the newer Eastern members of the organization toward Russia.

NONE BUT the most ethnocentric idealists should have been surprised when Moscow had the temerity to start acting like a great power again. No one should be surprised when the Russians still act like they have a sphere of influence, a right to impose discipline in unstable border areas. No one should be surprised when Moscow asserts the same protective prerogative toward secessionists in South Ossetia that NATO had toward Albanians in Kosovo (an analogy that Western officials denied but is essentially correct). The chickens had come home to roost. After years of poking Moscow in the eye at the price of only feeble protests, the West had to notice that Russia was back and that NATO's tide had crested. Russia's resurgence should have been expected, but should not be alarming and may not last.

Resurgence should have been expected because, in their own eyes, the Russians were down but not out after the cold war. With the economic recovery under Putin, it was natural to get back in the game and demand respect once more. Defeated great powers usually become competitive again as soon as they can. Two decades of humiliation were a potent incentive for Russian pushback. Indeed, this is why many realists opposed NATO expansion in the first place.

But resurgence should not be alarming because there is as yet no evidence that Russia's use of force points toward dangerous aggression, any more than NATO's actions in the Balkans did. Support for separation of two regions from Georgia is objectionable, but no more an indicator of Napoleonic ambitions than American support for Kosovo's independence. (The two actions need not be judged morally equivalent to be seen as equivalent in practical political terms.) Even if Russian motives are malign and tension with the West rises, the imbalance of power in NATO's favor is overwhelming, a radical difference from cold-war bipolarity. For forty years, NATO doubted its capacity to defend against Soviet attack without escalating to nuclear strikes, because it faced more than 175 Soviet divisions, their vanguard ensconced in the middle of Germany and a third of Europe in the Soviet camp. Today the tables are turned, and Russia faces a united Europe, its old allies of the Warsaw Pact and nearly half of the old Soviet Union itself on the other side of the fence.

Also, the Russian resurgence may not last because the fragile economic recovery flowed from temporarily high oil prices, and the country faces demographic implosion even if the economy holds up. Renewed internal turmoil could once more divert Russian government efforts to shoring up the domestic social and political order.

The gross imbalance of power makes NATO's military ability to prevent Moscow from conquering Western Europe (the concern that animated it throughout the cold war) a nonissue. That does not mean, however, that political conflict between Russia and the West poses no risks. What should NATO now do to keep Europe stable?

IT IS too late to pursue either of the alternatives that might have been considered at the end of the cold war, but at this point a truncated version of the balance-of-power approach where NATO ceases its expansion presents a better option than continuing the course of admitting more former-Soviet republics. Thus, Georgia and Ukraine should understand that they will not be getting into NATO, will not be protected militarily by the West and, in their own interest, should avoid provoking Moscow. They would be, to use a cold-war term, "Finlandized"-allowed to remain sovereign but forced to be neutral by a more powerful state. That status was considered awful by hawks back then, but compared to the fate of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and other Warsaw Pact members, it was not a bad deal. The prospect of Ukraine's, Georgia's or for that matter any other candidate's admission to NATO should be yoked to a more radical change in conditions that would make a symbolic collective-security organization, and specifically Russia's membership as well, possible.

Of course there will be no small risk in this. There was always something to be said for having all countries except Russia inside the NATO perimeter. It might prevent inadvertent conflict by making clear that Russian military action would mean war. NATO could thus let Moscow fume and accept its alienation from the West and bad political relations as the price of military stability. And if we leave potential flashpoints outside the perimeter it risks repetition of miscalculations like those of 1950 and 1990, when the United States excluded South Korea and Kuwait from its promise of protection, which encouraged their enemies to pounce. Then when faced with the shock of North Korean and Iraqi attacks, the United States decided to reverse itself and wound up in combat with the invaders to whom it had essentially given the green light.

But for all these risks, admitting the two controversial candidates to NATO would be worse. We have already seen the costs of provoking a resurgent Russia. This expansion would be extraordinarily messy and provocative, given the secession of two regions in Georgia and severe internal disagreements in Ukraine about being in NATO. Debates about the implications of Article V would grow in volume, as current members were forcibly reminded that the organization remains more than an ideological club or fighter of humanitarian wars against small enemies far from home. Membership in NATO could even embolden opportunistic leaders in the Eastern regions most at odds with Moscow to ratchet up anti-Russia actions. It is not in the interest of most of the countries of the alliance to be dragged into confrontation with Moscow, even a relatively weak Moscow, over disputes between a country and former parts of itself.

BY HISTORICAL standards NATO is still a resounding success, but we are still stuck with the problems caused by each of the organization's personalities. We cannot do history over, but we might be able to inch back toward a less complicated set of identities.

As pacifier of the Balkans or partner in the American war on terror in Afghanistan, NATO stretched the consensus of its members on its proper functions and actually degenerated into a coalition of the willing; many members elected not to participate materially in those ventures. The survival of this new out-of-area personality may depend on whether NATO can get out of Afghanistan on respectable terms, which depends on finding a new strategy for crippling the Taliban. This remains to be done in the face of huge obstacles: the country's corrupt political culture; sanctuaries for the enemy in Pakistan; and the strategically counterproductive effects from U.S. and allied combat tactics that have sometimes mobilized more opposition than they eliminate. Even if NATO exits the Afghan War with honor, the out-of-area mission is likely to look increasingly dispensable-despite the price of making the organization appear idle and aimless. This out-of-area personality might still be suppressed.

But no one wants to suppress the club-of-liberal-governments personality, even though it has overreached itself. NATO's leaders naively thought the age of power politics was over and took in new members without due regard for the strategic implications for relations with Russia. This brought the third personality, the dormant anti-Russia orientation of the organization, back to the surface-an unfortunate ebbing of the high tide of peace that looked so promising in the early 1990s. This personality cannot be eliminated because the expansion cannot be undone.

The sad irony is that the urge to broaden the political community of old and new democracies undermined the peace that broke out in the early 1990s. It is unlikely that NATO can resolve this paradox well enough to make the future like that brief euphoric period of amity from the Atlantic to the Urals right after the cold war. In the meantime, we should keep antagonism of our former-cold-war rival to a minimum. It is not impossible, however, to reach a more benign kind of stability. For this, Russia would have to democratize fully and be invited to join the NATO fraternity. Neither change is likely, but then if very unlikely things never happened, the cold war would not have ended.

Richard K. Betts, an adjunct senior fellow for national-security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, is director of the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.

¹ Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War, 3^rd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1988), ch. 8; William Wohlforth, "The Stability of a Unipolar World," International Security 24, no. 1 (Summer 1999).