How to make NATO matter again

by Julian Lindley-French

iPolitics
February 27, 2015

On 5 March, 1946 Winston Churchill gave his famous “Sinews of Peace” speech at Fulton, Missouri, in which he warned of an “iron curtain” descending across Europe.

Less well known is this passage, in which Churchill talked strategy: “What, then, is the overall strategy that we should inscribe today? It is nothing less than the safety and welfare, the freedom and progress, of all the homes and families of all the men and women in all the lands.”

Churchill might well have been speaking of the challenge NATO faces today and the strategy it must adopt if the alliance is to prove its worth in the rapidly changing world of the twenty-first century.

The most pressing challenge is the rise of illiberal power and the relative decline in liberal power. This is most evident in Russian aggression against Ukraine, which is again underway. The balance of both economic and military power is shifting rapidly away from the Western democracies to the emergent powers in Asia, most notably China. Russia is, of course, an economic basket-case — but with 40 per cent of all public investment directed at the armed forces, the danger posed by the militarisation of the Russian state is exacerbated by continued cuts to NATO forces.

The challenge posed by Islamic State is both ancient and new. It is ancient in the sense that the barbarous values they espouse have more to do with the eleventh than the twenty-first century. It is new in that, for the first time, an insurgency is attempting not just to seize a state but to create a sort of ‘anti-state’. As such, the threat Islamic State poses is both conventional and unconventional. The conventional threat is something the Alliance could address. The unconventional threat puts at risk the relationship between protection and projection upon which NATO is established.

NATO’s two great North American allies are being pulled inexorably away from the defence of Europe. This ‘pivot’ is not the result of political decision but rather a consequence of the new geopolitics and the emergence of illiberal peer competitors. For all the dangers imposed by Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, it is East Asia which today represents the epicentre of systemic fracture and which, for the sake of the world, will consume more and more of both American and Canadian political and strategic energy.

However, perhaps the greatest threat to the Alliance of which Churchill was the prime architect is the political and financial paralysis of Europe itself. Lost between integration and disintegration, Europe today is a financial black hole into which taxpayers’ money is poured, never to be seen again. Defence budgets are routinely raided to maintain the appearance of an EU that has become a giant Ponzi scheme. The January decision by the European Central Bank to effectively print €1.1 trillion was the last throw of the dice to prevent a deflationary cycle that would devastate European public finances. The election of Syriza in Greece points to a European house increasingly divided against itself. And no alliance, however august, can survive such division over time.

All of these threats to NATO are further exaggerated by levelling technologies and the challenge to the established order they pose. The threat of cyber attacks — whether their source is national or criminal — could keep allied states politically off-balance and undermine the relationship between leaders and led that could destroy the social cohesion of complex societies.

If NATO is to survive as a credible strategic cornerstone alliance, then new burdens must be shared. In short, Canadians and Europeans must keep Americans strong where America must be strong. For that to happen, Canadians must be better able to support America in Asia-Pacific and the High North, and Europeans will need to become effective first-responders in and around Europe — no easy task.

January 2015 marked fifty years since Churchill died. With his passing, an idea of power and strategy passed away as well. In September 2014 the NATO Wales Summit — the strategic reset summit — took place amidst much fanfare. With Russia again increasing its unforgiving pressure on Ukraine, perhaps NATO and its leaders might remember one of the great man’s other insights: “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”

2015 will be NATO’s tipping point, when the great peoples of the Alliance choose between relevance and irrelevance, capacity and incapacity. It will be a big year. Are we up to it?

Professor Julian Lindley-French is a Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute Fellow. He is also Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the National Defense University in Washington D.C., Senior Fellow of the Institute of Statecraft in London and a member of the Strategic Advisory Panel of the UK Chief of Defence Staff.