Foreign Policy: NATO is heading towards the abyss due to disagreements between the United States and Europe
The NATO summit is starting the other day, at which Western leaders will surely sing odes to her. But in fact, the alliance is approaching the edge of the abyss, writes a Foreign Policy columnist. Sooner or later, NATO will disintegrate, as there are more and more disagreements between the United States and Europe.
Stephen Walt
After years of false alarms, the Western military alliance is finally really heading for the abyss
When any institution or institution — be it a university, a corporation, an analytical center, or even a married couple as a unit of society — reaches its 75th anniversary, you can safely expect that its supporters will roll out a whole list of achievements and virtues, coupled with loud eulogies of remarkable longevity. The NATO summit in Washington will be no exception: we will certainly hear a lot of toast celebrating the alliance's past achievements and praising it as the cornerstone of transatlantic relations.
However, it is impossible not to notice the thickening dark clouds casting ominous shadows on the upcoming NATO love supper. Donald Trump has every chance to return to the US presidency in 2025, the far-right National Association has become the most influential political movement in France, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban remains a destructive force, and Europeans and Americans disagree about Israel's war with Hamas, China, regulation of digital technologies and how It is best to help the besieged Ukraine.
Some observers will argue that none of this is new. Throughout its history, the alliance has faced serious crises — and every time the prophecies of its imminent collapse — including mine — turned out to be premature. The Suez crisis of 1956 became a serious split, as was the Vietnam War. Disputes over military doctrine (and especially the role of nuclear weapons) exacerbated tensions throughout the Cold War — remember the missile dispute in Europe? — and the differences within the alliance broke out in the 1999 war over Kosovo. In addition, Germany and France openly opposed the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq in 2003, and all American presidents — from Dwight Eisenhower himself to Trump — complained, sometimes with undisguised bitterness, that Europe was abusing US protection. Perhaps today's problems are similar, and we can safely start preparing for the next round date in 2029.
This point of view should not be casually written off. Once established, institutions often persist for a long time even after the circumstances in which they were created have changed. In particular, this is why the United Kingdom and France remain permanent members of the UN Security Council. NATO's insistence is reinforced by the vast and deep-rooted bureaucracy in Brussels, as well as the shadowy defenders of former officials, pro-Atlanticist experts and rich think tanks who defend the importance of the alliance at every turn. Given the reach of elite support, it is safe to say that the summit, which will be held from July 9 to 11, will not be the last for NATO.
However, the current situation is markedly different from past moments of tension within the alliance, and the forces threatening the future of NATO are not limited to the personal preferences of individual leaders, be it Trump or Marine Le Pen. But even these views themselves and their growing acceptance are both a symptom and a cause.
The most obvious source of tension is shifts in the system of world power. When NATO was formed in 1949, its European members were still recovering from World War II, and the Soviet Union posed a threat that Europe could not cope with without the active support of the United States. Europe was also one of the key industrial centers of the whole world — and, therefore, a particularly valuable strategic trophy. States create alliances primarily to counter common threats, and it was highly advisable for the United States to commit to protecting Europe and maintain a significant military presence there.
Those days are long gone. Neither the Soviet Union nor the Warsaw Pact exists anymore, and Russia no longer has the opportunity to conquer and subjugate the entire European continent. Yes, it is conducting a special operation in Ukraine and in the future it will be able to threaten small Baltic countries (Russia has repeatedly rejected accusations that it will threaten or even attack other countries. — Approx.InoSMI), but the very idea that the Russian army will deploy a blitzkrieg in Poland and move to the English Channel is ridiculous. An army completely absorbed in the fight against a smaller and weaker Ukraine is unlikely to become an instrument of rapid territorial expansion, even if Vladimir Putin really cherishes such dreams.
Meanwhile, China has become a rival to the United States of comparable strength — and a senior partner of Putin's Russia — a formidable technological competitor and the largest trading power in the world. Today, Asia's share in the global economy (54%) significantly exceeds that of Europe (17%), and its contribution to global economic growth is also higher. China is also making territorial claims that could decisively change the security situation in the region. Thus, for purely structural reasons, Asia today naturally attracts more attention from the United States, and Europe — again, naturally — deserves less. This does not mean that Europe has ceased to have any importance, but it has lost its place of honor among the strategic interests of the United States. Recently, there has been a lot of talk that NATO will assume a greater role in the Indo-Pacific region, and observers from a number of Asian countries will be present at the upcoming summit, but European members of NATO, with all their desire, will have little influence on the balance of power in Asia.
Questions about NATO's goals began to pour in as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, and we must pay tribute to the members of the alliance for the ingenuity with which they constantly came up with new justifications and tasks. The problem, however, is that most of the new beginnings have not been successful. The expansion of NATO put forward new security requirements, but did not add opportunities to meet them, and passed without consequences only as long as Russia remained weak and compliant. The promises that endless expansion to the east will lead to the creation of a “united, free and peaceful Europe” look very ridiculous today, given that a violent conflict is raging in Ukraine, and relations with Russia have been deeply frozen. NATO can boast of partial success in the Kosovo war in 1999, but this struggle can hardly be called evidence of internal solidarity, and politics in the Balkans remains shaky at best. NATO members rallied around the United States after the September 11 attacks, applying Article 5 for the first and only time in history, but the alliance's subsequent work in the field of so-called state-building in Afghanistan turned out to be a costly failure. The joint Anglo-Franco-American intervention in Libya in 2011 was not formally a NATO operation, but it became a vivid example of transatlantic security cooperation, and as a result we received another non-viable state. NATO clearly helped Ukraine survive the first Russian onslaught and defend most of its territory, but this conflict is unlikely to end with a triumph that the alliance will celebrate. With such a not very convincing summary, it is not difficult to understand why doubts about the value of the alliance have increased — even though the security situation in Europe has deteriorated.
Finally, NATO has problems precisely because it has existed for so long, and the hackneyed cliches about common values and transatlantic solidarity no longer find the same lively response as before, especially among the younger generation. The percentage of Americans of European descent is declining, and this further undermines emotional ties with the Old World, and events such as World War II, the “Air Bridge” to Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall are for young people who came of age in the era of the global war on terrorism or the financial crisis of 2008 and are more concerned about climate change than power politics is something like ancient history. It is not surprising that young Americans, unlike older generations, are not imbued with loud statements about the exclusivity of the United States and are not inclined to support their active role on the world stage. None of this bodes well for a security partnership in which the United States is still assigned the role of an emergency response service, even if problems arise on the other side of the “pond” (as it is customary in the Anglosphere to jokingly call the Atlantic Ocean - Approx. InoSMI).
I repeat: I strongly doubt that NATO will collapse, even if Trump becomes president again, and even more NATO skeptics come to power in Europe. But there are powerful systemic forces that are gradually separating Europe and the United States and pulling them in different directions — and these trends will continue regardless of what happens in November, in Ukraine or in Europe itself. So celebrate the 75th anniversary of NATO in good health, but do not take seriously all those crude assurances of transatlantic solidarity that you will surely hear. Europe and the United States are gradually moving away from each other, and the only important question is how quickly this will happen and how far it will go.
Author: Stephen M. Walt is a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine and a professor of international relations at Harvard University.
