Nato's (lack of) strategic concept by: Marko Papic

By: Marko Papic

On November 20th 28 heads of state of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Alliance will meet in Lisbon to approve a new Strategic Concept, the mission statement for the alliance in the next decade. This will be NATO's third Strategic Concept since the end of the Cold War, with the last two coming in 1991 -- as Soviet Union was collapsing -- and 1999 -- as NATO bombed Yugoslavia, undertaking its first serious military engagement.

During the Cold War the presence of 50 Soviet and Warsaw Pact armored divisions and nearly two million troops west of the Urals spoke volumes more than mission statements. While it would be an overstatement to say that no mission statements were written -- NATO did put out four Strategic Concepts in 1949, 1952, 1957 and 1968 -- they merely served to reinforce the mission of NATO: keep Soviets at bay. Today, the very debate surrounding NATO's Strategic Concept is a symbol of the existential crisis that the alliance is facing.

INSERT: NATO AS THE GLOBE: https://clearspace.stratfor.com/docs/DOC-5802

EVOLUTION OF NATO'S THREAT ENVIRONMENT

The Cold War was a dangerous, but simple era. The seriousness of the Soviet threat to and the devastation of continental Europe in World War II left the European NATO allies beholden to the American war machine for defense. If there was any hope of deterring an ambitious USSR, it resided in Washington, and in Washington’s nuclear arsenal. This was not a matter of affinity or selection. For Western Europeans, there was little choice. And that lack of choice engendered a strong bond between the Alliance's European and North American allies and a coherent mission statement. NATO provided added benefits of security with little financial commitment, allowing Europeans to concentrate on improving domestic living standards, giving Europe time and resources to craft the European Union and expansive welfare states. For the Americans, this was a small price to pay to contain the Soviets. A Europe dominated by Soviet Union would have potentially combined Europe's technology and industrial capacity with Soviet natural resources, manpower and ideology, creating a continental size competitor capable of threatening North America.

The threat of Soviet invasion of Europe was the only mission statement NATO needed and yet so severe that the alliance in fact had few conventional ways to counter it. While <http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/military_main_battle_tank> that began to come online towards the end of the Cold War began to shift the military balance between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, much of it remained unproven until Operation Desert Storm in 1991, well after Soviet threat had passed. This technological and qualitative innovation came at an immense expense and was the direct result of the Alliance’s quantitative disadvantage, with the Warsaw Pact numerical advantage in armor still over 2 to 1 in terms of main battle tanks in 1988. There was a reason the Warsaw Pact called its battle plan against NATO the Seven Days to the Rhine, the name was a pretty realistic description of the outcome of the planned attack (if the Soviets could fuel the armored onslaught, which was becoming a more serious question by the 1980s). In fact, the Soviets were confident enough throughout the Cold War to maintain a no-first-use policy on nuclear weapons, believing that their conventional advantage in armor would yield quick results. The NATO Alliance simply did not have that luxury.

The Cold War threat environment was therefore clear and severe, creating conditions that made NATO not just necessary and viable, but also strong in the face of any potential disagreements of its allies. This environment, however, did not last. Ultimately NATO succeeded in holding back the Soviet threat, but in its success, the alliance sowed the seeds for its contemporary lack of focus. The Warsaw Pact threat was withdrawn with the dissolution of the alliance in mid-1991 and ultimately with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. Moscow unilaterally withdrew the borders of its sphere of influence from the Elbe at the West-East German border to behind the Dnieper some thousand kilometers to the East. Throughout the 1990s Moscow became a danger only in terms of how its potential collapse would impact nuclear proliferation. The U.S. and its NATO allies began to actively prop up the chaotic regime of Boris Yeltsin for that reason. Meanwhile, the alliance searched for a mission statement in humanitarian interventions in the Balkans, (LINK: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/georgia_and_kosovo_single_intertwined_crisis) with the momentary preponderance of American power allowing the West to dabble in expeditionary adventures of marginal strategic value.

INSERT: NATO THEN AND NOW MAP: https://clearspace.stratfor.com/docs/DOC-5802

DISPARATE THREATS AND INTERESTS OF THE ALLIANCE

With each passing year of the post-Cold War era the threat environment changed. With no clear threat in the East, NATO enlargement into Central Eastern Europe became a goal in and of itself. With each new NATO member state a new national interest in defining that threat environment was added to the Alliance while, if anything, the unifying nature of that threat environment has only further weakened.

Significantly, three major developments have changed how different member states of the Alliance formulate their threat perception:

First, the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the U.S. brought home the reality of the threat represented by militant Islamists. The attack was the first instance in its history that the NATO Alliance invoked Article 5, which stipulates collective self-defense. This paved the way for its involvement in Afghanistan, well outside of NATO's traditional theatre of operations in Europe. Attacks in Spain and the U.K. reaffirmed the global nature of the threat, but global terrorism is not 50 armored divisions. The lukewarm interest of many NATO allies in the Afghan mission in particular and profound differences over the appropriate means to address the threat of transnational terrorism more generally attest to the insufficiency of this danger as a unifying threat for the alliance. For most European nations the threat of militant Islam is not one to be countered in the Middle East and South Asia with expeditionary warfare, but rather at home using domestic law enforcement amidst their own restive Muslim populations , or at the very most handled abroad with clandestine operations conducted by intelligence services. They therefore want to shift the focus on policing and intelligence gathering, not to mention on cost-cutting in the current environment of fiscal austerity measures across the continent.

The U.S., however, still has both normative motivation of bringing senior leadership of Al Qaeda to justice and strategic interest in leaving Afghanistan with a government capable of securing the country sufficiently that it does not become a safe haven to terrorists in the future. As STRATFOR has argued, (LINK: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100907_911_and_9_year_war) both interests are real, but are over committing the U.S. to the tactic of terrorism and the threat of transnational jihad at the cost of emerging (and reemerging) threats arising elsewhere. Or, to use poker parlance, the U.S. has committed itself to the pot with a major bet and is hesitant to withdraw despite low probability of its hand's success. With so much of its chip stack -- both in terms of resources and political capital -- already invested the U.S. is hesitant to back off. Europeans, however, have already essentially folded.

Second, NATO's enlargement to the Baltic States combined with the pro-Western Georgian and Ukrainian Color Revolutions -- all occurring in a one year period between the end of 2003 and end of 2004 -- jarred Moscow into a resurgence that has altered the threat environment for Central and Eastern European states. In the NATO expansion to the Baltic States Russians saw the Alliance's designs for Ukraine and Georgia. (LINK: http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/georgia_ukraine_debating_road_nato_membership) This was unacceptable. Considering Ukraine's geographic importance to Russia (LINK: http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20081014_geopolitics_russia_permanent_struggle) -- it is the soft underbelly of Russia that gives Moscow's enemies great position from which to cut off Moscow's access to the Caucuses -- its loss is a red line for any Russian entity. The Kremlin has countered the threat by resurging in its Soviet sphere, locking down Central Asia, Belarus, Caucasus and Ukraine via open warfare, political machinations and color revolutions (LINK: http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20100426_russia_unrest_foreign_policy_tool) modeled on West's own efforts.

For Western Europe, sensitive to its dependencies on and looking to profit from its energy and economic exchange with Russia -- especially Germany -- (LINK: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100621_germany_and_russia_move_closer) Moscow's resurgence is a secondary issue. While it is of more primary importance for the U.S., current operations have left its ground combat forces over committed and without a strategic reserve. It is a threat Washington is reawakening to, but that remains a lower priority than ongoing efforts in both Afghanistan and Iraq. When it does fully reawake to the Russian resurgence, it will find only a portion of NATO with a similar view of Russia. That portion is the Central Eastern Europeans forming NATO's new borderlands with Russia, and for whom a resurgent Moscow is the supreme national threat. France and Germany -- Europe's heavyweights -- don't want another Cold War splitting the continent.

Third, the severe economic crisis in Europe has had the result of making Germany's rise as political leader of Europe (LINK: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100208_germanys_choice) clear for all to see. This was the obvious result of the end of the Cold War and German reunification in 1990, but it took 20 years for Berlin to digest East Germany and be presented with the opportunity to exert its power. That opportunity was presented in first half of 2010. Europe's fate in May of 2010 amidst the Greek sovereign debt crisis hinged not on what the EU's bureaucracy would do, or even on what the leaders of EU's most powerful countries would collectively agree on, but rather what dictates came from Berlin. This has now sunk in with the rest of Europe. (LINK: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100315_germany_mitteleuropa_redux)

Germany wants to use the current crisis to reshape the EU in its own image, (LINK: http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20100514_germany_creating_economic_governance) while France wants to make sure that it can manage Berlin's rise and preserve a key role for France (LINK: http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20100910_geopolitics_france_centralized_system_guarding_plain) in EU's leadership. Western Europe therefore wants to have the luxury it had during the Cold War to put its own house in order, it wants no part of global expeditionary warfare against militant Islamists or of countering Russian resurgence. Central Eastern Europeans nervously look on as Paris and Berlin come close to Moscow (LINK: http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20101007_russia_strategy_behind_european_security_treaty) while committed Atlanticists -- Western European countries traditionally suspicious of a powerful Germany -- such as Denmark, the Netherlands and the U.K. want to reaffirm their trans-Atlantic security links with the U.S. in light of a new, more assertive, Germany. The core of western European NATO members, in other words, is not only at war with itself over policy, but does not perceive a resurgent Russia as a threat (LINK: http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/germany_merkels_choice_and_future_europe) to be managed with military force.

NATO'S LACK OF STRATEGIC CONCEPT

Amidst this changed threat environment and expanded membership, NATO looks to draft a new mission statement. To do so a Group of Experts, led by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, has drafted a number of recommendations for how the Alliance is set to tackle the next 10 years. This Thursday, NATO member ministers of defense will take a final crack at the recommendations of the experts -- which can be read here -- before they are formulated into a draft of the Strategic Concept and presented by the Secretary General to heads of state on November 20th in Lisbon.

Though some recommendations do target issues that plague the alliance, it fails to address the unaddressable: the lack of a unified perception of threats and how those threats should be prioritized and responded to. Ultimately, the credibility and deterrent value of an alliance is rooted in an adversary's perception of its resolve. During the Cold War that resolve, while never unquestioned -- the Europeans were always skeptical of the American willingness to risk New York City and Washington in a standoff over European turf with Moscow -- was strong and repeatedly demonstrated. The U.S. in fact launched proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam whose purpose was largely to demonstrate unequivocally to European governments -- and the Kremlin -- that the U.S. was willing to bleed in far corners of the planet for its allies. U.S. troops stationed in West Germany and in immediate danger of being cut off in Berlin served to demonstrate American resolve against Soviet armor poised on the North European Plain and just to the east of the Fulda gap in Hesse. The only demonstration of resolve either way in recent years has been the failure of the U.S. -- and of NATO in general -- to respond to the Russian military intervention in Georgia, a committed NATO aspirant though not a member state. This was due to not only lack of US bandwidth, but also a refusal of Germany and France to risk their relationship with Russia over Georgia.

At heart of NATO today, therefore, is a lack of resolve bred in divergent interests and threat perceptions of its Allies. The disparate threat environment is grafted on to a membership pool that can be broadly split into three categories: the U.S., Canada and committed Atlanticists (the U.K., the Netherlands and Denmark) of Europe, Core European powers (led by Germany and France, with Southern Mediterranean countries dependant on Berlin's economic support in tow) and Central and Eastern European new member states, the so called Intermarum countries that stretch from the Baltic to the Black Sea and which are traditionally wary of both Russian power and relying on an alliance with Western Europe to counter such power.

With no one clear threat to the Alliance and with so many divergent interests amongst its membership, the Group of Experts recommendation were not just incoherent as a whole, but were largely incompatible. A look at the recommendations is enough to infer which group of countries wants what interests preserved and therefore see the built-in incompatibilities of Alliance interests going forward from 2010.

* Atlanticists: Led by the U.S., Atlanticists want the Alliance to orient towards non-European theatres of operation (think Afghanistan) and non-traditional security threats (think cybersecurity, terrorism, etc.), an increase of commitments from Core Europeans in terms of defense spending and a reformed decision making system that eliminates single member veto in some situations while allowing the Secretary General to have predetermined powers to act without authorization in others. The latter is in the interest of the U.S. because it is Washington that will always have the most sway over the Secretary General -- traditionally from an Atlanticist country, not Germany or France.

* Core Europe: Led by Germany and France, Core Europe wants more controls and parameters predetermined for non-European deployments (so that it can limit such adventuring), a leaner and more efficient Alliance (in other words, the freedom to cut defense spending when few are actually spending at the two percent GDP mandated by the alliance), more cooperation and balance with Russia and more consultations with international organizations like the UN (to limit U.S.'s ability to go at it alone without multilateral approval). Core Europe also wants military exercises to be "non-threatening", which is in exact opposition of Intermarum demands that the Alliance reaffirm its defense commitments through clear demonstrations of its resolve.

* Intermarum: The Central Eastern Europeans ultimately want NATO to reaffirm Article 5 of self-defense via both rhetoric and military exercises (if not the stationing of troops), commitment to the European theatre and conventional threats specifically (in opposition of Atlanticist non-European, non-traditional focus), mention of Russia in the new Strategic Concept as a power whose motives cannot be trusted (in opposition of Core European pro-Russian attitudes) and some Central Eastern Europeans also want a continuation of open door policy for new membership (think Ukraine and Georgia) so that the NATO border with Russia is expanded further East, which neither the U.S. or Core Europe (nor even some fellow Intermarum states) have appetite for at the moment.

It should be noted that Western Europe and the U.S. disagreed on interests and strategies during the Cold War as well. At many junctures the West Europeans sought to distance themselves from the U.S., including after the Vietnam War which U.S. largely fought to illustrate its commitment to them. In this context, the 1969 Ostpolitik policy of rapprochement by the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt towards the Soviets might not appear all that different to the contemporary Berlin-Moscow relationship. However, during the Cold War the Soviet tank divisions arrayed on the border of West and East Germany was a constant reality check that ultimately determined the priorities of NATO Allies. Contradictory interests and momentary disagreements within the Alliance were ancillary to the armored formations conducting exercises simulating a massive push towards the Rhine.

The problem with NATO today, and for NATO in the next decade, is that different member states view different threats through different prisms of national interest. Russian tanks concern only roughly a third of member states -- the Intermarum states -- while the rest of the alliance is split between Atlanticists looking to strengthen the Alliance for new threats and non-European theatres of operations and Old Europe looking to commit as few soldiers and resources, as little treasure -- and absolutely minimal blood -- towards either set of goals in the next ten years as possible.