{"id":6200,"date":"2003-06-26T21:17:09","date_gmt":"2003-06-26T21:17:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lexingtoninstitute.org\/?p=6200"},"modified":"2013-11-14T21:18:14","modified_gmt":"2013-11-14T21:18:14","slug":"natos-decay-and-the-search-for-a-few-key-friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lexingtoninstitute.org\/natos-decay-and-the-search-for-a-few-key-friends\/","title":{"rendered":"NATO’S Decay and the Search for a Few Key Friends"},"content":{"rendered":"
Thank you for inviting me to participate in this timely discussion of the role that alliances will play in America’s future security posture.<\/p>\n
The notes the foundation sent me for the meeting posed three questions in the aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom:<\/p>\n
Where does America move from here with regard to its allies?<\/p>\n
— What lies ahead for NATO and the transatlantic alliance?<\/p>\n
— What are the implications of recent developments for alliances with countries in Asia and the Middle East?<\/p>\n
I’m going to try to answer all three questions in a dozen minutes, devoting most of my time to explaining why NATO is likely to play a diminished role in future U.S. defense plans.<\/p>\n
As you know, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has recently endured a near-death experience over what to do about Iraq.<\/p>\n
It survived, but the prognosis is not good.<\/p>\n
The patient seems to be suffering from severe cognitive dissonance, if not multiple-personality disorder.That shouldn’t come as any surprise, because all the other multilateral alliances of Cold-War days — from ANZUS to CENTO to SEATO to the Warsaw Pact — have long since slipped into senility and death.<\/p>\n
Why would we expect NATO to be any different?<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, the official position in most western capitals is that NATO has a future.<\/p>\n
Its ranks are being increased — some would say invigorated — by the addition of new members from Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n
And earlier this month, member-states agreed to a number of steps designed to make the alliance more relevant, such as streamlining its command structure and establishing a rapid-response force.<\/p>\n
But these measures aren’t likely to mean much over the long run, because powerful centrifugal forces are at work, inexorably pulling the alliance apart.<\/p>\n
Let me briefly describe the five most important factors driving decline.<\/p>\n
First of all, the fear of Soviet aggression that originally forged and sustained NATO is long gone.<\/p>\n
It is hard today to even recall, much less recapture, the sense of crisis that surrounded NATO’s creation.<\/p>\n
In 1949, the year the alliance was founded, Russia exploded its first atomic bomb and communists secured control of the Chinese mainland.<\/p>\n
Soviet agents had recently subverted the government of Czechoslovakia, and were maneuvering to do the same in France and Italy.<\/p>\n
Vast Russian armies occupied much of Europe.<\/p>\n
And only months after NATO came into being, North Korea invaded the South.<\/p>\n
In such circumstances, it wasn’t hard to foster a feeling of solidarity and discipline among western democracies.<\/p>\n
There is no similar danger today.<\/p>\n
Terrorist threats are far more diffuse, and the military dangers posed by rogue states are relatively mild compared to the communist menace of Cold-War years.<\/p>\n
So the sense of urgency and shared purpose once so widespread in the West has largely disappeared.<\/p>\n
This is not unlike the experience of many countries in post-colonial Africa, which found it difficult to sustain a shared identity once the common oppressor had departed.<\/p>\n
Second, as the threat has changed so has America’s strategy for dealing with it.<\/p>\n
Throughout the Cold War, western strategy rested on twin pillars of deterrence and containment.<\/p>\n
Those doctrines were well-suited to a diverse, consensus-based alliance because they were essentially passive — they called for America and its allies to react to Soviet moves rather than seize the initiative.<\/p>\n
Occasionally a Fred Ikle or Ronald Reagan would point out the contradictions of deterrence, but Europeans viewed vulnerability as unavoidable and therefore resisted “destabilizing” changes.<\/p>\n
After 9-11, though, the Bush Administration reduced the role of deterrence and containment in U.S. strategy, preferring to preempt emerging threats.<\/p>\n
As President Bush put it at West Point’s 200th commencement …<\/p>\n
“If we wait for threats to materialize, we will have waited too long … In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action — and this nation will act.”<\/p>\n
That’s a sensible strategy for dealing with unpredictable enemies, but one that NATO is ill-prepared to implement.<\/p>\n
Preemption requires agility and daring, qualities traditionally in short supply within the Atlantic alliance.<\/p>\n
The alliance’s cautious, consensus-based culture forces the Bush Administration to choose between unilateral but timely action and ecumenical delay.<\/p>\n
Not surprisingly, the administration is inclined to favor unilateral action — which reduces the role of NATO in national strategy.<\/p>\n
Third, even if the European members of NATO were unified in their resolve to address emerging threats, they would lack the means to do so.<\/p>\n
In the dozen years since Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. military has been transformed by new technology.<\/p>\n
Despite the Clinton Administration’s best efforts to reap a “peace dividend,” the U.S. still managed to outspend the rest of the world combined in acquiring cutting-edge military technology over the last decade.<\/p>\n
The European members of NATO, on the other hand, largely stopped investing in new capabilities.<\/p>\n
Not only did they devote a much smaller share of national wealth to defense, but more of their military spending went to consumption items like pay and benefits rather than procurement.<\/p>\n
To make matters worse, their balkanized procurement practices squandered much of the money they did spend on new systems.<\/p>\n
As a result, the military forces of European allies are now a generation or more behind America’s in the capabilities they can field.<\/p>\n
They lack precision and stealth and mobility and connectivity that U.S. forces have come to take for granted — so much so that it is dangerous for them to operate in close proximity to U.S. combat forces.<\/p>\n
A senior Air Force officer described to me how ill-equipped his European counterparts seemed in the Balkan air war.<\/p>\n
“We let them play for a while,” he said, “and then we decided we better get those kids off the highway.”<\/p>\n
This is the reason that coalition warfare is largely missing from Bush Administration military plans after bulking large in Clinton plans — because the Europeans can’t keep up.<\/p>\n
We welcome whatever role they are willing to assume in peacekeeping, but when it comes to warfighting, they seem increasingly irrelevant.<\/p>\n
Fourth, due to demographic trends, European countries will have increasing trouble meeting their security commitments in the future.<\/p>\n
According to the World Health Organization, the average number of children born to a European woman today is 1.4, a third below what is required to maintain population levels without immigration.<\/p>\n
That means European populations are aging, shrinking the pool of people available for military service and greatly increasing the burden of social-welfare programs.<\/p>\n
This trend is most pronounced in Russia, where national population may shrink by 30-40% at mid-century.<\/p>\n
But the trend is also apparent in countries that do not suffer Russia’s rampant social decay.<\/p>\n
For example, WHO projects that Spain’s population will decline from 40 million today to 31 million in 2050 if current fertility rates persist.<\/p>\n
Italy will suffer a similar fate, with 42% of the population 60 years or older in 2050.<\/p>\n
Obviously, this is not the demographic profile we would hope to see among the members of our most important alliance.<\/p>\n
U.S. fertility rates are only slightly below replacement value — about two<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The notes the foundation sent me for the meeting posed three questions in the aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom: . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n