The Future of NATO

Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary-General of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, https://flic.kr/p/2jYmAeJ; CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/). President-elect Joe Biden will face several foreign policy challenges come January. Amid the myriad issues, the former vice president has consistently prioritized his desire to reaffirm the United States’s commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). For its part, NATO has already announced its plans to seek an early summit with the Biden administration shortly after inauguration to review potential proposals to reform the alliance. The agenda will probably also include NATO efforts to coordinate its policies in the aftermath of the Pentagon’s recent announcements that the U.S. would be withdrawing forces from Afghanistan and Iraq. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has warned that the expedited drawdowns could be dangerous to NATO troops left behind in those countries. NATO has faced several external challenges in recent years. These challenges have been exacerbated and invited by President Trump’s threats to withdraw the United States from the treaty and his perception that the organization is of little strategic value. To both NATO allies and adversaries alike, the Trump administration’s threats have gone beyond rhetoric and have revealed the potential that the United States could walk away from the organization that it helped create. For instance, Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, echoed this sentiment, warning that Trump would likely formally withdraw the United States from the treaty in a second term. (Jack Goldsmith and Curtis Bradley previously analyzed the constitutional issues surrounding executive power and unilateral withdrawal from NATO.) Adversaries like Russia have taken advantage of the alliance’s internal fault lines. Russia continues to sow doubts about the U.S. commitment to the alliance and has taken increasingly provocative military actions in Europe and the Middle East in order to test NATO’s limits. Beyond the familiar struggle between NATO and Russia, the Trump administration’s approach has sparked doubts that have also revealed an internal problem: a divergence in long-term security needs among the treaty partners. Specifically, Turkey has charted an independent course and Europe has simultaneously begun to fear its reliance on the United States for its long-term security needs. These problems are not without precedent, but according to an internal NATO report about the alliance’s future and the Harvard Belfer Center, these trends have each been influenced, at least in part, by a perceived lack of direction from the United States. As the U.S. transitions to a new administration, this post will reflect on the Trump administration’s approach to NATO over the last four years, examine its impact and evaluate claims about whether the treaty itself provides legal mechanisms to address these issues. It will also provide a brief summary of “NATO 2030: United for a New Era,” a newly released internal report about the alliance. Trump’s Focus on Defense Spending and Force Deployments President Trump’s critical approach to NATO, as Lawfare ’s Scott Anderson characterized in 2018, has been underpinned by the assumption that “the alliance is more of a liability on the U.S. ledger sheet than a lynchpin of a shared transatlantic strategy.” This assumption has manifested itself in the administration’s prioritization of NATO resource allocations—in the form of both individual states’ defense spending and troop deployments. Those concerns about resource allocations have taken precedence over other issues such as democratic backsliding in Turkey , Poland and Hungary and the need to develop a new unified plan to address evolving geopolitical challenges. The Trump administration has pressured member states to contribute at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) to defense spending while concurrently preparing to downsize the U.S. force presence from NATO theaters such as Afghanistan , Iraq and Germany . The message: The United States wants NATO countries to do more for their own security and, in Iraq and Afghanistan , to take on a larger security role to balance out any U.S. withdrawals. The result? In short, the Trump administration has made progress in bolstering NATO’s defense spending. Trump did not create an arbitrary policy for NATO spending but instead sought strict enforcement of a 2014 NATO pledge in response to the Russian annexation of Crimea by member states to increase defense spending. In that year, only three NATO countries—the United States, the United Kingdom and Greece—spent 2 percent of their GDP on defense expenditures. When the Trump administration came into office in 2017, one additional country, Estonia, had joined the list of two-percenters. Trump’s pressure began almost immediately after he took office. By May 2017, he accused NATO member states of “owing massive amounts” and not “paying what they should be paying.” This year, 10 NATO countries—Estonia, France, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Romania, the United Kingdom and the United States—are projected to spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense expenditures. Most notably, France will spend 2.11 percent of its GDP on defense for the first time since the 2014 pledge was announced. While these countries’ decisions to increase spending are not exclusively the result of Trump’s pressure, his efforts have contributed to the alliance that Biden will inherit in January 2021. President-elect Biden will also inherit the Trump administration’s efforts to downsize U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Germany while calling on NATO to expand its missions abroad. In 2018, amid Trump’s calls for NATO to do more in the Middle East, the alliance agreed to launch the NATO Mission in Iraq (NMI) a noncombat advisory, training and capacity-building operation designed to prepare Iraqi forces to prevent the return of the Islamic State. NATO has worked to expand the NMI while Trump continues toward withdrawing all U.S. forces from the country. A similar story has unfolded in Afghanistan, where Trump, since taking office, has called for a U.S. withdrawal from the country. NATO’s Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan (RSM) was launched shortly after the completion of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in 2014 and was designed to provide follow-on noncombat support to train, advise and assist Afghan security forces and government institutions to take on primary responsibility for Afghanistan’s national defense. The imminent U.S. withdrawal from the country has increased pressure on the RSM not only to secure military and political conditions in the country but also to manage force protection concerns. In October, NATO defense ministers agreed to maintain forces in the country until conditions in Afghanistan were sufficiently stable. In the view of member states, the issue in both Iraq and Afghanistan is not whether NATO can or should be substituted for U.S. forces abroad but, rather, if the alliance—originally designed to protect European countries from Russia—should be forced to spend additional time, money and resources in the Middle East, where its current train-and-advise presence is largely perceived as supporting U.S. priorities. As Stoltenberg put it in November, “We have been in Afghanistan for almost 20 years, and no NATO ally wants to stay any longer than necessary … [but] when the time is right, [the U.S. and NATO] should leave together in a coordinated and orderly way.” Trump’s plan to reduce U.S. forces in Germany—in response to Berlin’s failure to increase its defense spending—is also adding to these concerns. Germany currently hosts the largest U.S. military footprint in Europe, with approximately 34,000 troops, and is seen as an integral pillar of NATO’s deterrence strategy against Russia. The planned reduction—cutting the force by 11,900 in total—will be offset by modest increases in countries such as Poland and Italy. The Trump administration’s approach has prompted leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron to call for Europe to take charge of its own security. In particular, Macron is no longer convinced that the United States’s support is sufficient to preserve Europe’s long-term safety. In late 2019, he warned that—as a result of the U.S. approach to the alliance—the organization was at risk of becoming inert. Macron noted that the alliance “only works if the guarantor of last resort functions as such. … [W]e should reassess the reality of what NATO is in light of the commitment of the United States.” These statements point to Europe’s newfound realization: the need to ensure that its own defense is not entirely reliant on the United States.
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