NATO: Alliance with an Identity Crisis
Charles W. King
President Trump has moderated the disparaging comment he made about NATO during and after his campaign but these comments touched upon the identity crisis that NATO has had since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980’s. Since then NATO has been looking for the unity of purpose that it had when Soviet tanks sat in East Germany. In the 1990’s it expanded east and many former Soviet satellite states joined the alliance, and it intervened to quell the violence in the Balkans. In the 2000’s it responded to the US’s call for aid in its invasion of Afghanistan and turned its sights to terrorism and piracy. Understanding the alliance’s ongoing identity issues requires examining the purpose of the alliance when it was formed in 1949.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is famous for being the military alliance formed to prevent an invasion of Western Europe by the Soviet Union and its satellite states in the Warsaw Pact, but that is not the whole story. By 1949 the Americans, French, and British knew that it was not going to be conventional armies that dissuaded the Soviet Union from striking westward. Plans declassified since 1990 show that the Alliance knew that any effective defense of Western Europe would require the use of nuclear weapons. The Red Army simply had too many men and tanks for anything else to work. This raises the question as to the purpose of the continued presence of foreign forces in West Germany after the end of Allied occupation in 1954?
The answer lies in the fact that West Germany was not a founding member of NATO. When it was founded in 1949 NATO was just as much about deterring German aggression as Soviet aggression. The United Kingdom and France were justifiably concerned that a re-armed West Germany could turn its attentions west for a third time. West Germany only became a re-armed NATO member at American insistence. The French in particular did not want to let an independent West Germany re-arm. A solution was found in the European Defense Community which would’ve established multinational armed forces for Western Europe. The EDC was rejected by the French National Assembly as an unacceptable loss of sovereignty. This loss of sovereignty, particularly by West Germany, was the point. It would’ve prevented a re-armed West Germany from exercising direct control of its military. In the wake of the EDC’s rejection another solution had to be found. France and the United Kingdom were willing continue the occupation of West Germany, but the United States was not. Instead, over the span of a few short weeks, the leaders of the US, UK, France, and West Germany found another solution; West German membership in NATO. Not only would it permit West Germany to re-arm without an independent defense policy, it would permit the NATO militaries to have a continued presence in West Germany. From now on they would be allies rather than occupiers, but it was enough to soothe fears of another German war of expansion.
France, the US, and the UK are no longer afraid that Germany will invade its neighbors. The threat from modern Russia is not the same as when the Red Army occupied all of Eastern Europe. NATO has lost not one but both of its original purposes. Along with other post-war initiatives, it succeeded in mollifying German aggression. The question now must be asked whether or not it is possible to transition NATO to a new purpose. Thought of strictly as a defensive alliance it still can be an effective deterrent to foreign aggression. If policy-makers do not recognize how the alliance changed, dramatically, the geopolitics of Europe, then they fail to recognize how it is continuing to effect European geopolitics as NATO expands west towards Russia, and will not be able to shape those changes.
Further Reading
John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union and The Cold War (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2007).
Ralph B. Levering, Vladimir O. Pechatnov, Verena Botzenhart-Viehe, C. Earl Edmondson, Debating the Origins of the Cold War: American and Russian Perspectives, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001).
Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century, (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1998).