February 6, 2022 | View in Browser
Welcome to The Backstory. Every Sunday, we’ll guide you through the debates driving U.S. foreign policy and international affairs using pieces from the Foreign Affairs archives—some recent, some decades old. With over 100,000 Russian troops amassed along the Ukrainian border, “security in Europe today is more precarious than at any time since the end of the Cold War,” Ivo Daalder and James Goldgeier wrote last month. Moscow’s insistence that NATO deny membership to Ukraine has raised a recurring question: is the alliance, as it’s currently configured, making Europe more secure or less?
NATO, Michael Kimmage argues, “is too large, too poorly defined, and too provocative for its own good.” Ending its expansion and reducing its role “will not resolve Washington’s problems with Russia,” but doing so “is necessary in order for the most successful alliance of the twentieth century to endure and prosper in the twenty-first.”
NATO’s purpose after its success in the Cold War was not immediately clear. The Soviet Union was gone, but “nationalism and ethnic conflict” still threatened European stability, Ronald Asmus, Richard Kugler, and Stephen Larrabee argued in 1993, calling for an extension of “NATO’S collective defense and security arrangements to those areas where the seeds for future conflict in Europe lie.” In 1995, then Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke described the expansion of NATO’s membership and mission as “essential” to “widen European unity based on shared democratic values.” But Michael Mandelbaum warned that expansion would be “at best premature, at worst counterproductive, and in any case largely irrelevant to the problems confronting the countries situated between Germany and Russia.”
A rift opened within NATO as American and European interests diverged over the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both sides had to consider those events a “wake-up call,” Asmus argued in 2003. The transatlantic alliance needed to “coalesce around a new purpose and a new grand strategy, one fit to meet a different set of challenges beyond Europe” or risk becoming “increasingly irrelevant.”
Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 triggered further soul-searching. “Above all,” wrote outgoing NATO commander Philip Breedlove in 2016, the alliance needed to improve its capacity “to deter the Russian threat and to deal with the problems associated with regional instability on Europe’s borders.” Separate from the United States, Europe must also “develop the ability to better defend itself,” Alina Polyakova and Benjamin Haddad argued in 2019. Autonomy need not undermine NATO—in the long run, it could make the alliance “more balanced” and “more capable.”
A crisis of democracy, meanwhile, was undermining NATO from within, Celeste Wallander argued in 2018. “Just when the alliance is needed as much as ever to meet challenges from without, the foundations of its power are at risk of crumbling.”
The latest standoff between Russia and the West has confirmed NATO’s relevance, but the best path for maintaining peace in Europe is still contested. The expansion of the alliance “has helped stabilize the European continent for more than seven decades,” Eric Edelman and David Kramer argue. Minimizing NATO’s role “would demoralize Ukraine, make it more vulnerable to Putin’s designs, and split the alliance.” NATO is important, but any lasting settlement with Russia must address the broader collapse of the region’s security architecture, Daalder and Goldgeier write. The most pressing objective remains “to prevent the nightmare scenario of great-power war returning to Europe.”
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