has often been claimed, puts the very survival of the Alliance at stake.
This ‘self-preservation challenge’24 was evident even in NATO’s finest hour, at the end of the Cold War. With the Alliance having completed its mission of facing down a potential Soviet aggressor, was it time, the journalist (and later Clinton administration official) Strobe Talbott asked, to think about NATO’s retirement?25 Such views were not confined to journalists. West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher indicated in early 1990 a preference for the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) as a pan-European solution to Europe’s post-Cold War security relations. French President François Mitterrand argued similarly in favour of a ‘European Confederation’. Neither proposal had much time for NATO. Such schemes proved unacceptable, however, to the US and many of the other allies (Canada and the UK in particular), as well as to the West German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, all of whom lobbied forcefully in NATO’s favour. American advocacy of NATO would win the day. President George H.W. Bush argued that NATO was the most effective vehicle for ensuring American’s continued presence in Europe, for containing a reunified Germany and for projecting ‘a renewed Western vision for the future of Europe’.26 The EU, the CSCE and the Western European Union, Bush made clear, were partners of but not substitutes for the Alliance. That position, encapsulated in NATO’s historic London and Rome Declarations (issued in July 1990 and November 1991, respectively), effectively positioned the Alliance as Europe’s principal security institution. But as one observer noted at the time, NATO would not now be able to duck a whole range of new security issues arising from instability in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.27
And so, during the 1990s, arguments on NATO’s relevance continued. Republican Senator Richard Lugar warned in 1993 that the Alliance needed to go ‘out-of-area’ or it would go ‘out-of-business’.28 Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor in the Carter administration, suggested similarly that if NATO did not enlarge it would die.29 By the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration had fixed upon a firm position to beef up the Alliance – hence the moves toward enlargement, new partnerships and conflict management in the Balkans. The specifics of each policy were debated long and hard, but they were conjoined by a common logic. As noted by Robert Hunter, the US Ambassador to NATO throughout much of the period, the Alliance needed to ‘justify itself’, show that it was ‘strong, relevant and able to act’ after the Cold War.30
The debate on NATO entered an entirely new phase following the 9/11 attacks on the US. In response to this unprecedented act of terrorism, the Alliance activated for the first, and still only, time Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. Secretary General George Robertson would later comment that this was a transformative moment for the Alliance.31 But many commentators at the time were not so convinced. NATO played only a marginal military role in the initial US response to 9/11 (it was not involved in the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001), ended up deeply divided over Iraq in 2002/3 and appeared ill suited to tackling a security agenda of terrorism and counter-proliferation whose primary focus was outside of Europe.32 Largely under American influence, NATO’s ‘historic’ Prague summit of November 2002, which concentrated on this new agenda, was billed as having ‘fundamentally transformed the Atlantic Alliance’.33 But even a positive spin on NATO’s position in the post-9/11 environment saw it as facing daunting existential challenges, requiring a further reinvention or reimagining.34
The most marked expression of that shift was NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan. Precisely because the mission there was so demanding, it soon emerged as yet another test of relevance – a test that much more significant because the NATO-led ISAF was where the Alliance meshed with Washington’s desire to give it a ‘global’ outlook. For sure, that vision was not equally shared. The UK, the Danes and the Dutch enthusiastically supported the ISAF mandate. NATO’s new entrants in Eastern Europe, however, wanted to keep the focus on Russia. And the Mediterranean allies – France, Italy and Spain – were sceptical of a mission that was so obviously geared to American rather than European interests. Yet whatever their differences, the allies settled on ISAF as NATO’s principal concern. And having made that commitment, so, according to US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, ‘the credibility of NATO, and indeed the viability of the Euro-Atlantic security project itself’, came to depend on how well that mission performed.35
NATO’s priorities shifted decisively again in 2014. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and incursion into eastern Ukraine caught the Alliance on the hop. With NATO having dedicated itself to expeditionary missions after 9/11, the Russian action demonstrated that a more pressing danger was situated much closer to Europe. What had happened in Crimea, a report of the UK parliament’s Defence Committee suggested, presaged possible action against ‘a NATO country’. ‘[T]he future existence of NATO’, it concluded, meant the Alliance had to be ready to act ‘against common threats’ and to hold ‘a collective view of Russian actions’.36 A narrative of Russian threat was soon matched by concrete actions (see Chapter 4) – what the NATO Secretary General would describe in October 2015 as ‘the biggest reinforcement of collective defence since the end of the Cold War’.37
But no sooner had NATO elevated Russia to priority status than other issues intervened. Converging in what would be dubbed NATO’s ‘southern’ agenda, these included civil war and violence in Iraq, Syria and Libya, the rise of ISIS and the Mediterranean migration crisis of 2015. NATO’s response was the concept of ‘Projecting Stability’, formally adopted at the Warsaw summit in July 2016. Coupled with deterrence and defence, a new ‘conceptual operating framework’ emerged for NATO – a ‘360 degree’ approach that responded to both the concerns of the Alliance’s eastern members (whose priority was Russia) and those of countries such as Italy, France, Spain, Turkey and Greece who cared much more about instability nearer to home.38 But what of the US? The election in 2016 of Donald Trump meant NATO governments saw the need to align themselves with Washington’s priorities – counter-terrorism and burden-sharing, most notably, and, as evident from the 2019 NATO Leaders’ Meeting, China. Further, and to counter Trump’s NATO scepticism, a more general sense of ambition was accorded the Alliance. Keynote NATO declarations of the early Trump period – much like those of the 1990s and 2000s – were thus replete with claims to transformation and keeping NATO relevant for the future.39
America’s Foreign Policy Priorities
NATO, as an inter-governmental organization, enjoys functional flexibility by virtue of its institutional features. But the allies determine in which direction it moves. For reasons we consider in Chapter 2, the US stands head and shoulders above the others. NATO has consequently mirrored American priorities more often than not. And that is relevant here because US foreign policy has historically been expansive, indeed global, in scope.
That impulse was especially evident in the 1990s. President George H.W. Bush had already imagined a reconfiguration of global politics – a US-led ‘new world order’ – as the Cold War came to an end and the US assembled a military coalition in early 1991 to reverse Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Bill Clinton, upon assuming office in 1993, was initially hesitant to take on the mantle of global leadership, but by its end his was an administration characterized by ‘global hyperactivity’, premised on a claim that the US was the world’s ‘indispensable nation’ committed to global democratic enlargement, the spread of free trade and, where necessary, military intervention to promote regional order.40
Bush and Clinton are generally remembered as multilateralists, pursuing international cooperation for noble purposes. Yet both were clear that in foreign policy an American interest had to be served and that international organizations should be subordinate to that purpose. Such a proprietorial attitude was informed by a view that the Canadian and European allies were unwilling and unable to lead. Clinton’s reported views on
