The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is the most successful military alliance in modern history. For forty years NATO protected Western Europe from the hostile might of the Soviet Union until that ideologically-driven empire collapsed in 1990.
Victory in the Cold War, however, would be the beginning of the end for NATO, an alliance that outlived its time. It is today an expanded membership group of disparate nation states utterly unable to agree on its current purposes—as the Ukraine standoff shows.
The 72-year-old alliance has become the victim of its own success and the simple passage of time. In its heyday, the glue that held NATO together was a very realistic fear of Soviet Russia and its immense military establishment. Now most members of NATO do not feel threatened by today’s post-communist Russia—and worse, feel little inclination to militarily support the handful of “front line” states such as Poland andthe three Baltic nations) who do feel threatened.
Polls in recent years clearly confirm this new reality. In 2015 a Pew Family Foundation poll found that among NATO member nations, only in the United States and Canada did a majority support military force to aid a NATO member that was invaded.
Earlier this year the European Council on Foreign Relations polled 60,000 people in its eleven member states and found that by margins well over 2 to 1, public opinion believed that their countries should remain neutral in conflicts between the U.S. and Russia or China.
These sentiments flatly contradict the core tenet of the NATO Treaty, Article 5, which obligates all members to militarily support a member that is under attack. If European NATO members now prefer to remain neutral in any Russian-American conflict what is the point of the alliance from the United States perspective?
Add to this the fact that almost all European NATO members have long been defaulting on the financial obligations required by the treaty, and American skepticism about NATO in recent years is entirely understandable.
The seeds of NATO’s decline were sown at the very moment of the alliance’s greatest triumph, and the context was the issue of NATO expansion into the former Soviet satellites.
The not unreasonable view of Mikhail Gorbachev and later Boris Yeltsin was that with the Cold War over, the Soviet-sponsored Warsaw Pact dissolved, and an economically prostrate Russia struggling to become a democracy, there was no justification for expanding a Western military alliance hundreds of miles closer to the Russian border.
Initially, President Bush and President Clinton seemed to agree. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker assured Gorbachev in February 1990 that NATO wouldn’t move “one inch to the East.”
In October 1993 Clinton’s Secretary of State, Warren Christopher assured Russian President Boris Yeltsin that there would be no NATO expansion, but instead a new organization called “Partners for Peace” that would include all of the former satellite states and Russia as well.
Yeltsin enthusiastically embraced this concept. However, his fury knew no bounds a year later when Clinton reversed course and expanded NATO to include the satellites but excluded Russia. Yeltsin insisted that what had been agreed was “Partners for ALL, not NATO for some.”
He spoke of betrayal, the purposeful humiliation of a weakened Russia. From the sidelines Gorbachev lamented the rejection of his concept of a “Common European Home.”
This toxic issue has haunted relations between Russia and the West ever since, and became particularly dangerous when President George W. Bush said in April 2008 that he “strongly supported” NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine and wouldn’t accept any Russian attempt to veto this.
Bush’s proposal however was strongly rebuffed by six NATO members, led by Germany’s Angela Merkel, who called such NATO expansion “needlessly provocative.” An outraged Vladimir Putin declared that NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine was a direct threat to Russia’s national security and that he accordingly viewed it as a “red line” that must not be crossed.
Putin further countered by becoming involved in the savage ethnic politics of Georgia by supporting dissident separatist groups in Abkhazia and South Ossetia and ultimately recognizing them as independent republics backed economically and militarily by Russia.
In 2014 when Western-backed mass protests led to the overthrow of a pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Putin acted swiftly to intervene militarily in those areas of Eastern Ukraine whose inhabitants were largely Russian ethnically (Crimea 65%) or Russian speaking (Donbas 70%).
So now as 2022 dawns, how ironic that with all its internal problems NATO should be pursuing high-risk policies on behalf of countries that are not NATO members; are not allies; and would assuredly bring far more burdens to the alliance than assets. Exhibit A: the current saber-rattling on both sides regarding Ukraine.
As for the United States, which has seriously damaged itself through long wars in distant places, why would we be risking more of the same in places so little connected to our true national interests?
Clearly it is time for NATO to re-examine the reasons for its existence so far beyond its prime.
William Moloney, Ph.D., is a Fellow in Conservative Thought at Colorado Christian University’s Centennial institute who studied at Oxford and the University of London and received his doctorate from Harvard University. He is a former Colorado Commissioner of Education.