KEY TAKEAWAYS
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Leaders from across Europe and North America will gather in July in Washington to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The meeting will be a chance to celebrate NATO’s accomplishments as an alliance as well as the improvements it has made since the start of the Ukraine war. But it should also be a gut-check on the real state of NATO capabilities at a time of renewed geopolitical rivalry and attendant mounting dangers worldwide. A strong NATO is as essential for U.S. national security and international peace today as it was 75 years ago. But we have a long way to go before NATO can live up to its full potential in the turbulent new era that is unfolding.
First: the celebration. We take it for granted that NATO or something like it would exist, but that was far from a foregone conclusion. When NATO was created in 1949, it represented a sea change in U.S. foreign policy. Up to that time, America had tended to generally avoid standing alliances. Thirty years earlier, after World War I, Britain and France tried but failed to convince America to participate in a peacetime alliance. Had Washington taken them up on the invitation, we might have avoided World War II. By forming NATO, we ended the old cycle whereby the United States would respond to European wars in fire-brigade fashion, waiting until they broke out to respond then withdrawing afterwards, only to repeat the pattern when the next war came.
We take it for granted that NATO or something like it would exist, but that was far from a foregone conclusion.
It’s worth considering how different the world might look had NATO never been formed. When the Washington Treaty was signed in 1949, the Soviets were on the march in Europe. They had just seized control of Czechoslovakia and sealed off Berlin. Soviet agents were fomenting unrest in France, Greece and Italy. Europe was economically exhausted and in no condition to resist. It is entirely conceivable that the entire continent up to the English Channel might have fallen under Soviet influence had the United States and the major nations of Western Europe not banded together to create a standing alliance, backed by the economic aid of the Marshall Plan.
The world would also look very different had NATO not expanded into East-Central Europe after the Cold War. At the time, a lot of observers on both sides of the Atlantic wanted NATO dismantled or, at the very least, for it to not expand. Russia would soon be a democracy, the thinking went, and an integrating Europe was capable of fending for itself. Russian leaders nowadays like to portray NATO’s eastern enlargement as an infringement on historic Russian spheres of influence. But most of Central Europe had been an integral part of the Western order for centuries before Stalin grabbed them. Absent NATO’s expansion, it’s likely that today the alliance would be waging a proxy war with Russia on the banks of Poland’s Vistula or Oder rivers rather than Ukraine’s Dnieper.
Fast forward to 2024. NATO’s founders could not have foreseen a world where, in addition to Russia, the West faces a rising China more powerful than the Soviet Union at its zenith, as well as a nuclear-armed North Korea and potentially nuclear-armed Iran — all of which, increasingly, are working together. But the same logic that made NATO necessary in 1949 still makes it necessary in 2024. To be clear, NATO’s charter mandates that it focus militarily on Europe. As in 1949, its job is to defend the Euro-Atlantic area from outside aggression — which means an attack from Russia. By fulfilling that core mission, NATO produces positive externalities far beyond Europe.
The same logic that made NATO necessary in 1949 still makes it necessary in 2024.
From the standpoint of U.S. national security, a strong NATO increases America’s bandwidth for responding to military crises in East Asia or the Middle East without jeopardizing European stability. In the Cold War, we could shift massive numbers of troops from Europe to Asia (in the Korean and Vietnam wars, for example) with the assurance that the build-up of European forces in Europe — West Germany alone had nearly 1.3 million men under arms — would dissuade Soviet opportunism. Today, that would be much harder, both because Europe is far weaker militarily, and China far stronger in every way, than was the case back then. So, in this sense, a strong NATO with Europeans who are shouldering the frontline defense burden is arguably more essential today for overall global stability than it was in the past.
How well are we doing in that goal? On one hand, the Ukraine war has done a lot to wake up European members of NATO to the urgent necessity of self-defense in the current global moment. Since the start of that war, European members of NATO have increased defense spending by a remarkable 27 percent, or nearly $100 billion, collectively. This year alone, European allies are expected to invest a total of around $380 billion, which is more than triple the Russian defense budget. By the time of the July summit, as many as 23 of the 32 members of the alliance will be meeting their commitment to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense (compared to six prior to the war). Taken as a whole, Europe is surpassing that threshold for the first time since the end of the Cold War.
The problem is that we have a long way to go before these numbers translate into capabilities. European defense was in a state of atrophy for a long time. Real progress has been made over the last three years, but not enough. Key munitions have to be replenished, new weapons purchased and brought into service, and new cadres trained — all while sustaining an unbroken flow of supplies to Ukraine. To an even greater extent than in the United States, the European defense-industrial base urgently needs to be brought back to life, and given the resources, incentives and regulatory environment necessary to expand beyond the boutique production volumes required for NATO operations in Afghanistan. All of that takes time.
It's not just about weapons. The Ukraine war showed that a deeper mental shift is needed in how Europeans think about security. After the Cold War, Western societies came to believe that traditional geopolitics had ended. After 9/11, Western militaries became habituated to the doctrines and mindsets needed for counter-insurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both notions have to be discarded and replaced with an acceptance of the fact that old-fashioned geopolitics is back, and that the greatest threat to Western societies comes once again from large, determined, ideologically motivated states that have the capacity to wage industrialized, high-intensity warfare of a kind not seen since the mid-20th century.
Against that backdrop, the upcoming Washington summit will give us a chance to take stock and see how well NATO is evolving to reflect the new realities. Two things in particular bear watching.
One is what NATO commits to doing to help keep Ukraine supplied with weapons. Three years into the war, it is clear it will be prolonged. Putin’s theory of victory seems to be that he can mobilize Russia’s superior numbers to wear down Ukraine’s will to resist while running out the clock on its Western backers. NATO has never faced a frontier proxy war of this kind. If Ukraine falls, the alliance could find itself facing direct Russian military pressure along a much longer frontier than it had to manage in the past.
At the NATO summit in Vilnius last year, allied leaders agreed to language supporting an eventual Ukrainian entry into NATO. It’s possible alliance leaders will invite Ukraine to begin membership negotiations in the North Atlantic Council — NATO’s principal political decision-making body — next month. But as long as the war goes on, NATO is unlikely to support a move toward membership that could involve the alliance in a direct confrontation with Russia. Given this, NATO will have to look for other ways to signal its materiel and political support to Ukraine over a long-time horizon.
Things seem to be moving in the right direction on this front. In June, the United States signed a 10-year security agreement with Ukraine that is similar to the arrangement it maintains with Israel, and members of the G7 agreed to give the country a $50 billion loan, paid for by frozen Russian assets. Expect to see more in this vein at the NATO summit, including new commitments to supply Ukraine with ammunition and restock provisions in Europe. But behind these promises, watch to see if NATO allies are actually taking the steps — like introducing new contracting methods, revising arms export controls, refining manufacturing models, or providing financing for defense start-ups — needed to ramp up defense production on the enormous scale required to support Ukraine long enough to defeat Putin’s theory of victory.
A second thing to watch is what NATO is doing to improve its ability to deliver on its core mission of defense and deterrence. At summits in Madrid and Vilnius, allies committed to maintaining larger forces on a standing basis on NATO’s eastern flank, including four new battle groups, a new rotational model for eastern air defenses, and the maintenance of 300,000 troops at high readiness. But implementation has been uneven, to put it politely. Major Western European allies have struggled to get eastern deployments up to the new division-level requirements. Air defense rotation has yet to materialize. And while allies had no trouble earmarking high-readiness forces, there are serious questions about how these troops would actually be generated or sustained in a crisis.
What that means in practice is that NATO forces in the eastern flank remain essentially a tripwire. One decade after Russia used the technique of creating a fait accompli by grabbing Crimea, NATO’s most exposed eastern members remain vulnerable to exactly that kind of scenario. That means in a crisis scenario we would be in the difficult position of trying to compel Russia to disgorge territory rather than deterring the attack in the first place. That, in turn, makes NATO much more reliant on nuclear weapons for security, and on the United States for conventional defense at a time when the United States has also have to keep an eye on other simmering pots. And it undermines NATO cohesion in a very tangible way, since eastern members of the alliance will correctly perceive that, despite all the rhetoric, NATO remains effectively a two-tier alliance.
The unfortunate reality is that, behind all the announcements and progress of the last three years, NATO today is not where it needs to be.
In both cases, the unfortunate reality is that, behind all the announcements and progress of the last three years, NATO today is not where it needs to be. It’s not where it needs to be in terms of having the physical ability to supply Ukraine for the long haul. And it’s not where it needs to be in terms of credibly deterring and defending against an attack on its own eastern members. None of this is to gainsay NATO’s very real accomplishments to date, or to diminish its political and strategic value to the United States, or to cast shade on the very real progress that has been made since the start of the Ukraine war. But as was true in the Cold War, NATO today has to be judged by its actions and not just its words. So, we should celebrate NATO’s anniversary in July, but we should also hold the alliance to the same very high standards that its members lived by during the Cold War. That’s the best way to ensure that the remarkable alliance our grandparents built will still be around for our grandkids.