International Affairs Journal at UC Davis - NATO’S Staying Power in a Changing Global Security Environment

Home

IAJ International Update

August 2006

NATO’S Staying Power in a Changing Global Security Environment

Written by Jeanne Marie Berger

Tuesday, 15 August 2006

Europe and the United States face a strategic security environment unlike any they experienced during the Cold War. In 1949, North America and Western Europe established a military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, to defend itself with both conventional and nuclear weapons against the Soviet threat. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO’s mandate was forced to change and adapt to a completely different security environment: civil wars, state-building efforts, and the global war on terrorism. Despite NATO’s success in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the importance of its role in current conflicts, why is its relevance and future existence as a security institution being questioned? Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has proven itself to not only be a relevant institution, but a critical asset to both the security of the United States and the European nations.

NATO’s Adaptability

Once a threat to a military alliance has disappeared, the alliance usually dissolves, but due to NATO’s infrastructure, organization, and its reliable practices and procedures, it has been able to adapt to a mandate that matches the post-Cold War security situation. NATO has been able to implement military policies that move beyond defense and deterrence. Its integrated military command, logistics, command-control-communication capabilities and its decision-making procedures have allowed it to effectively respond to conflict situations as close as the Balkans and as far away as Afghanistan (Wallander, 2000). Although NATO was initially unprepared to send its combined joint tasks forces to Bosnia, due to its integrated military command structure, it was able to mobilize its task forces to perform peace enforcement and peacekeeping missions by 1995 (Wallander, 2000).

Past and Current NATO Missions

Besides the war in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990’s, NATO has been able to conduct operations outside of the European theater which have included:

The deployment of 18,000 troops to Afghanistan The training of 1,500 Iraqi military officials and the delivery of military equipment to Iraqi security forces (since July 2004)
The training and airlifting of 5,000 African Union troops in Darfur (July 2005 to October 2005)
The deployment of 1,000 NATO Reaction Force troops and 3500 tons of supplies to Kashmir (after its 2005 earthquake)
The donation of construction supplies to Southeast Asia after the 2004 tsunami and the United States Gulf Coast after the Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (Beehner, 2006)

As the United States military continues to fight a two front war in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as address prospective problems from Iran’s unwillingness to stop its uranium enrichment program and North Korea’s long-range ballistic missile testing, the U.S. will become increasingly dependent on its NATO partners. The United States’ resources and manpower are being stretched thin as it continues to engage in these wars; hence, it is likely that NATO will take on an ever-increasing global security role. Already, NATO had its International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) redeployed to southern Afghanistan in order to hunt for Taliban insurgents and to alleviate some of the burden of U.S. troops. This allows American troops, with their highly-skilled combat expertise, to maintain a more flexible posture as they engage in operations in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Future of NATO in a New Strategic Environment

It is likely that the United States will continue to rely upon its NATO partners for continued support. As mentioned earlier in the article, the United States is not only engaged in two wars and responding to potential nuclear threats from Iran and North Korea, but it is also engaged in a war on terror that requires immediate nonproliferation efforts to secure nuclear warhead and nuclear fissile stockpiles in the former Soviet Union. NATO countries are crucial to many of these efforts.

The Cold War threat from the USSR has been replaced by a much more global and dispersed threat from several state and non-state actors. This will demand the enlargement of NATO and NATO’s active participation in resolving these conflicts and diffusing these threats. It will also require NATO’s European members to share in the burden of not only troops but financial resources. Currently, only six of the United States’ 25 NATO allies contribute more than two percent of their GDP on defense (Holbrooke et al, 2006). Spending from the European members will have to increase in order for NATO to remain an effective institution and for NATO troops to be protected with the proper equipment. European governments must be aware that security issues from other regions of the world have a direct effect upon their national security which was manifested in the 3/11 Madrid bombings and the 7/7 London bombings. NATO members do not have the luxury to rely upon the United States to contribute the vast majority of the funds and manpower (as it did in Kosovo when the United States contributed over 80 percent of the resources). NATO is currently the European Union’s only source of hard military power. The European states should financially reinforce what is the European Union’s most reliable and enduring security institution to not only support its security needs but to continue to assist in the security needs of an interdependent international community.

References:

1) Beehner, Lionel, July, 27, 2006, “NATO Looks to Expand Mission and Membership”, Council on Foreign Relations, http://www.cfr.org/publications/11159/nato_looks-To_expand_mission-and-membership.html

2) Holbrooke, Richard and Asmus, Ronald D., March 14, 2006, “Next Step for NATO”, Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/13/AR2006031301487.html

3) Wallander, Celeste, A., (Autumn, 2000), “Institutional Assets and Adaptability: NATO after the Cold War”, International Organization, Vol. 54, No. 4, pp. 705-735