What's Wrong with NATO and How to Fix it. Mark Webber

the face of multiple challenges. But it has also, as a result, taken on too much. As one official suggested in the margins of the 2014 summit, NATO ‘must be prepared for every challenge the world throws at us’; it must ‘multi-task, while remaining proficient at every task’.⁸⁷ The intervening years have demonstrated the folly of such ambition. NATO’s position in Afghanistan has gone from bad to worse, its southern strategy has proven irrelevant to the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, and enlargement has foundered over questions of what to do about Georgia and Ukraine. The Alliance has become more impotent and more divided as its range has been extended. On some issues, it might have proven its worth (the military response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea could only have been effected by NATO), but the high tide of allied efficacy has seemingly been reached. If NATO is to avoid a future forever over-promising and underdelivering, it needs to take a hard look at its strengths and weaknesses, and to discriminate between the impossible and the achievable. That is the job of task discretion, a theme we turn to in Chapter 5.

Notes

      1 1. ‘North Atlantic Council, Declaration on Atlantic Relations’, 19 June 1974, paras 3–4, http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_26901.htm.

      2 2. Timothy Andrew Sayle, Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2019), pp. 33, 35–6, 47, 50–5, 64.

      3 3. ‘Operations and Missions: Past and Present’, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_52060.htm.

      4 4. NATO, ‘The Alliance’s New Strategic Concept’, November 1991, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_23847.htm?.

      5 5. NATO, ‘London Declaration Issued by the Heads of State and Government Participating in the Meeting of the North Atlantic Council’, 4 December 2019, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_171584.htm.

      6 6. Joanna Spear, ‘Organizational Survival: NATO’s Pragmatic Functionalism’, in Ian Shapiro and Adam Tooze (eds), Charter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018), p. 283.

      7 7. NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, address to the United States Congress, 3 April 2019, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_165210.htm.

      8 8. Anthony King, ‘Overload: Problems of Governing in the 1970s’, Political Studies, 23(2–3), 1975, pp. 162–74.

      9 9. Michael E. Brown, ‘Minimalist NATO: A Wise Alliance Knows When to Retrench’, Foreign Affairs, 78(3), 1999, p. 210.

      10 10. Beatrice Heuser, oral evidence to the House of Commons Defence Committee, Hearings on ‘The Future of NATO’, Question 83, 12 June 2002, https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200102/cmselect/cmdfence/914/2061207.htm.

      11 11. House of Commons Defence Committee, The Future of NATO and European Defence (Ninth Report of Session 2007–8) (London: The Stationery Office, 2008), p. 17.

      12 12. ‘Global NATO: Overdue or Overstretch?’, speech at the SDA conference, Brussels, 6 November 2006, https://www.nato.int/docu/speech/2006/s061106a.htm.

      13 13. Reynell Andreychuk (rapporteur), ‘Alliance Cohesion’, NATO Parliamentary Assembly, Political Committee, November 2010, p. 5, https://www.nato-pa.int/document/2010-219-pc-10-e-bis-alliance-cohesion-andreychuk-report.

      14 14. Jamie Shea, ‘NATO at 70: An Opportunity to Recalibrate’, NATO Review, April 2019, https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2019/04/05/nato-at-70-an-opportunity-to-recalibrate/index.html.

      15 15. Sacha Garben, ‘Competence Creep Revisited’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 57(2), 2019, pp. 205–22.

      16 16. Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2004).

      17 17. James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, ‘Institutional Perspectives on Political Institutions’, in Michael Hill (ed.), The Policy Process: A Reader (second edition, New York and London: Routledge, 2017), p. 150.

      18 18. Ashok Swain, Understanding Emerging Security Challenges: Threats and Opportunities (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 2.

      19 19. Michael J. Williams, NATO, Security and Risk Management: From Kosovo to Kandahar (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009).

      20 20. James Goldgeier, ‘NATO’s Charter: Adaptable but Limited’, in Shapiro and Tooze (eds.), Charter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, pp. 288–301.

      21 21. ‘The NATO Command Structure’ (February 2018), https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/pdf_2018_02/1802-Factsheet-NATO-Command-Structure_en.pdf.

      22 22. Christian Tuschhoff, ‘The Impact of NATO’s Defence Planning and Force Generation on Member States’, in Sebastian Mayer (ed.), NATO’s Post-Cold War Politics: The Changing Provision of Security (Houndmills, Basingstoke, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 207.

      23 23. On this sort of problem see Michael D. Cohen, James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, ‘A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 17(1), 1972, pp. 1–25.

      24 24. A phrase borrowed from Asle Toje, ‘The First Casualty in the War against Terror: The Fall of NATO and Europe’s Reluctant Coming of Age’, European Security, 12(2), 2003, p. 64.

      25 25. Cited in Eckhard Lübkemeier, ‘NATO’s Identity Crisis’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 46(8), 1990, pp. 30–3.

      26 26. Cited in Kristina Spohr, Post Wall, Post Square: How Bush, Gorbachev, Kohl, and Deng Shaped the World after 1989 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019), p. 286.

      27 27. Adrian G.V. Hyde-Price, European Security beyond the Cold War: Four Scenarios for the Year 2010 (London etc.: The Royal Institute of International Affairs and SAGE Publications, 1991), p. 201.

      28 28. Cited in Jennifer Medcalf, Going Global or Going Nowhere? NATO’s Role in Contemporary International Security (Oxford etc.: Peter Lang, 2008), p. 67.

      29 29. Zbigniew Brzezinski, ‘NATO – Expand or Die?’, New York Times, 28 December 1994, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/28/opinion/nato-expand-or-die.html.

      30 30. Robert E. Hunter, ‘Maximizing NATO: A Relevant Alliance Knows How to Reach’, Foreign Affairs, 78(3), 1999, pp. 190–1.

      31 31. Lord George Robertson, ‘Reflections on 9/11’, NATO YouTube channel, 7 September 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkaBVwnod7g.

      32 32. Andrew Cottey, ‘NATO: Globalization or Redundancy?’, Contemporary Security Policy, 25(3), 2004, p. 394.

      33 33. ‘Forward’, Prague Summit 2002: Selected Speeches and Documents (Brussels: NATO Public Diplomacy Division, 2003), p. 4.

      34 34. Anne Deighton, ‘The Eleventh of September and Beyond: NATO’, Political Quarterly,