It is hard to grant that the strategic vision announced at the end of the NATO summit in Madrid this summer marked a fundamental change in the alliance’s defence outlook.
The Madrid Declaration issued at the end of the summit may address the current challenge presented by the Russia-Ukraine war, but it is also informed by a cumulative legacy of defence policies that stretch back seven decades to the organisation’s establishment in 1949. It reaffirms NATO’s original role as a defensive alliance whose main function is deterrence, even as voices in the West today are arguing that proactive displays of force are needed and that NATO should be developing protocols for using it.
Russia, on the hand, claims that NATO has long since strayed from its original purpose as a defensive alliance. In December, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov asserted that, contrary to its claims, NATO is an aggressive alliance bent on expansion and that its policy in Asia confirms this.
“Not if, but when – and it will happen soon – NATO penetrates the Asia-Pacific region, I think that they will claim once again that a defence policy remains in effect and NATO is a defensive alliance, it’s just that their line of defence will lie in the South China Sea,” he said.
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in the early 1990s, NATO no longer had a real enemy and seemed to have lost the reason for its existence. It could have continued as a collective security organisation for the Euro-Atlantic region, but instead it expanded eastwards to take on new members that had once been under the Warsaw Pact umbrella.
Poland’s accession was of symbolic significance as it had once been the capital of the opposing pact. NATO then confirmed its “open door” policy and encouraged other Eastern European nations to join it.
NATO’s eastwards crawl was not the only policy shift at the time. As much of the literature and subsequent developments indicate, NATO was eager to carve out a new role for itself in the framework of the unipolar world order. It found one, starting in the Balkans in the 1990s and then, after the turn of the millennium, moving into Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.
NATO’s involvement in these overseas conflicts has remained controversial up to the eve of the Russia-Ukraine war. It was NATO’s “Operation Unified Protector” that secured the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime in Libya in 2011, even though its remit under the UN Security Council resolutions was only to protect civilians. Over the course of some 30,000 strikes on the country, it destroyed more than Libya’s military and security assets; it reduced much of the country’s infrastructure, including critical water installations, to rubble.
Until this year at least, there were three main trends of opinion on the question of NATO’s geographical jurisdiction. One held that NATO had deviated from its founding principles and exceeded its original remit in the Euro-Atlantic region, which was to defend members of the alliance in accordance with Article 5 of its Charter that says that an attack against one member is regarded as an attack against all.
Many have remarked on the organisation’s lack of consistency on this point. Where was this article when Iraq, under former president Saddam Hussein, threatened strikes against the Incirlik Air Base in Anatolia, even though Turkey, a NATO member, was the victim of aggression? In like manner, the downing of the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie in 1988 was a terrorist act against a NATO member and should have presumably triggered Article 5, but again NATO did not act.
On the other hand, NATO has got involved in theatres that present no threat to NATO members.
Germany and France have both been critical of NATO’s failure to abide by its founding principles. France has taken issue on the matter of NATO’s jurisdiction, arguing that NATO should not use force outside the original area of its remit without a UN mandate. Washington holds that NATO has the right and the independent mechanisms to exercise the mandate to carry out operations anywhere in the world.
This second viewpoint, espoused by the US, maintains that NATO has a global role to play. Former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright was the first to expound this in 2003, claiming that the alliance was not merely concerned with the immediate defence of its allies, but with defending their “interests” as well.
The context for this pivotal change in NATO policy was the 11 September attacks on New York and Washington and the US decision to focus its own as well as NATO’s efforts on the war against terrorism, its justification for occupying Iraq and Afghanistan.
The third view tries to strike a balance between the first two. It combines the idea of a major role for the alliance as a mutual defence organisation focused on the Euro-Atlantic region and of its having a larger global function in the interest of the preservation of international peace and security.
Proponents of this view argue that as long as NATO is equipped with the best modern armies and the most effective military assets in the world, it can be of great service in peacekeeping and peace enforcement. This view is an idealistic one, however, and it has never gained traction. The reality is that NATO forces are active combatants in conflict zones around the world, and, in other words, that Albright’s vision has prevailed.
The 2022 Madrid Declaration confirms that this vision has repeatedly been reaffirmed and updated and that it remains the essence of NATO policy. Moreover, it is hard to find significant differences between this policy and US foreign policy. An example is NATO’s technological development and its comprehensive modernisation policy to bolster the West’s “technological edge,” which is essentially an extension of the plans Washington has adopted over last decade after it woke up to the technological edge that China has acquired.
Strengthening “resilience” against potential shocks to security systems is another key concept for both NATO and US strategists. Due to various factors that are not necessarily military in nature, NATO member governments have been fostering closer civilian-military cooperation in areas ranging from cybersecurity to disease control and environmental and climatic disaster response. US think tanks began to theorise in this direction in the 1990s, and the recent Covid-19 pandemic reinforced the trend.
But policy is not the only overlap between NATO and the US. Structurally, the alliance has also undergone major changes, leading to a shift from NATO’s historic command headquarters in Belgium towards the NATO Allied Command in Norfolk, Virginia, in the US. It would be more accurate today to talk of a dual command structure for the organisation, with one branch in Europe and another in the US, but with a single real headquarters in Washington.
With the war in Ukraine, it appears that the question of NATO’s geographical jurisdiction has now come full circle. After expanding beyond its natural scope, the organisation now faces a threat to its frontier in Eastern Europe that Western sources claim has retroactively justified NATO’s eastwards expansion.
Moscow blames NATO for provoking the war in Ukraine through an expansionist policy designed to surround and blockade it. Although NATO denies any such intentions, insisting that it “poses no threat to any country” and that its invitation to Ukraine to join it does not justify the Russian invasion of that country, it is important to stress a number of points.
NATO’s open-door policy encouraged countries in the Russian orbit, or in what Russia regards as its vital sphere, to join NATO. Then, once they had joined, these countries agreed to host military bases and missile facilities that Russia saw as directed against it. The Kremlin clearly perceives the forward positioning of components of NATO’s missile defence shield in Poland and Romania as a threat to Russian national security, especially now that the bases are equipped with the Aegis Ashore system which can be modified to shoot down Tomahawk long-range cruise missiles.
Moscow feared that the same thing would occur in Ukraine, bringing NATO missile systems right up to Russia’s borders. Fuelling Moscow’s concerns, NATO pushed to accelerate the process of Ukraine’s accession to the organisation even before Kyiv officially applied for it. Ukraine joined the North Atlantic Cooperation Council in 1991 and NATO’s Partnership for Peace in 1994. In 1997, the NATO-Ukraine Commission (NUC) was formed to further cooperation in the framework of the Distinctive Partnership with NATO.
Subsequently, the NUC was tasked with overseeing Ukraine’s “Euro-Atlantic integration,” which included missions to promote security and military structural reforms in Ukraine to bring them into line with NATO structures. In 2017, the Ukrainian parliament passed legislation reinstating membership in NATO as a strategic foreign and security policy objective, and in 2019 it introduced a corresponding amendment to the Ukrainian Constitution.
The open door to Ukraine quickly then evolved into open military support. While NATO officially back-peddled on Ukrainian accession when Kyiv pressed for it, it compensated for this by turning Ukraine into the largest recipient of military aid in the world as, in the opinion of some experts, it transformed Ukraine into an arena for the power struggle between NATO and Russia.
When the war in Ukraine broke out earlier this year, some said that it was designed as a battle of mutual attrition. Russia’s strategic aim is to demilitarise Ukraine, neutralise it as potential gain for NATO, and end all Ukrainian connections with the alliance, returning Ukraine back to its status upon independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
NATO’s aim is to defeat Russia in Ukraine and reduce it to the nadir it experienced in 1991.
Meanwhile, the war has reinvigorated an alliance that former US president Donald Trump once described as moribund. The European partners in the organisation have increased their dues to more than 2.5 per cent of their GDP while simultaneously increasing their own defence budgets and setting in motion ambitious military development programmes. Germany alone has earmarked an unprecedented $100 billion towards this end.
The greatest concern now is that the proxy war in Ukraine will spiral out of control. It is certainly clear that Ukraine is no exception to the rule that it is easy to start a war but difficult to end one and equally hard to predict its course. Many analysts fear the worst, with some foreseeing a third world war, and others believing we are already in one. Both sides continue to adhere to the principle that recourse to nuclear arms would be solely for deterrence, but neither side has spelled out what precisely this would mean for them.
Some observers foresee a point where attrition and war fatigue combined with the realisation that there can be no winner or loser in this conflict may induce the belligerents to go to the negotiating table prepared to make some serious concessions. That point remains distant, however. Both sides are still determined to maximise their gains and strengthen their hands preparatory to any negotiating stage.
They are also continuing to press maximalist and impossible conditions. Russia seeks international recognition for its areas of influence in Ukraine east of the Dnipro River, namely the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts, while Kyiv insists that Russia withdraw from all Ukrainian territory, including Crimea.
The battle of sanctions and counter-sanctions also continues, with the West still bent on choking Russia economically while European countries pay heavily for this in the form of rising energy prices due to Russia’s use of oil and gas as leverage. The efficacy of these energy-related gambits will become clearer this winter, which may also bring major developments on the ground in Ukraine.
*A version of this article appears in print in the 22 December, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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