In trying to ferret out “the Meaning of Article 5”, at the heart of NATO’s commitment to mutual defense between allies, one encounters, very early on, ambiguity and self-doubt on all sides
It should be obvious that a 75-year-old treaty cannot be expected to keep up with the march of time without clarification of actual commitments and updates accounting for changed circumstances
No revision has been forthcoming – for good reason
Foundational for the Alliance acting defensively against the Soviet Union and Stalin’s encroachment in Central Europe, reconciliation of American military dominance with sovereignty of European allies seemed self-evident in 1949
However, while outsourcing territorial defense, which defines sovereign states, NATO's European allies might have assumed that the common resolve would evolve over time
Actually, neither the European allies, nor the U.S. have managed to give a shared meaning to 'partnership commitment' and renewed content to “security” in the post-Cold War era
If the Alliance has held out for so long, it may have been as a matter of ‘convenience’
And convenience is wearing thin....
America's distraction with global geopolitical challenges puts the onus on the European allies to drive policy innovation if NATO is to survive as a meaningful defense alliance of democracies
Costs will be high, ingrained political postures will need to be upended and policy differences between partners bridged - or else...
In many ways, the war in Ukraine heralds a transition bringing collective responsibilities of the European allies to the forefront as the US retreats
A tall order for the countries in the lead by virtue of economic dominance and military heft - Germany, France, Poland and Great-Britain
From the American perspective, military dominance of Continental Europe carried significant benefits for the US global outreach, while dealing American diplomacy a strong hand in negotiations with the USSR
For the Europeans, stability while rebuilding the economies after the WWII cataclysm was highly beneficial as well
This is how the allies came to rely on assumptions and expectations which diverged more and more as time went by and gaping misunderstandings were papered over and never truly bridged
They festered nonetheless
In the early 1960’s, the U.S. Administration under President Kennedy sought to update the doctrine of military engagement, with gradual responses to potential Soviet provocation
Military flexibility in the face of a range of possible aggressive actions, as the fast-advancing nuclear technology allowed, went hand in hand with America’s global interest in defining a framework for détente with the Soviet Union
Such developments were recognized for what they were by the European allies, much to their dismay – a shift away from a supposed all-weather security guarantee by the U.S.
Deterrence, made in America
All through the 1960’s and beyond, NATO attempted to refine military engagement to respond to European desire for ‘nuclear sharing’
The terms of engagement of nuclear weapons had gained urgency in Europe for good reason
The Soviet Union’ approached nuclear parity, detonating a powerful hydrogen bomb in October 1961 after a decade of testing, after the 1957 launch of Sputnik and the Soviets’ development of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), also in 1957
The U.S. was bound to put ‘deterrence’ in a novel light considering the potential vulnerability of the American territory itself
In its efforts to ensure the credibility of NATO’s security guarantees, the U.S. was actually pursuing two distinct goals – one of formal reassurance of Article 5 in the light of Soviet build-up and another novel one of embrace of all Western nuclear arsenals under NATO
Such an ambitious agenda was at best awkward and, to America’s allies, would soon appear high-handed, by minimizing the British nuclear weapon tests (from 1952) and the French pursuit of an independent nuclear capability (from 1960)
To further endanger the prospects of American initiatives, the politics of European economic integration, vying for global influence, were seemingly ignored entirely
Under such shaky premises, American initiatives got off to a poor start…and never recovered
Credibility in the nuclear age
Endorsed in 1961 by President Kennedy, the American proposal for a ‘Multilateral Force’ (MLF) intended to bridge the differences between the allies, aimed at a fleet of ballistic missile submarines and warships, each crewed by international NATO personnel, and armed with multiple nuclear-armed Polaris ballistic missiles
Linking the goals the U.S. negotiators had set, the Nassau treaty of December 1962 between the US and Great Britain may qualify as blueprint of American expectations, bringing existing (British) nuclear assets under a NATO Nuclear Force, a frontrunner of the MLF
At that early stage, it was unclear whether the MLF would involve genuine devolution of control over the use of nuclear weapons, with the US relinquishing control – in fact a most unlikely proposition
What was exactly expected to be achieved as the NATO secretary general actively promoted the MLF, except to isolate France which was strongly committed to its independent nuclear capabilities (but still part of the Alliance’s Military Command Structure at the time) is unclear
France withdrew from military command in 1966 and by then, American attention was focused on Vietnam, where 385 000 men were already engaged…
The MLF ended with a whimper…
The Dutch, with their usual frankness, wrote the obituary – the Multilateral Force was primarily political in nature, rather than military, isolating France and tying Britain to the continent on American terms without clear merits regarding control of nuclear engagement
There is no reason to doubt the intent of three Administrations, considered originally under President Eisenhower, pursued by Kennedy and put to rest by Johnson – but if the necessity to upgrade the relationship between the Allies in a NATO setting was undisputable, innovative policy was not very high on the agenda
Update of the shared security commitment was put to rest, never to be consider again, and one can only conjecture what innovative political action to upend the bureaucratic strictures of NATO would have looked like
How not to wage war
As the sole war, led by NATO on European soil, the air intervention in Serbia (March 1999 – June 1999), which brought an end to the Kosovo war, sets the tone
Cohesiveness of NATO assumes some agreement on the nature of the common defense
Initially straightforward in the Treaty, American control and command evolved in this political framework of military action where consensus to address potential aggressions is hard
A strategic doctrine - drawn up in the absence of real-life experience - must prioritize potential risks and define how to deal with them to stay relevant
Conversely, if there is no doctrine, or if the doctrine has not kept up with technological and political stakes, challenges to the Alliance will end up being addressed pragmatically, on a case-by-case basis, as events set the agenda
Responses, constrained in the broader pollical context, will become unpredictable, damaging NATO’s ultimate goal, deterrence
The Memoir of General Wesley Clark, NATO’s Supreme Commander at the time, “Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Combat”, published in 2001, effectively warns about combat effectiveness in a multilateral setting
Caught up between conflicting political, diplomatic, military and legal pressures, in a 19-member coalition operating by consensus, and profoundly ambivalent about combat over Kosovo, Clark attests that "the idea of decisive force never made it into NATO thinking"
Arguably, for want of strategic doctrine, bureaucracy filled the void, reducing warfare to a sequence of specific 'issues' monitored by self-serving processes
Enter the lawyers....
As told by Clark, NATO lawyers constrained even the preparation of options for decisive combat. Clark could not effectively plan for the use of Apaches in Kosovo "because the Army lawyers were interpreting new federal law to mean that until Congress was notified of the impending deployment, we were not permitted to spend any funds preparing for it."
Irrelevant strategy doctrines - stuck in a rut
One of the most noticeable traits of NATO has been the Allies inclination to hold on to time-tested interpretations (and prejudices), well past their sell-by date
This is all the more singular as change has racked the world in NATO’s 75 years and the stream of revolutionary events has not let up since the end of the Cold War
During the MLF debate, American obsession with analytic accuracy in its quest for a cohesive nuclear front left no room for the political frame of reference of its European allies – and since the late 50’s, economic convergence was its powerful driver of reconciliation
Missing entirely how French foreign policy and defense would move on separate tracks, the US State Department mistook French General de Gaulle’s nuclear ‘force de frappe’ (the core of the country’s defense strategy) for inimical
De Gaulle’s support during the Cuban crisis (1962), given flatly before even looking at the photographic evidence of Soviet missile installation, brought by Kennedy’s special emissary Dean Acheson, was to prove the contrary
As could have been predicted, the American effort to ram through military and economic alignments on the back of the British ‘special relationship’ would fail, and the US-UK 1961 Nassau treaty bore sour fruits with the French veto to British joining the fledging European Common Market (in 1963)
Deepening misunderstanding ran wild nonetheless and a Summary Record of NSC Executive Committee on January 25, 1963, presided by Kennedy, 3 days after the signature in Paris of the Treaty between France and Germany (January 22), could go down in the annals as a symbol of mistaken strategic analysis
Quoting President Kennedy and the minutes of the meeting
“We should look now at the contingency of de Gaulle trying to run us out of Europe by means of a deal with the Russians.”
"The President [Kennedy] thought we ought to think now about how we can protect ourselves against actions which de Gaulle might take against us. He said that if de Gaulle did make a deal with the Russians, it is possible that the Germans would go with the French.”
It is true – with hindsight, irony comes cheap, but in strategic doctrine, uncertainty is a given and conjecture an art
Conjecture, the art of the probable
The point is – conjecture is meaningless unless the strategic doctrine frames the policy reliably in terms of probability
For decades, all through the 1980’s, German Chancellors would ask the French with growing insistence to be consulted in case of nuclear warfare, under the reasonable assumption that French defense at their national border would, in practical terms, turn all of the Federal Republic of (West) Germany into a ‘glacis’ and predictable battlefield
Besides token expressions of understanding, the French never gave in…So much for the American angst to lose France and Germany to the Soviets…
The wider point of view – obvious to any observer – is how quickly a carefully crafted strategy can fall by the wayside: the ‘unknowns’ of the conjecture will be caught up by unanticipated events or the doctrine is nixed by technology advance, by new geopolitical challenges or by democratic vote …
The Ukraine war has given NATO a temporary lease on life and Mr. Macron’s diagnosis about the institution being ‘braindead’ may turn out to be formally correct but premature
War has been - and is likely to be in the future - addressed as a tragic event forced upon NATO members, a special case calling for pragmatism
Mr. Macron went to the heart of the matter by stating: "There has been no NATO planning, nor any coordination. There hasn’t even been any NATO deconfliction"
NATO may, or may not, survive as the leading European countries, with the largest armies (Poland), the largest arsenal (France and Great Britain) and the largest economic weight (Germany), will be invited to carry the baton
What should concern every member of the Alliance would be to cling to a doctrine founded on a 1949 legal clause of shared commitment when circumstances change - and they have changed, profoundly
The test of credibility leaves the European allies with a plain choice - abdicate or unite