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NATO’s European ascendancy at the end of the Cold War. London and Washington have ever since been lukewarm about the idea of an EU role in military security for fear that it will encroach upon alliance prerogatives. As the UK exits from the EU, such scepticism is only likely to increase. Non-EU Turkey has adopted a similar stance. France and Germany, by contrast, have tended to talk up the security and nascent military functions of the EU, but neither has ever contemplated abandoning NATO in order to support a distinct European alternative.

Related to this, NATO enjoys a privileged position in the ‘organizational ecology’ of international security provision.²⁴ Once the Alliance’s primacy had been asserted at the end of the Cold War, possible alternatives became complementary to its efforts not substitutes for them. Thus, in Bosnia, NATO worked alongside the UN to enforce a series of Security Council Resolutions. NATO’s peacekeeping force in the country eventually gave way to an EU operation (EUFOR Althea), a mission reliant on close cooperation between the EU Military Staff and NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). In Kosovo, similarly, KFOR has worked alongside OSCE and UN missions. And in Afghanistan, both ISAF and Resolute Support have been mandated by the UN. Here, EU and UN agencies have carried out significant roles alongside NATO.

      Third, NATO has a distinct transatlantic dimension. Membership of Canada and the US means it can legitimately claim to be the institutional expression of the Western group of states. Commentators have warned of ‘Westlessness’ – a sense of drift, division and disorientation among the countries of North America and Europe²⁵ – but NATO remains the principal connection binding Europe to what is still the world’s pre-eminent military power. A similar security blanket is also enjoyed by America’s East Asian allies, Japan and South Korea, but NATO is unique in anchoring that guarantee within a multilateral setting. The Alliance cannot claim a membership as large as either the UN or the OSCE, but it has been able to avoid the gridlock that has characterized both those two bodies. Generally speaking, NATO fosters a pragmatic spirit of cooperation among its members generated by their engagement in multiple operations and decision-making formats. Here, consensus is an asset not an obstacle, requiring prolonged and patient interactions, which over decades has sustained a strong sense of shared purpose. We acknowledge that NATO’s sense of political community is under strain, but the practices of the Alliance remain robust. ²⁶

       NATO is strategically aware

Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has been engaged in an ongoing search for a compelling strategic vision. As we will see in Chapter 5, it has not found that task easy. But here two points can be made by way of mitigation. The first relates to the complexity of the security environment that NATO has had to deal with. Comparison with Cold War NATO may be unflattering but it is also unfair. Faced with the singular, overarching threat of Soviet power, strategy came relatively easy. Since the Soviet Union’s demise, the security challenges facing the Alliance have been multiple in number, form and direction. NATO, consequently, cannot mobilize toward a single set of objectives (deterrence, defence and dialogue, as in the Cold War) focused on a clearly identified foe. Rather, it has had to shift focus according to the most pressing threat or issue at any given time.

      Responsiveness of this type is no bad thing if it is consciously considered. Indeed, a second point of mitigation is that NATO has purposively shifted its operational focus on several occasions. On this basis, it has been able to claim that it is multi-purpose. In the words of the 2010 Strategic Concept, the Alliance seeks to fulfil the three ‘essential core tasks’ of collective defence, crisis management and cooperative security. As one seasoned NATO official has acknowledged, pursuing all three tasks simultaneously is extraordinarily testing.²⁷ The Alliance, in this sense, is a victim not of inaction but of ambition.

       No organization is perfect

      Political organizations are rarely without fault, and few, if any, are perfect – able to act in complete accordance with the organization’s environment, to exercise flawless leadership and to mobilize resources efficiently and effectively to achieve its goals. While virtually all serious analysis would accept this as a starting point, opinion then differs on exactly how far organizations are constrained in action and effect.

An influential strand of realist opinion regards international organizations as mattering ‘only on the margins’. Such bodies operate primarily because states (and great powers in particular) harness organizations for their own ends. This may mean a temporary meeting of minds, but the cooperation that results is always fragile, temporary and likely to relapse toward more competitive ways of doing things.²⁸ A somewhat different take (but an equally pessimistic one) argues that organizations develop entrenched ways of doing things and so become inherently inefficient. Rigid thinking and inflexible behaviour are especially evident in an organization’s bureaucracy, but such patterns can also influence state members who become socialized into bad habits. The outcome is a dysfunctional organization, unresponsive to its environment, preoccupied with process and wedded to policies that end up being ineffective and self-defeating.²⁹

      If we accept such views, then NATO would have to be judged against a very low bar, it being just one more flawed and ineffectual international body. Such a starting point would colour both our diagnosis of the problems besetting the Alliance and prescriptions for how to attend to them. We would, in short, steer to a rather limited range of options aware that NATO’s influence in the world was constrained and its future uncertain. Such a view is not without its merits. Indeed, even NATO’s defenders hold to some of its assumptions, not least the view that the Alliance is an arena in which the interests of its members are presented and sometimes collide, and that, ultimately, the US runs the show.

The following chapters demonstrate, however, that such a view is overstated and, in certain regards, inaccurate. The premise we follow in this book is aligned more with the institutionalist view that organizations can have significant effects.³⁰ This does not mean that organizations are detached from their members – far from it. NATO, we suggest, has endured precisely because it serves its members’ interests. It offers ‘value-added’ to the allies in the shape of permanent, tried and trusted military and political cooperation. It goes beyond an alliance of convenience, coordinating defence and security in ways the allies could achieve neither alone nor in temporary coalition.

      NATO’s distinct qualities do not, however, make it immune from the external challenges that have bedevilled other bodies. There is a view that the international system has entered a particularly unsettled time, one for which the current crop of international organizations (which largely originated after World War II) are ill suited. All organizations have to deal with uncertainty, but the chain of events beginning with the financial crash of 2008, and continuing with the Eurozone crisis, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the 2015 migration crisis, Brexit, the election of Trump, the rise of populist politics in Europe and the COVID-19 pandemic, has been seen as ushering in a new dark age of problems.³¹ Such problems are, of course, real but perhaps no more troubling than those of previous decades. Robert Keohane argued in 1975 that ‘the world is in a profound political and economic crisis’ which has imposed severe ‘constraints on effective cooperative action’.³² The end of the Cold War gave rise to similar soul-searching as international organizations were immediately found wanting in the face of multiple crises, not least the wars in the former Yugoslavia.³³ In 2007, Edward Newman wrote that a ‘crisis of multilateralism’ had typified much commentary on international organisations throughout the decade of the 2000s.³⁴

      The lesson one might draw here is twofold: that crises tend to typify international politics over time and that international organizations are central to how these crises play out. This is not to say that international organizations are always equal to the task, but as NATO’s case demonstrates, an organization can persist and adapt in the face of cumulative crises. What interests us, and what this book seeks to explore, is whether NATO’s adaptation to date is sufficient and how much further it should go.

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