Defense and Technology Supplement: Will NATO Survive?

THERE are really two questions here: First, should NATO survive? And second, will it? It is easier to answer a firm yes to the first question than to the second.

Lord Ismay, NATO’s first secretary general, made the famous (or infamous) wisecrack that the purpose of the North Atlantic Alliance was to keep the Americans in Europe, the Russians out, and the Germans down. The reference to our democratic German ally is invidious and a distortion, but Lord Ismay was not wrong to touch on the three elements of the Alliance’s geopolitical purpose: to ensure an American military presence in Europe, as a counterweight to Russian power, and as an ultimate reassurance of Germany’s benign place in the Western security system. Obviously the Russian threat has receded, but the structural problem of European security turns out to be a major intellectual and political challenge in the new era nonetheless. Not in fifty years, in fact, has there been such fluidity and uncertainty about European arrangements. The stabilizing functions of the Alliance turn out to be still valuable—indeed, there is no adequate substitute—especially with respect to both post-Communist Russia and newly unified Germany.

PW

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Peter W. Rodman

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THERE are really two questions here: First, should NATO survive? And second, will it? It is easier to answer a firm yes to the first question than to the second.

Lord Ismay, NATO’s first secretary general, made the famous (or infamous) wisecrack that the purpose of the North Atlantic Alliance was to keep the Americans in Europe, the Russians out, and the Germans down. The reference to our democratic German ally is invidious and a distortion, but Lord Ismay was not wrong to touch on the three elements of the Alliance’s geopolitical purpose: to ensure an American military presence in Europe, as a counterweight to Russian power, and as an ultimate reassurance of Germany’s benign place in the Western security system. Obviously the Russian threat has receded, but the structural problem of European security turns out to be a major intellectual and political challenge in the new era nonetheless. Not in fifty years, in fact, has there been such fluidity and uncertainty about European arrangements. The stabilizing functions of the Alliance turn out to be still valuable—indeed, there is no adequate substitute—especially with respect to both post-Communist Russia and newly unified Germany.