Beyond Afghanistan, a weakened NATO can still write its own future

When the dust settles from this week’s NATO summit in Chicago, and in the quiet of our own thoughts, we need to ask ourselves what NATO, or the United States and Europe more broadly, should actually do from here. 

To be sure, NATO is managing the best it can in bad circumstances. It has grown fatigued in Afghanistan far sooner than needed to achieve success – and so it will embark on an inevitable but tenuous transition there.

Europe is consumed by a financial crisis and nearly everyone is slashing defense budgets – hence the focus on “smart defense” projects. Many allies lack the means or the will (or both) to take on hard military operations, so it’s good that partners such as Sweden and Qatar fill the gap.

And no one in Europe is enthusiastic about missile defenses to ward off potential strikes from Iran. But alliance members will go along if the Russians remain calm and the US pays – which it will, at least initially.

But the NATO that so dramatically transformed itself after the cold war is running out of gas. Since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, NATO began conducting “out-of-area” military operations as opposed to concentrating on deterrence. Now we’ve lost public support and are closing down operations. The alliance added new members from Central Europe – but that’s no longer on the table as Russian assertiveness and the prolonged euro crisis have taken away all appetite for open doors.

In the last two decades, NATO has transformed its defense forces from heavy and static to more nimble and deployable, but now those capabilities are being slashed. The only post-cold-war trend still at work in the alliance is partnering with other countries. Even that’s a bitter-sweet development, as partners are now doing what some allies refuse to do – fight.

Back in 2010, NATO’s Lisbon summit set out a “strategic concept” for the future. This, however, turned out to be a compendium of all the things NATO should do, without real priorities and commitment of resources. By prioritizing everything, we prioritized nothing.

So what to do?

One of NATO’s great secretary generals, Lord Robertson, said that “NATO’s credibility is its capability.” Today, when NATO’s capability is rapidly being reduced, we increasingly face a credibility gap. We have high ambitions, but don’t back them up with resources, leadership, and commitment. Restoring NATO’s credibility is arguably the most important task for the alliance at the moment.

One approach is for NATO to look closer to home. If publics are skeptical about far-off engagements such as Afghanistan – and if allies are slashing their capabilities to conduct such operations anyway – we should perhaps look at what we can accomplish with great credibility, and what our citizens will agree are high priorities.

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