Hard Choices
An expanded agenda means there is simply more for NATO to do, and many of its tasks are exceptionally difficult to execute. NATO has assumed an almost heroic quality: it claims to have taken whatever action necessary to keep the allies and their one billion citizens safe, and accepted the necessary price of that effort in blood and treasure.57 But such a view is too forgiving. NATO is not simply a victim of circumstances. Some of the problems it faces have followed from the particular choices it has made.
Afghanistan provides a telling example. It was not inevitable that NATO would end up in an open-ended commitment to the country. The Taliban had been overthrown before NATO took charge of ISAF in 2003 and at that point Afghanistan was reasonably stable. However, within a short space of time, a regrouped Taliban had dragged NATO into a counter-insurgency war, which by 2006 was already described as ‘unwinnable’.58 Yet the NATO/ISAF mandate was extended time after time, and eight years would elapse before the Alliance ended its combat mission, with the Taliban no nearer to defeat. NATO, for sure, operated under exceptionally testing circumstances. Afghanistan is one the world’s poorest countries, and the government of Hamid Karzai which the Alliance partnered for many years was both manifestly inept and corrupt. The nation-building mission thus proved next to impossible to execute despite huge inflows of financial aid. As for the military dimension, the Taliban (aided by clandestine support from Pakistan) proved a tenacious opponent. NATO was reasonably adept at tactical innovation and made a valiant effort to train national Afghan armed forces. Despite well-reported political divisions among the allies, at its peak in 2011, some 130,000 personnel were under ISAF command – drawn from all NATO’s then twenty-eight nations alongside over twenty partner countries. This was no mean feat of political and military will. The positive impact on Afghanistan itself was less marked, however. Official statements portrayed ISAF in a positive light right up to the end of its mission in 2014.59 But such optimism was belied by the release in late 2019 of classified documents which revealed persistent doubts among American civilian and military officials at the wisdom of policies they themselves had been overseeing.60 By that point, the US had spent over $750 billion on the military effort in Afghanistan plus some $130 billion on civilian projects. It had also endured nearly 1,900 fatalities and over 20,000 casualties. The UK, for its part, had suffered over 450 deaths, a figure by 2010 already higher than in the Falklands War. The number of total war dead in Afghanistan, meanwhile, was estimated at 147,000, including 38,000 Afghan civilians.61 And yet the Taliban insurgency showed no sign of abating. The US government’s own reporting estimated that insurgent activity in 2019 was higher than at any time since 2001.62 This was the context within which NATO’s Resolute Support mission then operated. Post-ISAF, the Alliance had clearly retreated from the ambitious agenda of its first ten years in Afghanistan, but to what strategic end and over what time scale remained an open question. NATO had committed at the 2018 Brussels summit to fund assistance to the Afghan security forces until 2024, in pursuit of ‘long-term security and stability’. But a survey of Afghan specialists in February 2018 had already noted that alliance and American aims were ‘largely unachievable and Afghanistan’s future [is] only partly salvageable’.63 In 2009, the US had appointed Richard Holbrooke as its first Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Holbrooke soon concluded that counter-insurgency in Afghanistan was failing. Efforts by the Obama administration to open talks with the Taliban, however, proved half-hearted.64 Trump took a more decisive approach, but the upshot was a deeply controversial agreement (pp. 89–90).
Russia provides another example of the consequences of hard choices. Here, tensions have been an all-too-predictable downside of enlargement. The arguments mobilized in favour of the policy may have been powerful and the benefits to new members tangible and real. But Russia objected to the policy from the outset. Critics in NATO countries echoed these concerns: George Kennan, the architect of America’s Cold War strategy of containment, warned in 1997 that enlargement could prove ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era’.65 For some, he was proved right. As we show in Chapter 4, efforts at NATO–Russia partnership failed to blunt Moscow’s opposition, and once the Alliance chose to support Georgian and Ukrainian membership, things spiralled downward. Both the Russo-Georgian war of 2008 and Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 can be seen as pre-emptive moves by Moscow to forestall Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO. Russia, particularly in Crimea, is in clear violation of international law, but whatever the legal position, as John Mearsheimer has pointed out, ‘anyone with a rudimentary understanding of geopolitics should have seen this [crisis] coming. The West was moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests.’66 Russia’s ‘backyard’ also includes the three Baltic States – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – all of which were once incorporated into the Soviet Union. Russian officials in the 1990s indicated that there, too, NATO membership for these countries was ‘categorically unacceptable’.67 NATO went ahead regardless. Moscow did not respond with active intervention, but the armed build-up in Russia’s Western military district since places the Baltics in a position of huge vulnerability. Most studies conclude that NATO would be unable to defend them in the event of a Russian attack.68
Imprecision
NATO has found itself in hot water over enlargement, in part, because of a reluctance to define the policy’s limits. Admittedly, here it has faced a real predicament. Had NATO been too restrictive on enlargement’s scope after the Cold War (or even eschewed the policy altogether) it would have been accused of abandoning Eastern Europe, and plunging the region into a ‘grey zone’ of strategic uncertainty. The course it chose instead was expansive but ambiguous. The Alliance’s position on enlargement is formally subject to Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty, a clause that affords the possibility of membership to ‘any […] European State’. NATO, having now taken in a number of Balkan countries, much of former communist Eastern Europe and the Baltic States, has an ‘open door’ that hypothetically extends to the whole of the former Yugoslavia, European neutrals and the former Soviet republics of Transcaucasia (including Georgia), as well as Moldova, Belarus, Ukraine and even Russia. Within this elastic geopolitical context, NATO has exercised choice by imposing political, military and geostrategic preconditions. But conditionality has, in effect, entrapped the Alliance. Entry can be delayed, but it has denied itself the ability to foreclose membership as a matter of principle.69 This has given rise to some real predicaments. Georgia especially has taken every opportunity to solidify its relations with NATO. Its troops have served in Afghanistan and Kosovo, it has units assigned to the NATO Response Force, and its armed forces are engaged in all manner of NATO-approved defence assistance packages. Georgia has ‘nothing else left to prove’, according to the former commander of the US army in Europe.70 Yet, fearful of Russian reaction, the allies have been unwilling to provide Georgia with a Membership Action Plan (MAP). Enlargement, at least in this case, is at a ‘geopolitical impasse’. NATO remains formally committed to the process but unable or unwilling to execute it.71
NATO’s partnership policies have exhibited a similar ambiguity. Since the early 1990s, the Alliance has developed relations with over forty states, drawing upon a menu of some 1,400 separate partnership activities. These have undoubtedly had some benefits. PfP helped prepare post-communist states for NATO membership and fashioned close working relations with neutral states such as Finland and Sweden; the ‘strategic partnership’ with the EU has facilitated practical cooperation on issues such as cyber defence and military mobility; and individual partners have made important contributions to NATO exercises as well as to operations in Afghanistan, Libya and Kosovo. But