The Foreign Service Journal, April 2009

16 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 0 9 and its continued influence in Eu- rope. Though it is an alliance based on mutual defense, with decisions reached by consensus of the biggest and the smallest member-states, NATO still translates as “American” in most European minds. This per- ception has its ramifications for Eu- ropean efforts to find the proper alignment between their defense posture as NATO members and their plans for a defense role for the Eu- ropean Union. The number of European uniforms visible at NATO’s sole headquarters in North America, Allied Command Transformation (formerly SACLANT) in Norfolk, Va., was always minimal compared to the thousands of Amer- ican and Canadian troops stationed in Europe. During the Cold War, of course, it was Europe that needed boots-on-the-ground protection against the Soviet Union. Now, despite NATO’s wider horizon, Europe remains the Alliance’s geopolitical epicenter. Europe’s attitude towards NATO is schizophrenic. On one hand, the Alliance provides strategic protection for European member-states and lessens their need to spend money on defense. The flip side is having to deal with American activism — whether nudging NATO’s borders ever closer to Russia’s sensitive frontiers, or taking NATO “out of area,” all the way to Afghanistan. As David Calleo observed in the December 2008 Foreign Service Journal (“NATO’s Future: Taking a Fresh Approach”), the “tool- box” strategy of using NATO as an intervention force risks transforming “a defensive European alliance into an instrument for American intrusions around the world.” Since the end of the Cold War some two decades ago, almost every NATO summit has been an excuse to re- hash op-eds proclaiming “The End of NATO.” The un- derlying disagreements usually pit the United States against the Europeans, but are al- most always patched up to allow the alliance to carry on. This is not to minimize what can be existential (in terms of NATO as an organization) ques- tions. Does the North Atlantic- European quadrant of the globe still require a standing alliance in the face of a diminished threat from the East? As NATO expands to almost double the number of member-states it had during the Cold War, can its decisionmaking ap- paratus withstand the increasing difficulty of reaching consensus? And — for both Europeans and Americans — does an alliance dedicated solely to defense capture the growing complexity of relations between the world’s largest trading partners and densest concentration of democracies? Membership Means Something After the Second World War, with the Cold War blast- ing its Siberian air on a ravaged Western Europe, the wartorn population greeted the creation of NATO in 1949 with relief. The postwar path of multilateral de- fense went hand in hand with cooperation in the eco- nomic sphere: the Marshall Plan and its successor, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; and the European Coal and Steel Com- munity, the almost-forgotten precursor to today’s Euro- pean Union. There was strength in numbers. In some sense, NATO is a victim of this success. Eu- ropean member-states — which also tend to belong to the E.U. — no longer see NATO as their primary insti- tution of reference. Even in the collective security sphere, NATO’s monopoly is over. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has responsibilities for early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation, as well as a membership that truly extends from “Vancouver to Vladivostok.” But the OSCE — the largest regional security organ- ization in the world — isn’t a NATO competitor. With its 56-member council, including countries as different as Belarus and Belgium, OSCE is a convenient forum but not a defense alliance. NATO, with its potential mem- bership list of 50 (the “Euro-Atlantic Partnership Coun- cil,” which combines NATO’s 26 members and its 24 partner countries, has been a way-station to member- F O C U S Despite NATO’s wider horizon, Europe remains the Alliance’s geopolitical epicenter. Gerald Loftus served at the U.S. Mission to NATO from 1994 to 1998, among many other Foreign Service postings. A subject matter expert for interagency coordination at U.S. European Command and graduate of the National Defense University, he organized seminars on a range of national security topics for NDU’s Africa Center for Strategic Stud- ies from 2004 to 2006. A retired FSO, he lives in Brussels, where he analyzes diplomatic issues on his Web site (http://AvuncularAmerican.typepad.com/blog ).