The just-concluded summit meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) in Chicago leaves gaping questions about the viability and direction of the world’s largest military alliance. Notwithstanding rhetoric about marching ahead to face 21st-century challenges through “smart defence”, this once-formidable institution of 28 member states is eroding.
Nato’s raison d’etre is unmoored and hazy today. As the Cold War drew to a close, American political scientist John Mearsheimer predicted that Nato’s survival was doubtful in the absence of a well-defined hulking military enemy like the Soviet Union. But Nato defied the doomsayers and expanded rapidly by harping on Cold War-hangover fears about Russian domination of Eastern Europe. The expansion of Nato to include Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania et al — in two waves in 1999 and 2004 — sent a message that Russia was still being countered geopolitically by the West, even though the ideological rivalry against Communism was over.
But in the process of reassuring small powers against Russia, Nato has lost the confidence of its Western European heartland. Unlike in the 20th century, Germany, France, Italy and Spain have nothing to be afraid about contemporary Russia. Germany, in particular, has developed a close working relationship with Russia for energy security and is unenthusiastic about Nato’s purported goal of protecting Eastern Europe against the Russian threat.
Last year, the former US secretary of defence, Robert Gates, chided Western European states for free riding on American spending towards the Nato budget. With over 70 per cent of the overall Nato budget coming from American pockets, Mr Gates lamented the institution as losing relevance, with a “dim, if not dismal future”. But since Russia no longer poses a mortal danger to Western Europe, politicians in Berlin or Madrid see no logic in pouring more money into Nato.
The institution’s defenders keep up the façade of Nato being the greatest guarantor of global peace and security, but it looks like a narrow American instrument. The forcible regime changes and “humanitarian interventions” Nato has come to be identified with since the Kosovo war of 1999 have not enthused all its member nations. The moralistic mission talk about defending human rights and preventing war crimes is not solid binding glue for Nato, which was at its strongest when there was a gigantic nation-state foe before 1991.
China is, of course, a true superpower now with means to challenge the US. But the facts that the Chinese have not deployed their military might on a global basis, and remain militarily limited to China’s immediate surroundings, mean that Nato cannot be united under the banner of a renewed alliance of capitalist democracies against Chinese authoritarianism. The Chicago Summit this week witnessed attendance of “special partners” of Nato, including the cluster of Asia-Pacific states with an anti-Chinese security outlook, viz. Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea. These non-Nato states ironically share Washington’s fear of Chinese expansionism much more than Nato’s core members like Germany or France.
According priority to retrenchment from Afghanistan, Nato also invited heads of Central Asian states to Chicago, but they rebuffed Washington in obvious deference to Moscow. Central Asia is an “out of area” region in which Nato has sought to insert itself militarily via the war in Afghanistan, but here too the enthusiasm of all Nato members to contest Russian and Chinese influence is not unanimous.
Nato’s structural problem is that it is headed by a US which retains the will to enforce its writ globally, but it is membered by European states which are fixated on fixing their domestic woes and, at best, policing their nearby environs. Counterbalancing distant great powers, combating terrorism by Islamic extremists wherever they exist, and waging wars in West Asia, Central Asia or East Asia are extravagant propositions from the lenses of fiscally battered Europeans.
Given this fundamental flaw, why does not the US just dissolve Nato? Why does the US invest so much in Nato when it may actually have become a burden with disproportionate costs? One motivation for Washington to keep the tiring Nato show going is America’s own economic doldrums, wherein even the 25 per cent or so of European inputs to the institutional budget matter. Something from the Europeans is better than nothing when the US has to contend with its own budgetary slashing on defence.
Secondly, the US is not fully confident about the loyalties of European states towards itself if there were no Nato umbrella left. If Nato were to shut down, the “nuclear sharing” mechanism, whereby American nukes are hosted by Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Turkey, would come to an end. The presence of formidable American military bases in eight European countries (over 53,000 American soldiers are positioned in Germany alone) would also be questioned if Nato no longer existed.
Thirdly, American power projection in Africa and West Asia would be considerably weakened if there was no Nato that keeps the Europeans (who are geographically closer to these regions) in the fold. So, however much the US establishment resents European half-heartedness vis-à-vis spending on Nato, it is America which needs the Europeans for its global interests rather than vice versa.
Nato is thus a jaded polygamous marriage where the most powerful partner needs the union to work, but where many smaller members are alienated or attracted to external suitors. Can such a military alliance be the global enforcement posse that it used to be? Can it win wars? Nato’s fiasco in Afghanistan and its pyrrhic victory after seven months over a disorganised Libya demonstrate that it is past its peak, although the institution has not outlived its usefulness for the US.
At the current rate of structural drift and economic decline on both sides of the Atlantic, Nato can only go further downhill until Dr Mearsheimer’s prediction pans out, albeit belatedly. Nato failed to justify itself perfectly in the post-Cold War years, but lived on nonetheless as a reluctant force multiplier for the unipolar hegemon.
As security competition shifts more decisively to Asia, however, a post-Nato era is on the anvil. You did not hear this epitaph in Chicago, where the leaders were celebrating and backslapping, but the writing is on the wall.

The writer is a professor and dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs