F OCUS - American Foreign Service Association

F O C U S
and its continued influence in Europe.
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 perception
has its ramifications for European
efforts to find the proper
alignment between their defense posture as NATO
members and their plans for a defense role for the European
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 American
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 “toolbox”
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 rehash
op-eds proclaiming “The End of NATO.” The underlying
disagreements usually pit the United States
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 Studies
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).
Despite NATO’s wider
horizon, Europe remains
the Alliance’s geopolitical
epicenter.
against the Europeans, but are almost
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) questions.
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 apparatus
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 blasting
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 defense
went hand in hand with cooperation in the economic
sphere: the Marshall Plan and its successor, the
Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development; and the European Coal and Steel Community,
the almost-forgotten precursor to today’s European
Union. There was strength in numbers.
In some sense, NATO is a victim of this success. European
member-states — which also tend to belong to
the E.U. — no longer see NATO as their primary institution
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 organization
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 membership
list of 50 (the “Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council,”
which combines NATO’s 26 members and its 24
partner countries, has been a way-station to member-
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