Fall 2017 JPI

Is NATO Relevant to American National Security?
Daniel Kurzyna
INTRODUCTION
The post-World War II period altered the landscape of security permanently, as two global wars
produced a transition from a multipolar world to one of bipolar peace among great powers. Scholars
of international relations, from primarily the realist school, assert that this order, conceived by the
establishment of multilateral organizations, offered reliance to states in an aggregation of arenas; from
finance with the World Bank, to trade with the World Trade Organization, to union with the United
Nations. 1 Nonetheless, some would contend that by far the most critical arbiter of peace derived from
the signing of the Washington Treaty, better known as the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949. 2 This treaty
conceived upon the globe an effective concept of collective defense and security, which centered on
the transatlantic region of the world, and rightfully so; this was the region that produced two world
wars that were fraught with carnage, death, and destruction on unprecedented levels. The North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) changed the nature of international relations as we know it. An
alliance treaty signed and ratified by twelve signatories, NATO meets traditional conceptualizations
of alliance structure, especially in the range of agreements, not just economic, among sovereign
entities. But just how credible is the NATO alliance? Thucydides, who could be considered the father
of international relations, once penned, “the only sure basis of an alliance [between equals] is for each
party to be equally afraid of the other.” 3 With regard to NATO, the fundamental purpose of collective
defense was sustained by anxiety, and not necessarily love or stake in the alliance itself.
IS NATO OBSOLETE?
During the 2016 American presidential elections, the nation, and the entire globe, was thrust
into a dialectic where many people were too uncomfortable to participate. Then how appropriate, or
in the words of then-Republican nominee Donald J. Trump, obsolete, is NATO and has it approached
the end of its existence? 4 Even outside of the realm of the US presidential elections, we observed an
excess of protests appear throughout the world in states where nationalist tendencies reared their
wicked head, and the moderate victors are tasked with unifying a broken political system. The United
Kingdom in the summer of 2016 voted by a rather slender margin to withdraw from the European
Union, which put a dent in a project that many deemed as being wholly promising. When Montenegro
was on the path of becoming a NATO member, before being ultimately offered accession in June, we
saw Montenegrins take to the streets in an attempt to resist, nearly on the level of an insurrection,
forfeiting even a sliver of sovereignty for the alliance 5 . Montenegro is a solid example for the answering
of the initial question, is NATO relevant to American security? From a geopolitical standpoint, one
could argue that the accession of Montenegro into the NATO coalition is a boon to American national
security due to its strategic location that holds vital geopolitical interest to NATO, in the case of its
access to the Adriatic Sea, and especially the United States, in its rivalry with Russia. The United States
and the West have long advocated for western values that uphold freedom, democracy, and human
1 Kenneth N. Waltz, "The Stability of a Bipolar World," in Daedalus 93, no. 3 (1964): 881-909. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20026863
2 NATO, "Founding treaty," NATO, accessed May 01, 2017, http://www.nato.int/cps/iw/natohq/topics_67656.htm.
3 Thucydides, The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, trans. Robert B. Strassler and Richard Crawley (New
York: Free Press, 2008), 164.
4 Michael Gove and Kai Diekmann, "Full transcript of interview with Donald Trump," News | The Times & The Sunday Times, January 16, 2017,
accessed May 01, 2017, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/full-transcript-of-interview-with-donald-trump-5d39sr09d.
5 http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/montenegro-approves-nato-membership-amid-protest-04-28-2017-4Tomovic, Dusica. “Montenegro MPs
Back NATO Treaty Despite Protests.” Balkan Insight, Balkan Insight, 28 Apr. 2017, www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/montenegro-approves-natomembership-amid-protest-04-28-2017-4.