NATO’s Remarkable Revival

There are four main reasons for NATO’s comeback as an enhanced and more coherent alliance.

The most important and obvious factor is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which returned NATO to its roots: deterring a Kremlin bent on expansion. It also motivated Finland to abandon its long-standing neutrality and join the alliance, with Sweden expected to join soon as well. The addition of these two Nordic countries will substantially enhance NATO’s position in Northern Europe. Russia’s aggression has also prompted NATO members to markedly increase their 2023 defense expenditures, with more member states on track to fulfill the bloc’s guideline of spending a minimum of 2 percent of GDP on defense, long a bone of contention between Washington and its European allies. Furthermore, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has strengthened the U.S. military presence and engagement in Europe.

A second factor behind NATO’s resurgence is the rise of China, with NATO turning into the primary forum for a closer trans-Atlantic security dialogue on China. After the United States announced its rebalance to Asia in 2011, it took the European Union and NATO roughly another decade to categorize China’s rise as a security challenge. NATO’s new Strategic Concept, adopted at the Madrid summit in 2022, identifies China as a challenge to its members’ interests, values, and security. Since then, NATO has been strengthening dialogue and cooperation with its partners in the Indo-Pacific region, including Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea.

Third, new technologies and interdependencies have broadened NATO’s agenda to cover cyberdefense and disruptive technologies. Economic dependencies on China and Russia have prompted the alliance to launch new initiatives such as the NATO-EU Task Force on Resilience of Critical Infrastructure.

Fourth, the election of U.S. President Joe Biden enabled smoother cooperation between the United States and its allies than had been the case during the Trump administration. This is as much a factor of policies as of trust: According to a June 2021 Pew Research Center survey, the transition from Donald Trump to Biden dramatically improved Washington’s international image, especially among key allies and partners.

Of course, in an era of intensified great-power rivalry, the strengthening of military cooperation is not unique to the Euro-Atlantic West. In Asia, China’s rise has led several countries to reinforce their bilateral security agreements with the United States, including Japan and the Philippines. Minilateral formats—such as the Australia-United Kingdom-United States security pact and the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad—include efforts to deepen military ties. In August, a historic summit among the leaders of Japan, South Korea, and the United States may be the basis for another such grouping; South Korea could potentially join the Quad as well. China and Russia, in turn, are increasingly closing ranks.

But in terms of scope and depth of cooperation as well as its longevity, NATO has no parallel anywhere. Military alliances, established to address an immediate threat or balance the rise of a regional hegemon, are often dissolved when the external security environment changes. NATO, however, not only survived the collapse of the Soviet Union but also proved adept at adjusting to the post-Cold War era by taking on nontraditional security challenges (such as terrorism and piracy), conducting military operations other than war, and engaging in out-of-area operations.

NATO’s success and endurance stand in sharp relief to the frailty and collapse of a similar military alliance formed during the Cold War: the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). Using NATO as a model, SEATO was established in 1954 to prevent communism from gaining ground in Southeast Asia. Comprising Australia, Britain, France, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, and the United States, SEATO was not a particularly coherent organization, whether in geographic or political terms. Thus, as soon as the security environment in Asia shifted as a result of the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War and U.S.-China rapprochement, members began to withdraw from the bloc. In 1977, it was dissolved.

NATO, on the other hand, consists of countries belonging to a distinct geographic region on both sides of the Atlantic and is founded on a strong political cohesion among its member states, almost all of which share core values of democracy and support the liberal international order. Indeed, safeguarding the principles of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law was written into the preamble of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, and Francisco Franco’s dictatorial regime was one reason Spain’s accession was delayed until 1982. That said, both Greece and Portugal were dictatorships during parts of their NATO membership, and today, Hungary’s and Turkey’s commitment to liberal democracy is unclear. The importance of political and other nonmilitary cooperation for NATO’s unity has been reiterated numerous times, most recently by an independent expert group appointed by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg to advise on the alliance’s 2030 agenda. In its final report, the group emphasized that “NATO is an outcome of political cohesion as well as a source of it.”

Will NATO still be a pillar of the security order when it turns 100? That will depend on how the alliance addresses the changing geopolitical order—above all, the threat from a rising, revisionist China. In particular, there are three scenarios for NATO’s future that could look very different from its present and past: a Europe-only NATO, a global NATO, and a fragmented NATO.

A Europe-only NATO is a scenario where the United States decides to withdraw from the alliance, either because it shifts all of its resources to the Indo-Pacific in order to take on China or due to domestic political change in the United States. As long as Washington was committed to containing the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Europe could take the U.S. security guarantee for granted. With China rising as the United States’ main rival, this is no longer the case. In that rivalry, the geographic focus is East Asia, not Europe.

When he was U.S. president, Trump abruptly awakened European elites to the possibility that a U.S. withdrawal from Europe could be just one election away. Instead of being reelected in 2024, Trump may now spend time in jail, and his main criticism of NATO allies—their inability to meet collective defense spending targets—is being addressed. Yet the idea of isolationism is still alive in the Republican Party, with John Bolton, a U.S. national security advisor under Trump, recently warning of a “virus of isolationism” among his fellow Republicans. A U.S. withdrawal would not only force Europe to take care of its own defense. It could even be the end of NATO.

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Essay

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A global NATO is a scenario where both the United States and its European allies shift their energies and resources from Europe to Asia. It entails European member states rebalancing a significant amount of their naval assets to the Indo-Pacific region in order to support the United States in balancing China. Such a state of affairs would differ markedly from the last time NATO went global in the early 2000s, when it deployed peacekeepers to Afghanistan, trained security forces in Iraq, and gave logistical support to the African Union’s mission in Sudan. A long-term major deployment to Asia would stretch European members’ resources to the limit, leave Europe exposed to Russian adventurism, and potentially cause disagreements among European allies. Eastern European member states, in particular, would probably be more concerned with deterring Russia than with balancing China.

Finally, a fragmented NATO is a scenario where the United States remains committed to the defense of Europe but where allies are no longer pursuing a single, coherent strategy—because of different threat perceptions, the disparate interests of new members, or domestic political pressures. Even though Russia remains a serious challenge to European peace and security, it is not as powerful and all-threatening as the Soviet Union was. In the not-too-distant future, Southern European member states may be more concerned with security challenges in North Africa and the Middle East, while Britain and France are more oriented toward global challenges. A further NATO enlargement to include Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and Serbia not only would influence the bloc’s priorities but could also weaken its coherence. What’s more, significant political changes in a number of member states, including the election of leaders less committed to democracy, the liberal international order, and the trans-Atlantic West, would undermine the alliance’s political and military cohesion.

None of these three scenarios have to come true in their extreme versions. But in all likelihood, NATO will have to grapple with elements of all three. Whatever they do, NATO members should not take their present unity and strength for granted.

This article appears in the Fall 2023 issue of Foreign Policy. Subscribe now to support our journalism.