NATO death watch, 2010 edition
Steve Walt is convinced that NATO is on its last legs, and that Afghanistan may be one of the alliance’s last gaps. He does concede, however, that his predictive powers on this front have not always been strong: Looking back, I’d say I underestimated NATO’s ability to rise from its sickbed. Specifically, it did manage ...
Steve Walt is convinced that NATO is on its last legs, and that Afghanistan may be one of the alliance's last gaps. He does concede, however, that his predictive powers on this front have not always been strong:
Steve Walt is convinced that NATO is on its last legs, and that Afghanistan may be one of the alliance’s last gaps. He does concede, however, that his predictive powers on this front have not always been strong:
Looking back, I’d say I underestimated NATO’s ability to rise from its sickbed. Specifically, it did manage to stagger through the Kosovo War in 1999 and even invoked Article V guarantees for the first time after 9/11. NATO members have sent mostly token forces to Afghanistan (though the United States, as usual, has done most of the heavy lifting). But even that rather modest effort has been exhausting, and isn’t likely to be repeated. A continent that is shrinking, aging, and that faces no serious threat of foreign invasion isn’t going to be an enthusiastic partner for future adventures in nation-building, and it certainly isn’t likely to participate in any future U.S. effort to build a balancing coalition against a rising China.
Walt vastly understates NATO’s role in the Balkans. It did much more than stagger through the Kosovo war — it initiated it and successfully wrested Kosovo from Serbia’s control. He omits entirely the alliance’s critical role in stabilizing Bosnia. And he says nothing about the important "pull" factor of NATO membership for central and eastern European countries and the way in which the prospect of membership led these states to make critical reforms.
Perhaps as important, Walt doesn’t quite come clean on his own, somewhat more parochial, interest in NATO’s marginalization. The frenetic activity of the alliance since the end of the Cold War has been damned inconvenient for realist theorists, most of whom predicted that the alliance would shrivel away with the disappearance of the Soviet threat and who are ill equipped conceptually to deal with the possible psychological, organizational, or other explanations for its endurance. NATO’s clearly got major challenges in front of it, but caveat emptor when it comes to realists peddling the imminent demise theory.
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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