NATO lives!

In anticipation of the upcoming Lisbon summit, my IR course at the Kennedy School held a mock "Oxford-style" debate on NATO’s future yesterday, and the results were sufficiently interesting that I thought I’d share them with you. 

The resolution was "Resolved: This House Believes NATO Should be Disbanded." We assigned a team of students to take the pro and con, and then allowed the rest of the class break into small groups to discuss what they had heard from each team. Each small group then offered its own views on the subject, followed by a general discussion.

The class voted on the resolution both before and after the presentations and discussion. If you’re a big NATO fan, the good news is that only one student (out of approximately forty) voted in favor of the resolution to dissolve NATO before the discussion, and nobody supported it afterwards. So based on this admittedly non-random sample, I’d say NATO is in very good shape, at least when it comes to public support. (NB: my class is quite diverse, and has students from all over the world).

By the way, this result is not due to the superior performance of the team that argued against the resolution; both teams did a good job of presenting the various pros and cons. Nor was I shilling for NATO as I led the discussion; if anything, I was trying to get them to see the idea of dissolution as a serious option. Yet it was clear that the class was strongly disposed to favor NATO’s continued existence even before the discussion began, and that view strengthened the more they talked and listened.

I’d attribute this result to several rather obvious factors:

First, NATO has been around for sixty years, and has acquired a nearly iconic status among students and practitioners of foreign policy. Institutionalists often emphasize the "sticky" nature of well-established organizations, and NATO has been such a familiar part of the international landscape that hardly anyone feels comfortable supporting a resolution calling for its dissolution.

Second, NATO doesn’t cost much anymore, and students don’t see a lot of potential benefits from ending it. You know: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The United States doesn’t devote a lot of money to defending Europe (for the obvious reason that there’s no serious threat there), and the Europeans are spending a lot less themselves. Ending the alliance would also involve some short-term costs (e.g., the United States would lose basing rights, etc.), and in a situation like this, the status quo naturally triumphs.

Third, many people still see NATO as an insurance policy against a deteriorating security environment in Europe, and (for Americans) as a way to retain political influence there. Dissolving NATO could lead to renewed security competition within Europe, or it might encourage the European countries to get serious about a common foreign and security policy. Neither of these outcomes is attractive from Washington’s perspective: The United States doesn’t like trouble in Europe, but it also doesn’t want the trouble that a more united Europe could cause. NATO’s continued existence helps avert both of these negative possibilities.

For these (and other) reasons, the real question to ask (and the resolution we should have asked them to debate) is not about NATO’S continued existence, but rather its continued relevance. 

Here the three big wild cards are 1) The effects of the latest round of European defense cuts (which will make out-of-area actions even more difficult in the future), 2) The lessons that NATO draws from the Afghan War, and 3) The rising importance of Asia. If Afghanistan is eventually seen as a successful operation that produced a positive result, then NATO’s value will appear to be reaffirmed and support for it is bound to continue. If the Afghan war ends in a defeat or even some sort of messy compromise, then more people will ask if the Alliance ought to be in the nation-building business at all. And if it’s not performing some sort of global policing duties, then what is it for? Finally, as the Asian balance of power starts to loom larger in everyone’s consciousness, NATO’s relevance will almost certainly decline even further. NATO may be willing to give the United States some modest assistance in the Gulf or in Central Asia, but it is hard to imagine Europe doing much of anything in some future conflict over Taiwan or the South China Sea. Indeed, they’d be more likely to stand aloof and trade with both sides.

But those more worrisome scenarios lie some years away. What I can report is that NATO seems to be alive and well at the moment, at least if you ask my students.