Walt, NATO, and inevitability
I’ve argued previously that Steve Walt is too eager to sound the NATO death knell (in part, I think, because NATO’s continued existence is nettlesome for realists). Apparently, his students are of the same mind. But Walt himself remains skeptical that the alliance has a future, in large part because there isn’t an obvious next ...
I've argued previously that Steve Walt is too eager to sound the NATO death knell (in part, I think, because NATO's continued existence is nettlesome for realists). Apparently, his students are of the same mind. But Walt himself remains skeptical that the alliance has a future, in large part because there isn't an obvious next mission:
I’ve argued previously that Steve Walt is too eager to sound the NATO death knell (in part, I think, because NATO’s continued existence is nettlesome for realists). Apparently, his students are of the same mind. But Walt himself remains skeptical that the alliance has a future, in large part because there isn’t an obvious next mission:
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.
There’s an important point here. Since the Cold War ended and NATO’s principal strategic purpose ended with it, the alliance has always seemed to have some project or another to bind it together and hold the attention of policymakers and the public: stabilization in the Balkans and the expansion push dominated the alliance agenda for much of the 1990s. Walt is right that post-Afghanistan, there’s no obvious new focus, and I’ve wondered myself whether NATO needs some kind of new crisis. But I also think Walt here is implicitly assuming the inevitability of the past. Alliance expansion, Balkan peacekeeping, and the Afghanistan mission were choices, not inevitabilities. At discrete moments, the key players in the alliance decided to direct the alliance toward these not obviously appropriate challenges and missions, sometimes in the face of determined opposition. I see no reason why they could not make the same choice about a whole host of future challenges.
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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