Willing or Waning? NATO’s Role in an Age of Coalitions
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Twenty years after the great debate over NATO’s future at the end of the Cold War, we appear to have come full circle—“back to the future,” in John Mearsheimer’s words. Its instrumental role in pacifying the Balkans, its major commitment in Afghanistan, and its recent operation in Libya notwithstanding, the role and relevance of the alliance appear no more certain today than they were when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. International relations specialists are certainly wondering. Rajan Menon has recently pondered “the end of alliances,” and Stanley Sloan speculated about whether NATO might no longer be a “permanent alliance.” In April 2011, James Joyner joyfully declared that the Libyan operation was helping “NATO get its groove back,” but only four months later, toward the end of an exhausting half-year battle with Muammar el-Qaddafi’s third-rate force, he was much less optimistic, penning a commentary for the National Interest titled “NATO fails in Libya.”
At the same time, so-called coalitions of the willing seem to be emerging as an increasingly serious competitor to the Atlantic alliance and its traditional role as the primary conduit for Western security policy. Particularly in post-9/11 Washington, such informal and flexible arrangements are enjoying considerable popularity as a means for projecting power and stability out of area. At least since the French push for employing a similar model in the fight against Qaddafi, this preference for ad hoc coalitions over permanent alliances is no longer unique to the superpower.
It is therefore high time to stop and ponder what role and relevance a Cold War alliance can still aspire to in (what appears to be) an age of coalition warfare: that is, to inquire into the post-Cold War trends that explain NATO’s troubles of the past two decades, to examine how their (superior) ability to cope with these trends can account for the rise of coalitions over the same period, and to delineate from this a potential future role for the alliance based not on competition, but on cooperation with the coalitions.
To a significant extent, the persistent uncertainty about NATO’s role and relevance in the post-Cold War world is the result of a development that was set off by the collapse of the bipolar Cold War superstructure more than two decades ago: the gradual demise of security policy’s systemic dimension. Three aspects of this broader trend in particular have profound implications for the global relevance, operational effectiveness, and political cohesion of a standing formal alliance like NATO: the increasingly situational nature of threats and challenges, capabilities and commitments, and interests and alignments.
During the Cold War, any conflict or crisis, occurring anywhere, could have implications for the security of almost everyone in either of the East-West camps. This began to change once the global ideological antagonism subsided. As the threat—real or imagined—that a local or regional conflict halfway around the world might evolve into a global nuclear holocaust faded into history, security became an increasingly situational affair, shaped by—and properly understood only against the background of—the particularities of specific political, geographical, and historical contexts.
Events in Somalia and Rwanda, for instance, no longer necessarily affected the interests and security of the entire Western camp and its dominant alliance the way that similar occurances had in the past, however indirectly. European allies had always sought shelter under the US umbrella, but now they had much less reason than before to concern themselves with the global responsibilities of the sole surviving superpower. No longer having to fear that local conflicts elsewhere might spark a catastrophic confrontation on the Old Continent, much of Europe happily retired from any global role or aspiration, comfortably settling into what Robert Cooper calls a “post-modern world” of regional peace and prosperity.