Nato needs a radical rethink about its mission if it is to remain relevant | thearticle

This week marks the 70th anniversary of NATO. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO Secretary-general’s recent pronouncement that the organisation was “the strongest, most successful alliance in

history…because we have been able to change” seems like an assessment of past glories in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. The problem isn’t simply a divisive debate about ‘burden

sharing’, although continued refusal to meet the 2% of GDP commitment by Germany is indicative of the alliance’s waning importance to some European members. The relative defence spending of

the U.S. and Europe is not a new issue. Although this call to end ‘free riding’ has gained momentum under Trump, it was also part of Obama’s rhetoric -and many of their Presidential

predecessors. The issue is that NATO has lost sight both of its strategic goals, and more fundamentally, the shared liberal values of the Atlanticist community that it was created to

protect. We tend to view NATO in narrow military terms and to characterise its historic purpose as the geographic defence of Western Europe from the Soviet Union. Indeed measured in these

terms, NATO was a success. But NATO always had other constitutive roles that were extra-territorial. NATO’s founding charter, the Atlantic Charter, is a lesson in parsimony, both a blessing

and a curse. With its opening rubric the North Atlantic Treaty explicitly bound the signatories into the defence of common values, to “safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation

of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law”. Indeed nowhere among the treaty articles was there an explicit mention of the Soviet

Union. The mutual relationship between NATO’s institutional operation and the values it was defending was always taken as an article of faith – membership and cooperation would spread

democracy. The empirical record is somewhat different. The mere fact of inclusion in NATO did not necessarily promote values such as democracy within its members. We need only think of the

Salazar regime in Portugal during the Cold War or Turkey and Hungary today. Over time, NATO’s functional military dimension replaced a coherent defence of the shared Atlanticist values of

the community. Little surprise, then, that since the fall of the Berlin Wall, NATO’s major achievement, if that is the right word, has been undifferentiated expansion, at the expense of

invigorated strategic purpose. The alliance is soon to number 30 members, once North Macedonia joins. When the debate about enlargement occurred at the end of the Cold War, NATO drafted the

“Perry Principles” to determine which countries would be admitted, stating that new members would have to maintain democratic institutions. In practice, beyond the threat of expulsion, it is

not clear that NATO has the power to enforce these principles. Expulsion remains a high sanction that would undercut the strategic position of the alliance. In strategic terms, NATO now

seems split between those countries in close proximity to Russia, who regard her bellicosity as a direct geographic threat, and those such as the U.S., Germany, Italy and Turkey, whose

actions suggest increasing disdain for the alliance. Part of this problem can be explained by NATO’s failure to modernise its view of its strategic purpose. The receding threat of Russian

tanks rolling across Germany make the defence of new members difficult to sell to domestic audiences. This places unbearable stress on the key Article V guarantee of mutual defence. With

each new entrant, the threat to NATO gets literally pushed further to the periphery, the high burden of unanimity over collective defence becomes harder to maintain, and the will of the

initial members, especially the U.S., to honour the article V commitment weakens. In other words, NATO’s strategy of geographic expansion weakens its own political will serving to undermine

itself. NATO’s function as a deterrent to would be aggressors is being hollowed out by focusing on geography rather than values. David Howell’s recent, excellent piece for TheArticle is

correct to identify Asia’s rising power as a major challenge to Europe but underestimates, by omission, the devastating impact that Russia is currently having on NATO members. To simply

identify the rise of China at the expense of the U.S. and Europe misses the main point about the balance of global power in the twenty-first century. The new paradigm is multipolarity, not

simply the rise of China as peer competitor to the US. Russia’s unexpected return to the global stage in the Middle East and Latin America and her interference in Western democracies matters

more in the medium term, than China’s gradual rise to power. Putin is well aware that Russia’s military capabilities do not allow Russia to realistically invade and occupy member states

without risking war with NATO, yet the threat of Russian military action forces a NATO response. The most memorable aspect of the invasion of Crimea in 2014 were the ‘little Green Men’. The

absurd theatricality of this meant that few were in any doubt that the unmarked soldiers were Russian special forces, even whilst Russia denied involvement. Although Ukraine wasn’t a NATO

member Russia showed that its tactic of maskirovka or ‘deception’, could easily limit the types of response made by Western democracies. It raises the question of how responsive to these

kind of threats NATO’s article V really is. It is the threat of this type of deniable incursion in the Baltics that forces NATO to expend reosurces deterring a militarily weaker adversary,

rather than any realistic threat of all out invasion. Moscow is exploiting this, returning to her Cold War strategy of ‘reflexive control’, a way of predetermining your opponent’s decision

making in your favour, by altering key factors in their perception of the world. In its current iteration Russia’s strategy in Ukraine and Belarus has been to entice NATO into an arms

build-up in the Black Sea region, manipulating NATO into being seen to defend its North Eastern flank. In so doing it places maximum pressure on NATO’s fractious relationship with Turkey,

which controls access via the Mediterranean. NATO’s build up in the Black-sea takes place in the context of profound internal tensions. The US recently halted the supply of F-35 jets to

Turkey, after Ankara pushed ahead with plans to purchase the S-400 air defence system from Russia and President Erdogan accused his western allies of sabotaging Turkey. Trump continues to

undermine Article V and Italy is defying the US by preparing to sign a trade deal with China. Against this backdrop, getting NATO to commit to operations that seem increasingly far away from

political realities in Washington, not to mention Berlin, is far more powerful than direct military confrontation that Russia cannot possibly win. The point of reflexive control is to get

one’s adversary to make a series of decisions that discard options that might improve their situation until they are faced with a choice between bad and worse options. The choice NATO now

faces is between defending the Eastern flank against a low level incursion, or not defending the Eastern flank. The first option exacerbates Western and Southern European and US questioning

of the cost of defending new NATO members. The second option undermines the principle of collective security. Either outcome benefits Moscow. China and Russia have identified and are

exploiting NATO’s point of maximum vulnerability. NATO’s principle weakness is not so much territorial defence rather the relative weakness of the liberal democratic values that most of the

member states uphold. The alliance has fallen victim not only to confusion about its purpose and domestic political chaos within the member states but also systematic political assault by

Russia and to a lesser extent China. Writing at the end of the 1990s, two Peoples’ Liberation Army Colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui wrote a controversial book called _Unrestricted

Warfare_. They observed that America and the West’s narrow definition of war and focus on technological superiority exposed it to a vulnerability that weaker states, like Russia and China,

could exploit. Since no adversary can hope to defeat US conventional forces, war for them, was no longer about ‘using armed force to compel the enemy to submit to one’s will,’ but rather

‘using all means, including armed force or non-armed force, military and non-military…to compel the enemy to _accept one’s interests_.’ The whole nature of warfare has undergone a profound

change, accelerated in the past ten years. The division between war and peace has become blurred into an ongoing, mostly non-violent conflict. More profoundly something about war has changed

that goes beyond simply the way in which it is waged. Rather than seeking decisive victory, the signature of US and Western strategic thinking, Russia and China are concerned with shaping

the kind of alternatives their adversaries can make. In this conception the barrier between soldiers and civilians would be erased or minimised, because the battlefield was everywhere. As

Qiao would go on to comment most controversially of all ‘the first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.” Military force becomes just one kind of

national power. They expanded the understanding of what war is, to include definitions that did not involve violence. Other kinds of warfare include diplomatic, financial, network,

ideological, even regulatory and environmental; the list is almost endless and society itself is the battlefield. Qiao and Wang were writing in response to the first Gulf War and were ahead

of their time. Almost two decades later, their analysis of the inherent vulnerability of American (and by implication, NATO) power gives a compelling insight into Chinese and Russian

strategy. American military power and the strategic thinking that underpins NATO is fundamentally ill equipped to even conceive of this type of ‘total warfare’, let alone how to calibrate a

response. NATO’s response to Russian activity in Ukraine shows that they still mainly think in terms of conventional force deployment as deterrent, although joined with some ancillary

cybersecurity activity. The themes of_ Unrestricted Warfare_ have profoundly influenced Russia’s strategic community. Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s Chief of the General Staff wrote an

influential article in 2013 that became known as the much misunderstood ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’. Discussing the Arab Spring, he argued that the ‘role of non-military means of achieving

political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness.’ Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s one time ideological and

communications guru, a key architect of Russian political operations in Ukraine, published a science fiction book under a _nom de plume_, shortly after the invasion of Ukraine. It borrows

thematically from _Unrestricted Warfare_, ‘The simple hearted commanders of the past strove for victory…It worked in some places, but basically, war was now understood as a process, _more

exactly_, part of a process, its acute phase, but _but maybe not the most important_.’ Surkov’s fiction is fast becoming reality. There are now wars without a clear end point, the conflict

in Ukraine being one, the civil war in Syria another, both now Russian campaigns. Both conflicts can be understood not in terms of victory as a goal but rather in terms of a level of

advantage with which political compromise can be forced. NATO is entirely unsuited to this type of conflict. Without comfortable poles between peace and war, NATO needs to become effective

at a threshold below declared war. As the alliance fractures with various members tilting towards China and Russia, obtaining unanimity of purpose in the face of deniable military action is

a major challenge. Those who followed the Mueller inquiry in detail had a rare glimpse into the workings of Russian reflexive control as applied to the US political system. The possibility

of collusion by a Presidential candidate was always unlikely, a sideshow to more worrying revelations. A US intelligence report published shortly after the election claimed that the ‘Putin

ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm

her electability and potential presidency.’ It seems unlikely that Russia thought it was possible to tilt the election, it certainly wasn’t necessary to achieve their desired end. They were

able to orchestrate near political civil war in the US, which meant the Republicans almost ignored Russia as an issue, whilst the Democrats advanced what appeared to be conspiracy theories,

both sides undermining their credibility. The biggest casualty was confidence in the American electoral system. After a long silence Surkov published a revealing article in February. Called

‘Putin’s Long State’ it is in large part propaganda but nonetheless worthy of dissection. He suggests that Putinism will outlive the man himself, an ‘ideology of the future’ as he calls it.

Perhaps unsurprisingly he asserts Russian expansionism but his point is not just political or military but rather ideological expansion. Surkov mocks Western concerns, he admits that Russia

‘started an information counter-offensive against the West.’ He continues ‘Foreign politicians believe that Russia interferes in elections and referenda worldwide…[in fact] it interferes in

their brains and they don’t know what to do with their altered state of consciousness.’ There are significant holes in Surkov’s argument but the detail is almost besides the point. Surkov’s

vision of non-linear war has been extremely successful in allowing Russia to leverage comparatively weak conventional military power, to devastating effect in Syria and Ukraine. Western

powers simply seem unable to calibrate an effective response. As the world shifts towards a new multipolar disposition of power, America’s current isolationism renders it unable to confront

this new strategic environment. As a result NATO is increasingly finding itself competing against direct aggressors such as Russia and China, who whilst antipathetic to her collective

values, appeal to individual member states. As Qiao and Wang predicted NATO must also now contain friendly states competing with each other such as Germany and France subverting US policy on

Iran. NATO needs a radical rethink about its mission. Purely geographic defence is a paradigm that makes no sense in the world of _Unrestricted Warfare_. NATO cannot simply define itself

with regard to protecting the Baltics from military threat. The original core of NATO is under attack as well, not to mention the alliance itself. Russia and China’s assault is

extra-territorial and is in large part an ideological challenge. Russia’s particular skill has been the ability to harness the destructive potential within the alliance members. Election

interference in particular has had a corrosive effect within Western democracies. Surkov’s bombastic rhetoric is itself weaponised, an extremely appealing alternative for those countries who

feel aggrieved by the US led liberal world order. The challenge for NATO will be in conceptualising how its members think about war and peace, particularly as their relationships with each

other wax and wane. They face a particular challenge that neither Russia nor China do, retaining liberal values and upholding the rules-based global order when Unrestricted warfare

explicitly subverts norms and rules. Surkov doesn’t explicitly state it but NATO is already at war, one it is rapidly losing, perhaps without even realising.