My review of a new history of NATO by Sten Rynning. Remember that you can support this blog by buying me a coffee.
As leaders gathered in Washington last week to mark the 75th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty's signing, the mood was hardly one of a party. Russia's war against Ukraine overshadowed the summit, with missiles striking a children's hospital in Kyiv on the eve of the NATO gathering. China started naval exercises in the Pacific and announced joint military drills with Belarus. Journalists' eyes, meanwhile, keenly watched US President Joe Biden's performance as doubts grow about his fitness for office. Gaffe–prone Biden managed to introduce Volodomyr Zelenskyy as 'President Putin of Ukraine' and refer to Kamala Harris as 'Vice–President Trump'. Few paid much attention to the incoming NATO Secretary–General, Mark Rutte, so preoccupied were they with other matters.
In the final communique, the alliance referred to Ukraine's 'irreversible path' to NATO membership. The wording is more favourable for Ukraine's hopes than the last summit communique, which waffled: 'We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met.' Obtaining agreement on the term 'irreversible' is significant, not least in the event of potential negotiations with Russia, but it is still indecisive about when Ukraine might join, still looks like kicking the can down the road. (Meanwhile, new UK prime minister Keir Starmer sounded a positive note of support to Ukraine by saying it could use British missiles against targets in Russia – and then his office walked back on the comments.)
What is NATO?
Timed for the seventy–fifth anniversary, the Danish political scientist Sten Rynning has written a new history of NATO. The heightened geopolitical tensions in current affairs make the book doubly relevant. As Rynning says: 'NATO was and is a testbed for the geopolitical relevance of Western values... President Putin has effectively declared war on [NATO], with the purpose of ultimately denying Ukraine the right to choose NATO, and NATO the right to choose Ukraine' (p.2). This claim about NATO's relevance is fair if you understand the bloc to be something more than a mutual defence alliance, and this history certainly does conceive of NATO as the product of grander ambition albeit interspersed with periods of lowered expectations.
Rynning presents NATO's history as a cycle of boom and bust, or more accurately 'ambition and crisis' (p.11). Part I covers the initial period of grand ambitions. He ties NATO's emergence to the ideals of the UN Charter. Thus, the UN's vision of something closer to collective security, even a security community, is embodied in Article 2 of the North Atlantic Treaty which talks of strengthening 'free institutions' and economic cooperation. It is this sense of community, inherent in the origins of NATO in Rynning's telling, that engenders the possibility of enlargement codified in Article 10 of the Treaty and insists that NATO has always been something more than a mere military alliance and has always strived to overcome balance of power politics in Europe (p.60–2). Cold war histories do not always present NATO this way and I found this quite a refreshing and convincing presentation.
Part II, covering the years from 1966 to 1989, sees a retreat into realpolitik. What interested me here was how even in this era NATO contemplated out–of–area operations in, for example, a report by Lester Pearson (p.79). The new realism, and belief in the need to address security issues outside the North Atlantic area, also found expression in a report commissioned by NATO's leaders. Belgian foreign minister Pierre Harmel's report described the 'first function' of NATO as 'maintain[ing] adequate strength ... to deter aggression', while broader ambitions were found in its 'second function' of maintaining stable ties with adversaries. The key note of this era, however, was a diminshing ambition: '[By] the late 1970s, NATO had become a conservative alliance. The allies could, at best, hope to preserve NATO, not, as once was the case, to transform Europe' (p.137).
Part III sees grand ambitions return as the cold war concludes. George Bush famously spoke of a Europe 'whole and free' and the original ambitions of NATO found their recapitulation (p.161–2). Bush also dubbed it an 'age of freedom' (pp.179–80). The 1990 London declaration averred: 'NATO must become an institution where Europeans, Canadians and Americans work together not only for the common defence, but to build new partnerships with all the nations of Europe' (p.182). Realists eagerly pointed out that these ambitions might chafe with the Russians, especially if NATO heeded east Europeans' calls for a membership perspective. George Kennan famously called enlargement a 'fateful error'.
The debates within the alliance in the 1990s were the same ones we see today: those who see NATO as a force for good against those who express anxiety its enlargement only ever leads to a deterioration of the security situation. The warnings from Russia were, of course, there from the beginning of the post–cold war period. Boris Yeltsin worried that NATO enlargement will cause 'conflict tomorrow' (p.204). The debate between Atlanticism versus Europeanness within NATO is another enduring theme and perhaps the book doesn't articulate this as cleanly as it might. Lastly, NATO acting 'out of area' returns to the fore in the 1990s as the organisation strives to understand its role in a world without the Soviet Union: first, in Europe and the former Yugoslavia; later in Afghanistan.
But if the 1990s were a time of renewed ambition, optimism soon began to fade. NATO's 2008 summit in Bucharest is hard to look back on kindly: the promise that Georgia and Ukraine would one day be members of the alliance has haunted everything since. Invited as a guest to Bucharest, Vladimir Putin railed against NATO enlargement and by the end of that year the alliance looked 'short on political oxygen' (p.229). NATO's response to Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea was weak, with the Normandy format negotiations taking NATO out of the picture (pp.243–7). NATO at this time looked less like a community and more like a mere collective defence alliance. Meanwhile, US President Barack Obama's brittle 'red line' on Syria's use of chemical weapons reflected badly on US leadership.
Part IV of the book assesses the most recent crises to confront NATO and sober their ambitions once more. Afghanistan had taken on added importance given the allies' differences of opinion over the Iraq war, and NATO's role ended in a mess as the allies botched the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. This section of the book takes us from Libya to Syria to Ukraine. Donald Trump described NATO as 'obsolete' and Emmanuel Macron called it 'brain dead'. It's easy to see in all this why many pundits think a weak NATO emboldened Putin's Russia to move towards its full–scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The NATO of the future
What comes across clearly in the book is how NATO tried hard not to provoke Russia. In the context of Afghanistan, NATO sought to develop 'lean and agile national forces... too lean to threaten Russia, but capable of chasing terrorists in [the war on terror]' (p.217). Similarly, as NATO enlarged in the early 2000s it strived to 'soften' its military posture by focusing on cultivating interoperability with the new members rather than any permanent troop deployments on their territories (p.207). Rynning's comment that NATO 'enlarge[d] politically, but not militarily' is an intriguing formulation (p.207). It is only since Russia's post–2014 intervention in Ukraine that NATO began to change its position on deployments in eastern Europe, resulting in an 'enhanced forward presence' in Poland and the Baltic states.
As Russia wages war in Ukraine, couching its actions in language of being at war with NATO, one might be wary of rose–tinted histories of NATO. I think Rynning gets the balance right in recognising that, however lofty the collective ambition, NATO members have always acted in their own interests. This is where, in my opinion, the book makes its most vital contribution: recognising this self–interest without resorting to blaming NATO for where we presently are. For example, having described the negotiations about Germany's future and the reunified Germany's full membership of NATO, Rynning says:
Some might even be tempted to conclude that NATO bribed the Soviet Union (and then Russia) into a political order against which it would sooner or later revolt. The result, one could then venture, is the war that Russia began in 2022 in Ukraine. (p.187)
In fact, Rynning explains, that particular decision was always about Germany – both its wishes and the interests of NATO in respect of it – and that meant tying Germany into the security order so that Europe could avoid a return to balance of power politics. It was not really ever about getting one up on (or bribing) the Soviets/Russians. There is plenty one might quibble about here but it probably was the best solution for the greatest number of states.
Nor does Rynning eschew recommending different ways of doing things. Having carefully explained the history, the book offers three lessons about how NATO's future must deviate from its past. NATO must, he argues, 'correct its trajectory' and avoid the cyclical nature of its first 75 years (p.11). First of all, he says, NATO must 'temper its aspirations with geopolitics': this confuses me slightly since the 'bust' moments in the foregoing cyclical history are marked by geopolitical realism. Indeed, the author invokes the 1967 Harmel report as an exemplar of what could be, which, as mentioned above, coincided with one of the 'crisis' turns in the cycle (p.280–1). The 'lesson' seems to be that NATO ought to assert itself as a traditional alliance and eschew high–minded political ideas (cf. p.274); is this passing the test of geopolitical relevance mentioned at the outset? The implications of that might not bode well for Ukraine. It's also a proposition that Rynning thinks requires focusing on China in the years ahead (p.264, p.274). He is certainly correct in suggesting that NATO needs to engage the global south if it is to have an effective policy on China (p.282).
Secondly, NATO 'must foster European leadership'. This is agreeable but not easy to achieve given the disagreements and that have populated the preceding three hundred pages. The NATO Secretary–General is always a European, yet American leadership is obvious in other ways. Thirdly, NATO 'must think ahead' which, in the author's hands, is a call for fewer summits and more strategic planning. Again, an agreeable call but not easy to achieve. When military chiefs have been allowed to define a strategy, it has sometimes been resisted by political leaders (see e.g. p.256–8).
I found this a generally persuasive history, highly readable (I got through most of it on holiday and it passed muster as beach reading!), and I certainly learnt plenty from it. The earlier sections are based on archival documents, whereas later periods rely more on public statements and the author's first hand knowledge of NATO. There are memorable depictions of key moments, whether the relaxed atmosphere at the 'swimsuit summit' in Guadeloupe in 1979 or NATO Secretary–General Manfred Worner dying in hospital as he steers the bloc through its intervention in the former Yugoslavia. We see NATO's deputy secretary–general pouring Crimean 'champagne' down the toilet (p.252). These details make the narrative livelier and evocative of the subject matter.
For its seventieth anniversary in 2019, NATO members' heads of state did not even meet for a summit (p.258). NATO feels far healthier five years on with the recent accession of Finland and Sweden. It is ironic that Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine has invigorated the sense of NATO both as a defence alliance and as a community. The likely return of Trump to the US presidency could be tricky to navigate, but if people allow him to claim some credit (however spuriously) for the strengthening of NATO, then he might be more invested in its future. That might keep the alliance in fine fettle. This new volume, which makes for a first rate addition to any bookshelf, is a reminder how varied NATO's course has run. Its waters also run deep.
Sten Rynning, NATO: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World's Most Powerful Alliance (Yale University Press: New Haven and London; March 2024). ISBN–978–0300270112.
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