To mark the occasion of the 75th anniversary of NATO, we are sharing this extract from Sten Rynning’s new book, NATO: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance.
NATO’s vision of being free and allied contrasts with the Eurasian vision of President Vladimir Putin’s Russia or the Sinocentric vision of President Xi Jinping’s China. Essentially, NATO was and remains a testbed for the geopolitical relevance of Western values. What happens next to NATO is of concern to everyone.1
NATO lies at the heart of Europe’s security order. And that is no small matter. President Putin has effectively declared war on it, with the purpose of ultimately denying Ukraine the right to choose NATO, and NATO the right to choose Ukraine. Next to Russia stands Xi Jinping’s China. Their “no limits” friendship falls short of Chinese military assistance in the Ukraine war, but highlights the growing alignment of the two powers in opposition to the United States and NATO. According to China, the war of attrition in Ukraine is a result not of Russia’s attack, but of how NATO’s “five consecutive rounds of eastward expansion” have violated “Russia’s legitimate security demands.”
In the face of this assault on Europe’s order, the NATO allies have had to go back to square one, so as to define their principles for order and provide the military muscle required to protect that order. NATO is the vehicle by which the Western allies—beginning with the United States, but involving all thirty-two countries—will invite Ukraine into an enhanced security partnership, and eventually into their alliance. It is a new order for NATO. And it is not just about Ukraine: it encompasses the entire NATO frontier—which, as a direct result of Russia’s war, now includes Finland and soon Sweden. Th e allies must build up their military capacity to protect and defend this entire territory. Before Russia launched its war in February 2022, the allies did not really take this matter too seriously. Now they do. But forward defense—the ability to defend at the very frontier of NATO territory—requires enormous political-military eff ort, and it is around the table of the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s decision-making chamber, that this effort will be shaped.
NATO allies have faced similar challenges before. But something has changed: power is no longer shifting in the West’s favour—as it did in 1949 (when NATO was founded) or in 1990–91 (when the Soviet Union, NATO’s Cold War adversary, disintegrated). China is the rising power, and it exudes the confidence of a rising power. The Western allies, by contrast, seem hesitant, unsure of how they can build a sustainable order in the face of adversity. They have provided considerable aid to Ukraine, but they have also restricted that aid in order to prevent an escalation. Th is pattern of significant but limited assistance comes after a decade of indecision. The bruising war on terror led the allies to seek to extricate themselves from wars in faraway countries, so as to carry out nation-building at home. Though their policy styles differed considerably, Presidents Obama and Trump shared this agenda. Other allied leaders likewise became introverted, expecting others to do the hard lifting for the NATO collective. And so, as China rose and Russia fulminated, NATO weakened.
Historically, the NATO allies have responded to international opportunity not with timidity, but with a degree of overconfidence. In 1949 they aimed high, as indeed they did again in 1990–91: in both instances they offered to “transform” international relations into something better. In the 1950s, this high-minded aspiration fuelled a competition among the leading allies over the political spoils of leadership. Half a century later, it led the allies to undertake a vast and impossible mission to build a society for the Afghan government they had sponsored. The allies set up NATO to exercise power with restraint, but they have not always had the wisdom to do so. And there is a risk that the allies will once again bite off more than they can chew, only this time in a confrontation with Russia and China.
For Americans, NATO remains a critical resource of sustained international leadership. Th e alliance is a hub of growing attraction for allies and partners committed to the international order. When it has utilized NATO’s complex multinational diplomacy, the United States has been able to win high-quality policy reflection, consensus, and resilient security commitments; whenever the country has ignored NATO consultations, it has typically suffered.2 NATO helps the United States guide the exercise of power by free and pluralist counsel, and it helps US decision-makers mobilize greater force than the country could manage on its own.
For Europeans, NATO is just as important, but for different reasons. Europe has a wealth of nations and free counsel, but it cannot exercise power collectively. NATO—not the European Union (EU)—is where European allies can have multiple voices and exercise real military power alongside their American ally. At heart, Europe’s peace is built on America’s extended nuclear deterrent: to imagine Europe’s strategic autonomy independent of that deterrent is to deny military reality. Russia’s predilection for hard power is there to remind the European allies that if NATO did not exist, they would have to invent it.
About the author
Sten Rynning has researched and written on NATO for twenty-five years. He is a professor and director of the Danish Institute for Advanced Study, University of Southern Denmark, and the author of NATO in Afghanistan and NATO Renewed.
About the book
NATO
From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance
Sten Rynning
“A brilliantly researched, incisive and magisterial history of the most powerful military alliance the world has known. Rynning takes us into the very soul of NATO to explain how it has endured and why it remains so essential to global security. Rynning shows how NATO resurged to counter Russian aggression, and how it needs to evolve further to meet the challenges of the future.”—Theo Farrell, author of Unwinnable: Britain’s War in Afghanistan
Also of interest
Featured image: Photo by Jannik on Unsplash
- Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, “Wang Yi expounds
China’s fi ve-point position on the current Ukraine issue,” February 26, 2022,
https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/zxxx_662805/202202/t20220226_10645855.html. ↩︎ - David P. Calleo, Th e Atlantic Fantasy: Th e US, NATO, and Europe, Baltimore,
MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970; David P. Calleo, Follies of Power:
America’s unipolar fantasy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009. ↩︎
