Global NATO

Ivo Daalder and James Goldgeier

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2006

Summary:  The advent of a new global politics after the Cold War has led NATO to expand its geographic reach and the range of its operations. Now, NATO must extend its membership to any democratic state that can help it fulfill its new responsibilities. Only a truly global alliance can address the global challenges of the day.

Ivo Daalder is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. James Goldgeier is Professor of Political Science at George Washington University and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

With the emergence of a Europe whole and free in the 1990s, the strategic purpose of the United States' European engagement was essentially fulfilled. And so the United States spent much of the decade struggling to define how to use its power. Washington debated its role in preventing ethnic conflict and genocide and wondered whether the U.S. military should henceforth be used primarily for humanitarian intervention and postconflict stabilization. The attacks of September 11, 2001, put an abrupt end to that discussion; the global nature of the challenges confronting the United States had become obvious to its leaders and the public.

This new reality transformed not only U.S. foreign policy but also the role of history's most successful alliance. On September 12, 2001, NATO members took the unprecedented step of invoking the North Atlantic Treaty's collective defense provisions, under which an attack against one alliance member is deemed to be an attack against all of them. At first, the Bush administration rejected any direct NATO involvement in military operations in Afghanistan. But it later realized that such involvement was necessary to help it meet the challenges of the global age, particularly because the deployment of forces to Iraq left the United States needing more help in securing and rebuilding Afghanistan.

In August 2003, NATO formally took charge of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which is tasked with helping to provide security in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Although the ISAF initially operated in the relative safety of the capital and its environs, the force has steadily expanded its responsibility and reach throughout Afghanistan, including into the dangerous southern section of the country. NATO's presence in the country has consequently grown from 5,000 troops at the beginning of operations to 9,000 troops today, and plans call for further expansion to 15,000 troops by the end of 2006.

NATO's command of the operation in Afghanistan is by no means the only example of its current involvement outside of Europe. Despite divisions within the alliance over the war in Iraq, NATO forces have trained 1,500 Iraqi military officers and coordinated the delivery of much-needed military equipment to Iraq's security forces. NATO airlifted 5,000 African Union troops into Darfur and helped rotate the forces that are stationed there. It has provided training to AU officers and contributed technical assistance to the AU mission at its headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The United States and its European allies "now find that our entire agenda is pivoting from an inward focus on Europe to an outward focus," Nicholas Burns, the U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, said last December. "U.S.-European relations are increasingly a function of events in the Middle East, Asia and Africa."

As NATO's geographic range has expanded, so has the scope of its operations; the alliance now takes on jobs that are no longer strictly related to territorial integrity and security but pertain to international stability more broadly. Last year, for example, NATO airlifted 3,500 tons of supplies donated by alliance members and other countries into the earthquake-stricken region of Kashmir and provided medical and other relief. It also responded to the tsunami in Indonesia by donating material that was used in the construction of four new bridges, and it supplied relief items, such as food, water-purification units, generators, and helicopters, to the victims of Hurricane Katrina in the United States.

GROWING PAINS

Clearly, NATO is changing. But is it changing enough? If the point of the alliance is no longer territorial defense but bringing together countries with similar values and interests to combat global problems, then NATO no longer needs to have an exclusively transatlantic character. Other democratic countries share NATO's values and many common interests -- including Australia, Brazil, Japan, India, New Zealand, South Africa, and South Korea -- and all of them can greatly contribute to NATO's efforts by providing additional military forces or logistical support to respond to global threats and needs. NATO operations in the Balkans and Afghanistan have benefited greatly from contributions made by non-NATO members. Australia, Japan, and South Korea have sent substantial numbers of troops to Iraq in support of efforts by NATO members to stabilize the country. Together with other non-NATO democracies, such as Brazil, India, and South Africa, they have also contributed significantly to peacekeeping operations around the globe.

NATO has begun to recognize the need for strengthening and formalizing its relations with countries beyond the transatlantic community. NATO leaders began to discuss how to relate to nonmember countries at the alliance's meeting of foreign ministers in April. "Since NATO is having its operations over a strategic distance, it means that there is also the need for a dialogue with other interested nations," NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer declared. He suggested that NATO become "an alliance with global partners."

These remarks are a welcome sign that NATO recognizes the need to go global. But partners are not the same as allies, and dialogue is not the same as multinational planning, exercises, and operations. NATO should see these global partnerships not as a final objective but as a first step toward formal membership. The alliance adopted a similarly staggered approach in the mid-1990s when it began to work with former Warsaw Pact countries through its Partnership for Peace, which started out by allowing those countries' militaries to participate in training exercises and certain peacekeeping operations with alliance members. Although initially some saw the partnership as an alternative to NATO membership, it soon became a means to joining NATO. NATO's new global-partnership project should play a similar role by preparing the alliance to transform itself from a transatlantic entity into a global one. NATO need not decide in advance which countries it would invite to join its ranks; it need only decide that membership should in principle be open to non-European countries.