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Analysis: The NATO Alliance at War

Council on Foreign Relations

Updated: April 2, 2008
Author: Greg Bruno

Ahead of a presidential trip to Europe built around the upcoming summit of the Atlantic alliance in Romania, President Bush said his chief goal “is to make sure NATO stays relevant.” The best way to do that, he said, is to “deal with the threats of Afghanistan.” Yet when Bush arrives in Bucharest for the three-day summit, he’ll find his allies often define relevance differently.

NATO, experts say, suffers from a deficit of strategic vision. The definition and redefinition since 1991 of an alliance once held together by the Soviet threat has yet to produce a long-term strategy everyone can coalesce around. And in Afghanistan, argue Julianne Smith of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Michael Williams of the Royal United Services Institute, NATO has become “a two-tier alliance” (PDF). On the one hand are members like Germany that view reconstruction as the primary objective. On the other is the United States, pushing security and stability. Domestic political pressures frame the debate. Transatlantic Trends, an annual public opinion survey, finds just 30 percent of the European public supports combat operations (PDF) against the Taliban in Afghanistan, compared to 68 percent of Americans. An uptick in suicide attacks in 2007 (PDF), along with corruption, crime, and an illicit drug economy, have contributed to the violence, and to Europe’s squeamishness. Last year, 232 NATO and non-NATO forces were killed, marking the deadliest year for the coalition.

Troop commitments by NATO member states, and the limitations their forces serve under, reflect this split in attitudes toward the alliance’s Afghan project. The U.S. supplies about 19,000 of the 47,000 NATO troops (PDF) in Afghanistan. Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands make up the bulk of the remainder.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2008 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.