NATO after 9/11: An Alliance in Continuing Decline (review)

With this book the author has two basic tasks: to document that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been confronted with internal disarray, and to prove that the disarray means that NATO is on a steady course to oblivion. The author argues that because there is no sufficient common threat to the vital interests of all of the allied members, and because fundamental differences have divided the United States from Canada and Europe since the 1990s, "NATO will continue to prove less and less valuable to its members with each passing year." While the book accomplishes the first task beyond any conceivable doubt, it demonstrates that it is impossible to prove the second task. The book paints an accurate and vivid depiction of the current transatlantic disarray but is uncertain on whether this disarray will be durable and have destructive long-term effects. It does not consider the view that it may be a temporary condition.

A close examination of the book's methodological approach reveals the reasons for both the critical juncture of NATO's existence (which is where the strength of the book lies) and the difficulty in predicting specific events (which is where the weakness of the book lies). The book breaks up NATO's chronological existence into two easy parts: the Cold War years, and the post–Cold War years. Drawing from mainstream international relations theory, which has been the basis for arguments that alliances exist to serve participating states' vital national interests, the book notes that NATO came to life because the Soviet Union threatened the existence of the states that became its members, and has functioned as a defensive organization under US auspices and security guarantees. As long as the Soviet threat was present, NATO's existence was justified by the vital national security interests of the allied states and facilitated by US leadership and resources.

The author argues that the dissolution of the Soviet Union erased the possibility of it attacking any NATO states. Yet the resulting changes in the international system shifted the threat focus of NATO to domestic political and economic crises, which, if unchecked, would pose serious threats to the stability of the post–Cold War international system. Under the new systemic arrangement, the author argues, NATO gradually drifted from an organization that was based on collective defense to an organization that would rely on collective security. "NATO's leader," the book notes, "assumed that all member-states held a common concern for engaging those 'instabilities' and were willing to use NATO as a tool for ameliorating conflicts. Such thinking was the slippery slope to collective security." The underlying assumption here is that while collective defense is practical, collective security is not. The League of Nations was based on collective security and failed precisely because of its impracticality. A threat to any specific state is not the same as a threat to all states. When the vital interests of each of the member states are not threatened, states remain unwilling to act, and collective security is rendered inoperative. NATO's expansion, its shift of focus away from territorial defense, and its assumed commitment to out-of-area operations paved the way for its drift toward collective security. However, the Balkan crisis, the book argues, demonstrated the unfeasibility of collective security and signaled the beginning of NATO's decline: "Conflict in Yugoslavia during the early 1990s illuminated the sad reality that the Western capitals did not share a common perspective on security threats." According to the book, Yugoslavia was a test for NATO, and NATO failed it miserably.

Decisions made by the Bush administration after 9/11 ruptured the rift within NATO. Signs of the rift appeared as early as 1992 when an internal Pentagon study, produced by Undersecretary for Policy Paul Wolfowitz and his staff, was leaked to the press. The study "postulated that American interests were best served by maintaining overwhelming military superiority and dominance...