NATO has turned 75. When its leaders meet in Washington in July, they will celebrate the fact that it has endured so long. But an alliance needs to do more than survive to be truly successful. It also needs to serve the interests of its members. NATO’s history is the story of a struggle to do this—despite major disparities between U.S. and European military power, a growing number of allies, diverging interests, and an expanding geographic scope.
Today, allies are unified in the face of Russia’s attack on Ukraine. But unless adjustments are made to adapt a much larger alliance to a more complex geopolitical environment, history reveals that this unity may be fleeting.
NATO has had four major phases in its history. The first began after World War II, when 12 nations signed the North Atlantic Treaty. That early alliance had three aims: to defang Germany by embracing it; to defend itself against a mounting Soviet menace; and to bind the United States to Europe, at a moment when it seemed likely to withdraw.
By the 1960s, the military standoff with the Soviet Union had stabilized, and for the next two decades, the alliance continued to serve the three aims of its founders. But intra-alliance frictions were serious.
Irritated by the United States’ dominant role, French President Charles de Gaulle pulled out of NATO’s military structures in 1966. U.S. President Richard Nixon pursued superpower détente with the Soviets over the other allies’ heads. President Ronald Reagan deployed medium-range missiles to Europe in the 1980s, provoking mass protests in the streets.
Nevertheless, in the end, the superior strength of the West’s free market economies triumphed when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989—a peaceful victory that was extraordinary in the history of great-power competitions.
With the Soviet Union in collapse, many scholars expected the alliance would disband now that it had completed its mission. Instead, NATO found a new raison d’être by transforming from a defensive military alliance into a force for broad-based political change in Europe. Thus began the second phase in its history.
In the decade after the end of the Cold War, the alliance tried to stop the bloody ethnic wars raging in the former Yugoslavia. It was moderately successful, helping to contain these conflicts, but did not always resolve them. The costs were sometimes high—for example, when NATO aircraft bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1999 during the Kosovo War.
NATO also embarked on a controversial process of expansion aimed at rooting democratic and free market institutions in European nations where communism had retreated. At the Washington summit in 1999, which celebrated NATO’s 50th anniversary, the alliance thus welcomed the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary as new members. The number of allies grew to 19.
The pomp and circumstance of that 50th anniversary summit buried real conflicts created by the yawning gap between U.S. and European military power. This gap had emerged clearly before and after the summit, as the United States found itself having to take on most of the burden for military operations in Kosovo. As one clever observer put it, Americans seemed to be from Mars, Europeans from Venus.
Meanwhile, European allies drifted away from NATO. France and Britain pursued deeper European integration and an independent European military. This created more friction with Washington, which feared it was losing control of the alliance.
Rifts within the alliance were thus already evident when al Qaeda struck the United States on 9/11, but these terrible attacks helped resuscitate it. In the third phase of its history, counterterrorism became NATO’s new call to action, animating the allies and suppressing their fault lines.
In a truly global war on terrorism, NATO’s focus drifted far from Europe. Allies invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, declaring that they viewed al Qaeda’s attack on the United States as an attack on all of them. They joined Washington in hunting al Qaeda and battling the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the alliance soon split over the Iraq War, with major allies such as France and Germany protesting the U.S. invasion because it had nothing to do with fighting terrorists.
In this phase, Europe attempted to retool its militaries for a new form of warfare among faraway peoples. With limited budgets and political support, this was hard to do.
The Pentagon grew frustrated with the complexities of leading dozens of allies in Afghanistan, each of which operated under a different set of restrictions. The International Security Assistance Force that NATO ran there, usually referred to by its acronym “ISAF,” was often ridiculed among the U.S. rank and file as “I Saw Americans Fight.” But Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama wanted the allies involved—however nominally—in the United States’ long wars because allies added political legitimacy to the U.S. use of military force globally.
NATO also continued enlarging its membership in this third phase, growing the alliance to 28 members by 2009. New members Poland and Estonia brought new perspectives on European security that often clashed with those of the Western European founders. Central and Eastern European members, which once suffered under the Soviet yoke, saw NATO primarily as a means of tying the United States to their security. They became wholehearted supporters of the U.S.-led global war on terrorism, even though they felt no immediate threat from al Qaeda. They built ties with U.S. special operations and intelligence services. Some took the need for military spending more seriously than their Western European counterparts. They gained popularity in Washington.
In return, these new members wanted U.S. troops on their soil, more attention to the threat from Russia, and Washington’s support for further NATO enlargement. That push climaxed at the 2008 Bucharest summit, when Bush, ignoring the recommendations of his senior advisors, strong-armed reluctant European heads of state to promise eventual NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. Russia promptly invaded the latter.
Even though Russia had invaded Georgia, concerns about its trajectory were suppressed in the first Obama term in an effort to reset relations with Moscow. They reemerged with a vengeance, however, when Russia attacked Ukraine in 2014—thus opening the fourth and most recent phase of NATO’s history.
The return of Russia as NATO’s major adversary harked back to the Cold War. It refocused attention on the now long-standing power gap between the U.S. and European militaries. More than ever, the United States seemed to be footing the bill for Europe’s defense. It was one thing for Europe to spend less on defense at a time when the alliance was fighting al Qaeda or the Islamic State, terrorists whose primary target was the United States. It was another thing for Europe to invest so little now that Russia directly threatened it.
At the 2014 Wales summit, NATO leaders pledged publicly to spend 2 percent of national income on defense. But most European allies dragged their feet, a fact that U.S. President Donald Trump seized on when he entered office in 2017.
Trump was not NATO’s only critic in these years, however. French President Emmanuel Macron pronounced the alliance “brain-dead” in 2019 after frustration at the allies’ bickering. That bickering was in part the result of some allies’ democratic backsliding. NATO aspires to be an alliance of free market democracies, but not all allies have always met the standard. Turkey, for example, was sometimes run by its military during the Cold War and has backslid again under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Hungary, which was once a rising democracy in Central Europe, has also become more illiberal under Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Meanwhile, the center of gravity of U.S. national security strategy was shifting away from counterterrorism toward a new era of great-power competition. For most Americans, this meant taking the problem of China seriously. But for Europeans, it meant renewed focus on Russia. This created a major new tension at the core of the alliance, a tension that Russia’s full-scale attack on Ukraine in 2022 accentuated.
That war is now well into its third year. The good news is that European allies, including major economies such as Germany, are finally beginning to meet their pledges to spend more seriously on their own defense. But it has taken more than a decade of U.S. pressure, and many hurdles remain. Pledges made back in 2014 are moreover insufficient for the future challenge, given that Russia has retooled its entire economy around its war effort (as some front-line countries recognize). Moreover, rebuilding Europe’s shattered peace will remain extremely difficult and very costly. In the interim, Europe’s weight in U.S. strategic thinking will continue to decline.
As NATO celebrates its 75th anniversary, the situation resembles the Cold War—but only vaguely. Russia is again NATO’s main adversary, but the front lines have been pushed to the east, and there is a hot war going on in Europe itself. NATO confronts Russia with great economic and military strength, but Europe is no longer the center of U.S. foreign and security policy, which has shifted to Asia.
If NATO is to survive the rifts of the past phases in its history, Europe will need to take over far more of the challenge of meeting the threat from Russia—diplomatically and militarily. The United States can help but not as much as Europe is accustomed to. Expecting Washington to tolerate the trans-Atlantic power imbalances of the post-Cold War era is a surefire way to create new rifts that will tear the alliance apart.
The Biden administration is the most pro-Atlantic administration that Europe is likely to ever see again. It wants to downplay the tension between Europe and Asia by fusing the two theaters together with the argument that the United States faces a single, united threat in China and Russia. The White House has thus invited key Asian allies to participate in the upcoming summit. The idea of turning NATO into a global alliance of democracies is not new but continues its appeal in some quarters.
But any effort to fuse Russia and China together into a single threat will only go so far. America’s allies in Europe ultimately have little to offer the United States militarily in Asia, just as the United States can be expected to do only so much to support their security in Europe. Russia is also not China, which still has a deep economic interdependence with both Europe and the United States. The interdependencies between America’s Asian allies and China are even deeper. Most of all, NATO should want China to pull back from its entente with Russia, not see it grow closer.
Meanwhile, the pressure to enlarge the alliance eastward continues as Ukraine and its friends push the alliance to realize the promise of membership from back in 2008. But that promise was made under entirely different geopolitical circumstances, when Russia was far weaker and not nearly so hostile. Ukraine also has a long way to go before it meets NATO military or democratic standards. Offering it membership now would risk dangerously lowering the bar and prolonging the war. The military requirements for defending it have not been seriously studied.
To be sure, it is important that NATO has survived for so many decades, but staying alive can’t be the standard for judging success. Real success comes from serving the concrete interests of the members of the alliance. In a more threatening geopolitical environment, the argument for allies is as strong as ever, and it’s better if they share U.S. values. But with a much larger alliance, persistent gaps in military strength, and divergent interests, managing NATO’s tensions will be even more difficult than in the past.