NATO’s leaders must live up to its founders’ ambitions

It was New Year’s Eve 1947 when U.S. State Department Director for European Affairs Jack Hickerson strode into the office of his deputy, Theodore Achilles, and announced that the two of them were about to change the world.

The result, following 16 months of negotiations, was the treaty that created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

NATO’s leaders will gather in Washington for their annual summit next month, facing some of the thorniest questions in its 75 years of history — from the war in Ukraine to what role, if any, it should play as tensions grow in Asia.

Amid such turmoil — and the appointment of the first new alliance secretary general in a decade (outgoing chief Jens Stoltenberg looks set to be replaced by former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte) — today’s NATO leaders would do well to learn from the organization’s history.  

It was a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, Donald Rumsfeld, who once quipped in the 1970s that the alliance was saved roughly once a decade by a new crisis with the Kremlin — and the Ukraine invasion has indeed delivered a shot of adrenaline.

In the months that followed the initial offensive towards Kyiv, eastern and central European states, particularly the Baltic states, lobbied furiously for increased protection. NATO was able to move forces swiftly to reinforce its eastern flank.

Huge strides have been made in the last two years to draw up plans to defend the continent. Indeed, nothing like it has really been seen since the early 1950s, when Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was recalled to military duty from Columbia University to become NATO’s first Supreme Allied Commander Europe at the start of 1951.

Barely a year before running for the presidency, Eisenhower and his team built NATO’s modern military structures. While the key decisions when it came to any Cold War crisis were almost always made in Washington, the very existence of the alliance — alongside that of atomic weapons — made it harder for the Soviet Union to divide and conquer Europe without risking Armageddon.

The legacy of that is hard to overstate. Whereas those in the U.S. might have faced conscription to go and fight in Vietnam, no European city was bombed or shelled from the end of World War II to the outbreak of fighting in the Balkans in late 1991.

From Korea in 1950 to the present day, wars have raged outside the borders of the alliance, but not so far within them. And NATO can continue to boast that it has not lost an inch of territory to an aggressor.

NATO’s next 25 years, however, promise to be perhaps even more challenging than its first 75. For the first time, the rise of China and the very real prospect of a conflict around Taiwan means Europe can no longer be Washington’s number one priority.

The prospect of a renewed Trump administration has further rattled European allies, although diplomats say it would be a mistake to talk of “panic.” The majority of European members now commit at least 2 percent of GDP to defense, and the summit in Washington may call for that to grow.

That, of course, is heavily a consequence of the horror in Ukraine. Increasingly, European nations look set to be drawn into ever-greater support, with the coming summit likely to see advances on French plans to lead several countries delivering military training inside Ukraine itself.

Critically, the Washington summit will likely see NATO nations agree that the alliance will step forward to coordinate weapons supplies through the currently U.S.-led so-called “Ramstein process.” It is a move officials acknowledge is deliberately designed to ensure Kyiv gets support even if Trump wins in November.

Many in Central Europe regard defeating — or at least weakening — Russia in Ukraine as the best way of reducing the direct threat to themselves. But with Russia’s economy now mobilized for war and U.S. officials warning that China is getting its own forces ready for a potential Taiwan invasion by 2027, they increasingly worry that Putin or a successor in the Kremlin may reach the point in the coming years where the Russians take the gamble of attacking one or more eastern NATO states.

The best way of preventing this, as it always has been, is for member states to be able to defend themselves and for the alliance to be able to rush reinforcements to the scene and threaten Russian territory with both conventional and nuclear strikes if needed.

Deterrence against Russia will require considerable military capability — and European states are increasingly realizing that will require an ability to corral industry into delivering the necessary shells, missiles and drones, as well as military structures to recruit large numbers in time of major war. Nuclear deterrence remains similarly vital — and the alliance has quietly increased the profile of its nuclear planning and exercises over the last two years.

This year’s NATO military drills — the largest since the Cold War, involving some 90,000 personnel from the Arctic to the Mediterranean — were part of re-establishing credibility. But following the recent addition of Sweden and Finland to NATO’s ranks, making decisions with 32 members is a much tougher diplomatic task than it was with the initial 12.

Hickerson and Achilles would almost certainly be proud of the enduring value of their NATO project. But if today’s leaders are to maintain its success and keep the peace for another generation, they must live up to the ambition and determination of the organization’s forebears. Failure to do so might prove catastrophic.

Peter Apps is a global defense columnist for Reuters news agency, a British Army reservist and author of the new book “Deterring Armageddon: A Biography of NATO.”