Why NATO Still Exists – The Atlantic

America is hosting the NATO summit this week. Russia’s bombing of a children’s hospital should remind every member that the Atlantic Alliance must do more for Ukraine.

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The World’s Fight

NATO turned 75 this year, and remains the most powerful and most successful alliance in the history of mankind: It has deterred cataclysmic war, allowed almost 1 billion people to thrive under a shield of peace, and more than doubled its initial size because of the eagerness of so many nations to join it. When the first NATO nations, led by the United States, banded together in 1949, they were trying to stop a group of evil men bunkered in Moscow from threatening the peace of the world. The mission today is the same, as NATO’s 32 members now consider how to deal with another group of evil men in the same city.

NATO’s longevity is cause for celebration; the continued need for its existence is a tragedy.

Once upon a time, it seemed as if NATO might simply dissolve because it was no longer needed (and because no one seemed to care that much about it anymore). “NATO,” the author Jack Beatty wrote in this magazine in 1989, “is a subject that drives the dagger of boredom deep, deep into the heart.” He meant that, during the Cold War, the alliance was mostly a wonky policy area dominated by bureaucrats and military planners. By the time Beatty made his observation, the West’s main worry—how I miss the days when peace seemed to be breaking out everywhere—was no longer that the mighty Reds would conquer Europe, but that the U.S.S.R. would collapse into chaos and war.

Only five months after Beatty wrote those words, ordinary Germans took hammers to the Berlin Wall. Two years after that, the Soviet Union was gone.

I was a young scholar at the start of my career back then. I was teaching my first course in Soviet politics at Dartmouth College when the Wall came down—so much for that syllabus—and the following year, I moved to Washington and took a position working in the Senate for the late John Heinz of Pennsylvania. I expected to be advising him mostly on Soviet arms-treaty issues, but as the world changed, it was a joy to write his 1990 floor statement welcoming German unification.

By 1990, with the Soviet Union about to collapse in defeat, I felt as though I were living in the bright alternate reality of a science-fiction novel. Even when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait that year, I believed that America and the West were more than up to the task of dealing with new dangers now that the Soviet threat had been defeated.

The idea that NATO would ever need to expand was faintly ridiculous to me after 1991. I was a Reaganite Cold Warrior in my youth, but when the Soviet Union collapsed, I was as eager as any American for an era of peace and reduced defense spending. (I recommended, for example, that Heinz vote against continuing to fund the B-2 Stealth Bomber. Heinz told me as he came off the Senate floor: “I voted to do the conservative thing: save money.” Such Republicans, men and women of consistency and principle, once existed.)

After I left Washington to return to teaching, I wondered if Russia and NATO would end up finding common cause on any number of issues. The entire world was facing growing threats from terrorism, rogue states, and nuclear proliferation. And for a time, Russia and some NATO nations did manage to cooperate and share information. (Even this year, the Americans took the dramatic step of warning Russian authorities of a possible terror attack that turned out to be the dreadful massacre at the Crocus City Hall near Moscow.)

I left Dartmouth for the Naval War College, where I taught military officers from the United States and around the world—including, for a time, a few Russians. I believed that NATO had helped the Western democracies win the Cold War, but I was reluctant to see a return to Cold War thinking about European security. I favored the immediate admission into NATO of Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland as a way of stabilizing post-Soviet Eastern Europe and rectifying, as best we could, the pain inflicted on those nations by Moscow in 1956, 1968, and 1980. But other nations, I thought, should join at a much slower pace. America and Russia were, if not friends, at least not enemies, and for years I argued for a closer Russia-NATO-America relationship, an effort that could be undermined by a stampede of new Alliance members.

NATO, slightly more than a decade older than me, marched on toward middle age, as did I. In 1999, the alliance turned 50. I attended an academic conference in Germany devoted to this golden anniversary, and while listening to the discussions, even I started to feel the sharp point of Beatty’s dagger of boredom. NATO, I came to believe, should leave aside its roots as an anti-Soviet alliance and consider adopting the model of a collective-security organization, a group that reacts to aggression from anywhere and has no specific enemies. In this new role, the Atlantic Alliance would try to dampen or prevent wars and genocides where it could, and aid other parties to do so where it couldn’t.

I was finally talked out of all this optimism by the best advocate NATO has ever had in its later years for a larger, more aggressive, and better armed alliance specifically aimed at deterring Russia: a former KGB stooge named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

Putin didn’t sway me back to my Cold War roots immediately. When Putin first came to power, I hoped he would be a bureaucrat and workhorse. But he turned out to be a murderous, grubby dictator, a Mafia don at the apex of the gang of thugs who now infest the Russian government.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, I admired the Biden administration’s thoughtful restraint. Putin had blundered badly; despite his reputation as a sly, cool Russian spymaster, he is in reality quite emotional and not a particularly adept strategist. (Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer has put it more concisely: “Putin overreaches, and he miscalculates.”) The key for the West in those early months of the war was to help Ukraine survive—something I admit that in the first week or so I thought might be impossible—without accidentally sparking a wider regional or even global war.

Two years later, Ukraine is holding on, and it needs not only more of our weapons but also our permission to use them more effectively. The intelligent American strategy of 2020 has now become vapor-locked, stuck mostly where it was more than a year ago. The United States is sending weapons and better systems—finally—but the U.S. defense, diplomacy, and security establishments need to be jolted back into coordination and toward a more aggressive strategy, especially by lifting now-senseless restrictions on the use of American weaponry. (“Washington,” Pifer wrote to me today, “should allow Ukraine to use US-provided weapons to strike military targets in Russia without restriction.”) Biden’s people can do this, but they need direction from the president; they need to focus on increasing the lethal effect of our aid instead of being paralyzed by abstract theories about controlling escalation.

I am older and grayer now. The optimism I felt 30 years ago has dwindled. As NATO’s delegations were arriving in Washington this week, Putin’s forces bombed a children’s hospital in Kyiv. Russia’s defense ministry issued a typically hazy denial in which it claimed that the Russian military does not strike civilian targets. But the Russians have been obliterating civilian targets since the beginning of the conflict—a campaign of atrocities and war crimes—as a way of warning the Ukrainians that if they do not kneel to Moscow, Putin will murder every last one of them, including their children.

NATO at 75 should resolve not only to continue sharing its arsenal with Ukraine but also to rekindle the spirit that led to victory against the Soviet Union. NATO’s ministers should remind the world’s democracies that Moscow’s barbaric expansionism is a threat to civilized human beings everywhere.

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P.S.

I won’t say the Cold War was fun. (Like many children of my generation, I had nightmares about nuclear war.) But I will say, after years of teaching a course on the popular culture of the era, that it produced some truly unusual moments when light entertainment collided with the most serious things in the world. I do not mean novels such as Fail-Safe and Alas, Babylon, both of which you should read if you’re interested in the Cold War. I mean the nuttiness of a classic movie such as The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, with the magnificent (and young) Alan Arkin in an early starring role, and especially the James Bond series, which were supposed to be popcorn movies but often relied on Cold War devices.

Yes, Bond was mostly fighting crazed supervillains, but usually those Mao-jacketed loons had done something that could cause World War III. In 1967’s You Only Live Twice, Bond’s archenemy, Ernst Blofeld, was hijacking U.S. and Soviet spacecraft; in The Spy Who Loved Me a decade later, Karl Stromberg—an underwater-dwelling Blofeld with webbed fingers, basically—was stealing British, U.S., and Soviet nuclear submarines.

But to get a sense of how something scary could intrude on something fun, watch for the scene in the 1983 Bond flick Octopussy where Bond realizes that a mad Soviet general—Steven Berkoff in full scenery-chewing glory—has planted a nuclear weapon at a circus on a U.S. air base in Germany. (The plot was clearly drawn from the real-life debate in the mid-1980s over stationing U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe.) Octopussy isn’t great, but that moment, in which Roger Moore is wearing clown makeup and pleading with an American general to evacuate the base, is a great example of how there was just no getting away from the Cold War, even at the movies.

— Tom

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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