 Welcome to the Naval War College, the Navy's home of thought. We are excited to present a new series titled NWC Talks, where we showcase our world-class experts in discussing national security matters. We hope you enjoy the conversation. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, who commanded the U.S. Army in Europe, has described as the most successful alliance in history, and has just celebrated its 70th anniversary. I'd like to pose a provocative question to you today. Will NATO see its 75th anniversary? I'm Professor Nicholas K. Vozdev. I'm the Captain Jeromey Levy Chair of Economic Geography and National Security here at the Naval War College, and welcome to NWC Talks. It may be a bit provocative to ask whether an alliance which has seen through the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union is perhaps destined to run into failure. But as investment prospectuses always tell us, past performance is no guarantee of future delivery. NATO was created to deal with the specific problem, the threat of the Soviet Union. It was created in 1949 in response to clear Soviet intentions after World War II to dominate the entire continent of Europe. After all, Joseph Stalin, in 1945, had told a group of visiting Yugoslav communists, each spreads his social system as far as his armies can reach. And between 1945 and 1948, in almost every country liberated from Nazi occupation by the Red Army, pre-war democratic governments were replaced by copies of Soviet communist systems. And Stalin made it clear that he was not interested in limiting his reach simply to Central and Eastern Europe, fomenting the civil war in Greece, tensions in Turkey, and even trying to use the Communist parties of Italy and France to seek regime change in those countries as well. Despite the economic assistance of the Marshall Plan, it was clear that the countries of Western Europe on their own and individually could not resist the Soviet threat. They needed to come together and needed the support of the United States. This led to the Washington Treaty of 1949 in which the United States, Canada, and the countries of Western Europe committed themselves to form an integrated military alliance based, as they committed in Article III, upon commitments of self-help and mutual help and most importantly, in Article V, committing that an attack on one member of the alliance would be considered as an attack against all so that no potential aggressor could feel safe in thinking that attacking only one country would lead to a limited response. The creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization of an integrated military command backed by the U.S. nuclear umbrella and in addition by the independent nuclear forces of Britain and France did the job. It kept the peace in Europe. It kept the Soviets on their side of the Iron Curtain until that point in time as George Kennan had predicted when the Soviet Union would be forced to confront its own internal contradictions, its inability to sustain an arms race, its inability to pay for superpower status, withdrawing from its outer empire of satellite states and ultimately imploding in December of 1991. NATO held together during the Cold War because it was clear to every member of NATO what the alliance was for. There was a Soviet threat. Soviet battle plans in order to defeat the West would require Soviet thrust throughout all of Central and Western Europe. So it didn't matter how close or how far a European country was to the Iron Curtain. Sooner or later, they were all bemenaced by Soviet armed forces. And it was clear following Stalin's dictum to his Yugoslav comrades that the Soviet Union would seek if it gained control over a country to change its social political and economic systems. So what held the alliance together was this recognition of a common threat. That threat posed a challenge to secular liberal social democratic states in Scandinavia to more traditional and sometimes even authoritarian states in Southern Europe, including for periods of time two military dictatorships in Greece and Turkey. NATO was not necessarily held together by a common vision of how societies should be ordered but NATO members were very clear they didn't want the Soviet Union imposing its social system upon them. Within this confine of a shared threat NATO countries learned to work together. They learned to pool resources. They learned to deal with crises including the crises of the late 1960s when France withdrew from the integrated command and NATO was moved from Paris, France to Brussels as the new headquarters. November of 1990, as the Cold War was winding down, the United States, Canada, the members of NATO, the newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union met in Paris and declared an end to the Cold War. The Soviet Union could no longer sustain this competition with the West and within a year's time it too would disappear from history. So as the Soviet Union was beginning to vanish people were asking, what's the future for the NATO alliance? If the threat was designed to contain is disappearing, does the alliance have a role? And different answers were put forward. Some said that NATO should continue as a guarantee because perhaps the Soviet Union might disappear but Russia could continue to be a geopolitical threat and NATO would be needed to contain that threat. Others looked at the map, said the future was going to be determined by events in the greater Middle East and the threats coming from that region would be where NATO would need to pivot and that Russia was not a problem. Focus on Russia was now counterproductive. Throughout the West there was a sense that spending on defense during the Cold War had been a burden and now that the Cold War was over it was time for a peace dividend was time to redirect spending away from defense matters towards social programs and welfare. There were those who said that NATO at the time the Soviet Union collapsed every country in NATO was classed as a liberal democracy that NATO should now take on the role of spreading democracy first through Europe but perhaps even expanding beyond that NATO should take on global responsibilities that it should be in the words of former Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski the armed guarantor of the Western world and the defender of its values. So as the Soviet Union disappeared different visions for NATO's future were put forward. Each of them had benefits and costs and instead of settling in on a clear post-Soviet mission for NATO political leaders decided to square the differences and what we got in the 1990s and 2000s was a series of what now appear to be unsustainable bargains. For those countries that felt that Russia was still a threat and particularly those countries seeking admittance to the NATO alliance who had been part of the Warsaw Pact they wished to join an alliance to gain that Article 5 guarantee that an attack against one is an attack against all. Countries in Western Europe said the Soviet Union is gone and Russia is not the Soviet Union. Russia doesn't pose a threat to us and in fact we can forge beneficial political and economic relations with the post-Soviet Russia. The United States was looking for its own peace dividend but was also looking for more true burden sharing and was hoping that the NATO alliance would play more of a role in other parts of the world where the United States was carrying the burden of security assistance. So we ended up with a series of political bargains. One bargain was to admit new members to NATO in Central and Eastern Europe who wished to join the alliance to avoid what they saw as a Russian threat but Western Europeans were told don't worry there's no Soviet threat there's no Russian threat these are guarantees that you can give without having to worry about them ever being called upon. West Europeans were told admitting East European states to NATO would continue them along a path of Western European social development. This was a way to expand the European project to bring more countries into the European order. And Americans were told not only is there no threat from Russia so there's no worry about the Article 5 guarantees being tested against a Russia that is either too weak or in fact wants to join the West but enlarging the NATO alliance brings more bill pairs more countries to share the burdens. All of this of course runs up against a few problems. It assumes that Russia would always remain either in a weakened state or in fact would be quiescent and particularly starting in the second term of President Vladimir Putin's administration it was clear that Russia was reviving but that Russia also was not satisfied with the way the post-Cold War war in Europe had unfolded and wanted to make changes to it peacefully if possible but increasingly over the last several years using force if necessary to gain a redrawing of boundaries and a shifting of how things are done in Europe. The concept of alliance solidarity has been tested as different countries in the alliance look at what is in their national security interests and question whether or not the security concerns of one member of NATO are their concern. During the Cold War the Soviet Union threatened Portugal and Norway as much as it threatened Germany or Italy. Today is Russia the biggest threat the alliance faces? That's certainly the answer one would receive in Poland or Romania. It's not the answer one receives in Germany or Spain or Italy where the greater Middle East migration, terrorism, climate change are seen as bigger threats and Russia is either not seen as an important threat or not a threat at all. Americans have watched their share of the NATO burden increase since the end of the Cold War where the United States now bears a greater share of the alliance costs and as Americans look at potential threats that the US faces in the western hemisphere in the Asia Pacific region they question the utility of the NATO alliance and America's contributions to it for American national security. A country like Turkey which was a staunch pillar of the alliance during the Cold War has been questioning whether or not NATO benefits their security. They found a distressing degree of lack of solidarity from other NATO allies as Turkey has faced problems from the spillover of the Iraq and Syrian wars and increasingly Turkey forging its own cooperative economic and political relationships with Russia is less willing to risk those new found ties simply because other members of the alliance have difficulties and problems with Russia. So we're now faced in 2019 with a very existential question for the alliance. What is it here for? NATO has survived in recent years on inertia on the fact that it allows for countries to work together. Vladimir Putin has certainly given a shock to the NATO system helped to reorient at least some degree of focus back on Russia but again we see within the alliance that there is no unified position on Russia and whether or not Russia poses that existential threat to the entire continent and so while the generals and the politicians and the diplomats gathered in Washington this past April with champagne glasses in hand to toast the 70th anniversary of the alliance it's clear that the alliance faces questions moving forward. What do I think will happen? I'd like to think that the alliance will continue and there are so many equities built into the alliance that it would be difficult for countries to simply want to walk away from them but we are seeing continued strain. Turkey decided despite protests and pressures from the United States and other NATO allies to buy a Russian air defense system which they will integrate into their air defense network so a NATO ally will be turning to a country that many NATO countries feel is a threat to be part of its security apparatus. Other NATO countries are continuing with major economic projects with Russia because they feel it's in their interest to do so even if it undercuts the security of their fellow allies. While the countries of NATO have agreed to limited deployments in Eastern Europe to help reassure allies the opinion polling is not so sanguine. In Germany and Italy and France and elsewhere when publics are asked should we go to war with Russia to protect allies in Eastern Europe the answers aren't encouraging. In the United States things that were once whispered quietly are now being spoken of openly. Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates in his farewell address to his fellow NATO defense ministers in 2011 warned that unless the alliance could do more other members did more in terms of spending to show that they were taking on a greater share of the burden this would fuel questions in the United States as to the utility of the alliance and that Americans might one day conclude that the alliance was not worth what America was paying for it. That's no longer a theoretical question that's a question that is now posed by the current president of the United States who wonders openly and allowed whether or not the alliance is worth what America puts into it. And finally we have a division of values in the alliance. During the Cold War the alliance knew what it stood for it was against the Soviet threat but now allied countries are divided what does democracy mean? What does it mean to hold European or Western values? Several members of NATO are no longer classed as fully free by freedom house meaning that they no longer meet the standards normally associated with liberal democracies. So there are several paths moving forward. One is NATO reconceptualizes itself as a security alliance around a threat posed by Russia and therefore brings together those countries that see Russia as the biggest threat and accepts that other legacy members of the alliance are not as committed to that focus and it returns to this geopolitical focus upon this particular country in this case Russia. Another is for NATO to conceive of itself as an alliance of liberal democratic states in the transatlantic region in which case several members of the alliance don't meet that criteria would need to be isolated or perhaps even asked to leave the alliance even if they bring capabilities or geopolitical position and the NATO countries of Europe need to decide where the alliance fits in with their obligations to the United States as the United States faces the question of arising China is the rest of NATO alongside the United States confronting the potential of China or does the rest of Europe essentially say they sit this one out and they will not in the future necessarily be with the United States if the United States is forced into a military confrontation with the People's Republic. And then finally as we look at the alliance for those countries that see Russia as the threat what happens with the continued threats coming from Europe south across the Mediterranean and what happens is the impact of the migration crisis in Europe affects European politics and its effect on solidarity within the alliance. I think the alliance will endure simply because inertia is a powerful force in bureaucracies but the question of the cohesiveness and effectiveness of the alliance is in doubt. So while I think we will see the 75th anniversary of the alliance I don't know that we'll have as many causes for celebration. Thank you very much. I'm Professor Nicholas Kvozdev and this is NWC Talks.