U.S. policymakers made their biggest mistake with regard to NATO during the 1990s. Though some might focus their ire solely on NATO expansion, the problem was actually much broader: a choice by the Clinton administration and later the Bush administration to fundamentally re-orient NATO away from collective defense and towards new missions for “the new security challenges of the next century.”
These new missions included peacekeeping in the Balkans, acting as the enforcement mechanism of the UN Security Council in humanitarian missions, and helping to promote liberal and Western norms in Eastern Europe. NATO expansion was one component of this process, but hardly the only part of it: NATO’s member states also retooled their armies for “out-of-area” missions and began to emphasize nontraditional security concerns like terrorism.
This transformation was by no means inevitable. NATO in the 1990s undoubtedly faced a “March of Dimes” problem: that organization, infamously, had put itself out of business by succeeding in its goal to end childhood polio, before pivoting to other causes rather than wind down its operations. NATO had done much the same with regard to the Soviet Union, bringing about its own obsolescence as a military alliance with the collapse of the USSR.
The 1990s was therefore a period of significant questions about NATO’s future purpose: should the United States be in or out of European security? Should NATO continue to exist at all? Could Russia be welcomed back into Europe’s security architecture? Though U.S. policymakers chose to transform the organization into something more expansive and ambitious, one can also imagine a world in which NATO became a more modest, European-only collective defense mechanism.
Instead, U.S. policymakers chose to transform NATO to meet the narrow needs of their preferred policies during the 1990s. This might not have mattered, except that the ways in which NATO was transformed served to undermine its core defensive capabilities. Expansion not only worsened U.S.-Russia relations, but extended U.S. security guarantees to less defensible territory like the Baltics. The number of members in the alliance was doubled, making it harder to achieve consensus. The transition to out-of-area missions made European forces less capable of sustaining their own defense. And the continued strong U.S. commitment to Europe helped to hollow out the European pillar of NATO as part of a peace dividend. At the end of the Cold War, for example, the Bundeswehr boasted more than 500,000 troops; today, it is just over a third of that.
The transformation of NATO during the 1990s into something other than a European collective defense alliance thus made it harder for the alliance to pivot back to its original mission after 2014. Today’s NATO is less defensible, less coherent, and perhaps even more dependent on U.S. capabilities than in the late Cold War. U.S. policymakers bear the blame.
