NATO's big wins in boomerang period

By Andrew Hammond

The memorable phrase of Charles Dickens in "A Tale of Two Cities" that, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," is one that NATO can surely relate to.

The Western military alliance faced a potential near-death experience during Donald Trump's U.S. presidency. Yet, following the devastating Russian invasion of Ukraine, its fortunes have rebounded, and it had its most successful annual summit in years last week with multiple wins.

Not only has Turkey relented on its opposition to the accession of Finland and Sweden to the Western club, but the alliance is also enjoying its strongest international support in years. Take the example of Spain, which hosted the summit, where pro-NATO sentiment has risen to a very high 83 percent, a double-digit increase compared to 2018, according to a survey by think tank Elcano Royal Institute.

NATO also agreed to the largest overhaul of its defense posture since the Cold War. This change includes plans to increase its presence in Eastern Europe, including an expansion of the 40,000-strong NATO Response Force, which is more than a sixfold increase to 300,000.

The military alliance's new strategy announced at the summit, its first in over a decade, looks east to China, not only Russia. For there are growing Western worries about Beijing too, which is now being called a strategic challenger, with its increasingly sophisticated missile systems, and this situation will become especially concerning if it doubles down on its alliance with Moscow in the 2020s.

In this context, it was no coincidence that a unique feature of the summit was the attendance of several Asia-Pacific leaders for the first time at any NATO leadership meeting. The regional politicians there included: Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

The turnaround in NATO's fortunes in 2022 underlines how much the Ukraine crisis has highlighted the continuing relevance of the Western alliance of countries with a collective population of about 1 billion. For all its remaining weaknesses, NATO remains one of the world's most successful military organizations ever, helping to underpin the longest period of sustained peace in the West's modern history.

This massive, positive shift in sentiment toward NATO since February has allowed it to turn the corner, at least temporarily, on the worst strains in its 70-year history, which were seen during Trump's presidency. Former U.S. officials, including ex-National Security Adviser John Bolton, have confirmed that Trump came close to announcing the U.S.' withdrawal from the alliance.

This move would have been a huge blow to its credibility. Indeed, it is chilling to think what a re-elected Trump, who initially described Russia's invasion of Ukraine as "genius," would have meant for the future of NATO while facing one of its gravest threats.

Washington's waning commitment under Trump badly irked the alliance, including the White House's failure to consult the Western allies before pulling U.S. forces out of Syria in 2019. French President Emmanuel Macron was even forced to declare that he did not know if the United States could still be relied on to defend the alliance under the terms of its founding charter, which states that any attack on one member will trigger a collective response. It was Macron's exasperation at the diminished commitment of the United States, under the Trump presidency, which drove his astonishing outburst in 2019 about the alliance's supposed "brain death."

However, the challenges within NATO during the Trump era were by no means only of his own making. One of his critiques of the alliance ― that more than half of its members were not spending the prescribed 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense ― is a long-standing sore point that other U.S. presidents have highlighted, dating back to at least the 1990s under Bill Clinton.

It is important, therefore, to see that more nations in Europe have now committed, in the wake of the Ukraine crisis, to this target. Most symbolically, this commitment includes Germany under new Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

Moreover, while Trump supported Brexit, that dimension of the fracturing of the Western alliance owed more to long-standing U.K. political issues that he exacerbated, rather than created. Ironically, the Ukraine crisis may now help heal some of the schisms, as London and the continental European capitals work together closely in their response to Russia's revanchism.

Nonetheless, a key medium-term threat to the alliance is the prospect of a new U.S. president in 2025 or after ― possibly even Trump himself ― coming into power with a NATO-skeptic agenda again. Despite the successes of 2022, there remain concerns about whether the alliance is fully fit for the purpose in its eighth decade, and this issue cannot simply be wished away.

Andrew Hammond (andrewkorea@outlook.com) is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.