Pentagon'un NATO Üyelerine 'Sadakat Testi' Anketi Tartışma Yarattı

Creating a 'NATO of Nations' in order to save it

This summer the Pentagon handed NATO members a questionnaire asking whether they support in part, “U.S. foreign policy priorities.” Dubbed a “loyalty test” in the press, it was seen by many Europeans as the most recent sign that the alliance is coming apart because of American petulance. Yet what is actually happening is that the U.S. is putting stress on an inherently flawed and now exhausted form of alliance politics. The roots of the present discord were planted not in the 2024 reelection of President Donald Trump, but in the moment of NATO's Cold War triumph thirty years earlier. Indeed, one of the more puzzling developments after the dissolution of both the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact was the conviction of Western leaders that the time was ripe for new, grand projects of expansion and integration. In the absence of a genuine counter-power, NATO abandoned its former role as a heavily armed defensive alliance anchored in the Atlantic and instead embraced a normative mission, often described as an “alliance of values,” to which even states far outside the Atlantic sphere and without any meaningful defense capabilities were encouraged to accede. Its principal purpose became the accumulation of ever more members – Sweden being the latest, in 2024 – regardless of their suitability. For a time in the late 1990s, NATO effectively served as the waiting-room for Eastern European candidates to that other expanding supranational project: the European Union. As the late English philosopher Roger Scruton observed, drawing on his involvement in the underground intellectual scene in Eastern Europe, the liberated Soviet states wanted nothing more than to reclaim the national cultures that communism had tried to erase during more than forty years of occupation. Instead, they were incorporated into an EU that reduced the multifaceted European continent to a vast trade area, whose inner borders and local identities simply could – and should – be dissolved. It was assumed that a single community could be built on the particular ones, supported by, among other things, a "European anthem" and euro banknotes depicting imaginary architectural heritage. The EU and NATO took a bet on the virtue of breadth, disregarding that both institutions in their modern incarnations were political creatures that, to paraphrase historian Peter Apps, were in fact organized controversies, “attempting to resolve sometimes irreconcilable and enduring differences between its members.” The price of breadth was cohesion, with the secretary-general’s role in Nato evolving from what Javier Solana once called a “catalyst of consensus” into something closer to a frustrated chief whip, struggling to discipline increasingly disruptive members – much as Ursula von der Leyen does in the EU as president of the European Commission. This was always an unstable arrangement that now faces a reckoning, accelerated but not caused by Washington’s retreat under President Donald Trump from NATO’s post-Cold War design; ironically, much as the Soviet Union did in 1989, when Moscow under Mikhail Gorbachev abruptly withdrew its protection from satellite governments. The response from Secretary-General Mark Rutte and major European capitals has been to propose more of the same, a "NATO 3.0" that leaves the alliance’s underlying logic intact while merely shifting the financial burden to non-US. members. The Istanbul summit in July advanced precisely this vision. Yet NATO’s future depends less on spending than on distinguishing itself from the EU it gradually came to resemble. What if Nato were transformed into an alliance with a more nation-centered character in which the highest degree of military solidarity would only be expected in the event of a threat against all members? States would then explicitly be allowed to participate in NATO operations around the globe in accordance with how they saw them as aligning with their own national beliefs and interests. If such a rule had been in place during the military aid effort for Ukraine, Spain, for example, would not have been reprimanded for focusing on security challenges along its southern border rather than on what, from its perspective, is a distant regional war – only to be criticized later for not doing enough to anticipate and reverse the Ceuta migrant crisis. Under such an arrangement, members would not be required to adhere to a single, often Western-aligned analysis of world affairs, yet would remain entitled to collective protection in the event of a genuinely shared threat. Suppose Iran were to permanently close the Strait of Hormuz to maritime trading to strangle energy supply to large swathes of the world or build a nuclear weapon, or China were to seize Taiwan and, to paraphrase the Stanford historian Niall Ferguson, discover that its appetite grows with the eating. In those kinds of scenarios, it would be in the interest of each member to contribute to collective security according to its means. Sweden could, with its diminished army but highly advanced defense industry, become part of "NATO’s workshop," producing fighter jets and other assets. Such a loosening of NATO, and the relinquishing of its current supranational character, would likely foster greater harmony among its members while keeping Trump – and future U.S. presidents – engaged. It would also strengthen solidarity where it matters most: in the event of a major war. The lynchpin of a "NATO of nations" would be a rewording of the mutual defense clause of the North Atlantic Treaty to require explicit military support. As it stands, Article 5 obliges members to take “such action as [they] deem necessary” if one of them is attacked. In theory, Britain met that requirement during the “Phoney War” of 1939 by dropping supportive leaflets as the German blitzkrieg overran its ally Poland. If NATO members could agree to that, it would surely be acceptable for some of them – even the U.S. – to sit out the latest campaign in defense of “values” rather than core interests. The EU’s Lisbon Treaty is, by contrast, more explicit, calling on members to use “all the means in their power” in support of mutual defense (although Sweden has, over the years, done its very best to argue that the formulation does not imply military support). If NATO is to shed its EU-like illusions, this is at least one lesson worth borrowing. President Trump has asked NATO members to do more to assuage his doubts about the value of the alliance and the U.S. commitment to it. What if he is making the wrong demand, and should instead be telling them to do a lot less? Paradoxically, that may be the best way to keep America in.