Antique alliance: Rethinking NATO at 75The following was originally published on July 2, 2024 by Defense Priorities. Lyle Goldstein
Meanwhile, South Korean and Japanese leaders have become regular attendees at NATO summits, and will be present at the summit this July. NATO’s leader, General Jens Stoltenberg, has made visits to Northeast Asia and there has even been talk of setting up NATO offices in the region. These activities do not support U.S. or European interests in the Asia-Pacific. Nor do they uphold security in that volatile region. NATO’s lean into Asia is based on a number of mistaken judgments. It is common sense that European militaries and NATO itself should focus on preparing for military contingencies in Europe. The Ukraine-Russia war has amply illustrated that European armed forces are under-resourced and unprepared for major combat within Europe. How does it make sense to spend scarce recourses in distant locations and in possible contingencies wherein European interests are limited? NATO’s lean into Asia has already resulted in substantial strategic setbacks for the U.S. and global security by fundamentally strengthening the nascent China-Russia quasi-alliance. With some familiarity of Chinese military thinking, it is not difficult to discern Beijing’s perspective that NATO’s activities in the Asia-Pacific are unwelcome and unnerving. Meanwhile, European comments on Taiwan—including efforts to link the Ukraine and Taiwan causes—have only seemed to make the Taiwan situation more acute, eliciting vitriolic responses from Beijing. Against this background of evident China-NATO hostility, it’s no surprise that China has taken a distinctly pro-Russian position of neutrality with respect to the Ukraine war and that the China-Russia quasi-alliance is developing quite smoothly. The Russia-North Korea strategic partnership is even more dynamic and likely has similar causes. A few more arguments against NATO involvement in Asian security should be noted. Europeans deploying military forces into the Asian region carries the distinct and unpleasant odor of previous historical periods of rampant and brutal European imperialism in the region. Americans may not recall this history, but Asians surely do. Another major problem is that NATO countries have frequently enabled major U.S. strategic mistakes by lending them a veneer of legitimacy. For example, one has to wonder if the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan would have lasted so long—20 years—if Europeans had not been duped into joining that misbegotten enterprise. NATO should not help enable the next Asian war, which could turn into a nuclear conflict, through this deleterious “cheerleader” effect. Finally, and most decisively, Europe’s forces are simply irrelevant to the deterrence calculus with China—a reality well understood in Beijing. Even if they had the appropriate forces, NATO contingents could not be sustained at such a distance from Europe. Skittish European publics would be certain to abhor the enormous costs that a war with China would entail. Most particularly, the kind of naval forces that NATO countries have been deploying into the Pacific would quickly be destroyed by China’s formidable anti-access arsenal. While British and French nuclear submarines do indeed form a partial exception, there are far too few of those prized assets to make a decisive difference. Indeed, a recent report shows the Royal Navy has trouble keeping its “small force” out at sea on a regular basis and the trends are not favorable. Lyle Goldstein is director of the Asia Engagement program at Defense Priorities and a senior fellow at the Watson Institute at Brown University. Formerly, Lyle served as research professor at U.S. Naval War College for 20 years. |