Washington Needs a New Approach to NATO

We are emerging from four years of foreign policy under the Biden administration that has witnessed the failure of deterrence in key theaters across the globe and left the United States and its allies exposed to a heightened risk of war.  In Asia, the Chinese threat to Taiwan has increased exponentially.  In Europe we have a full-scale war in Ukraine, with no strategy for victory after three years of horrendous bloodletting and a growing risk that the conflict may spread inside NATO’s perimeter.  The Middle East is on fire with Iran both directly and by proxy repeatedly attacking Israel, America’s closest ally in the region.  Tensions in the Korean Peninsula remain high, with North Korean soldiers now deployed into a combat zone in the European theater – an unprecedented escalation that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago.  The rhetoric of the Biden administration repeatedly asserts that the United States is “defending the rules-based international order,” while our adversaries continue to ignore our warnings at will as they ramp up the pressure in key theaters. 

The next administration has a mandate to articulate a new national security strategy that changes how we interact with NATO in a way that serves America’s interests, restores deterrence on the Continent, and checks Russian revisionism.  The new strategy requires that we speak plainly about who our closest allies in Europe are going forward and focus on working closely with countries that share similar threat perceptions when it comes to Russia, are willing to decouple from China, and are spending money on defense to check Moscow’s neoimperial drive.  These are countries that lie in the Northeast Corridor along NATO’s flank: Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Baltic States and Poland.  

The Northeast Corridor is the new center of gravity of the NATO alliance, with Poland – much like West Germany of the Cold War era – now the critical hub of NATO’s European defense.  These seven countries should be prioritized by the second Trump administration, including when it comes to our sales and co-production of advanced weapons systems.  The administration should also consider shifting U.S. permanent bases out of Germany and into the region as well as investing in regional economic cooperation and infrastructure projects under the Three Seas Initiative umbrella endorsed and supported during the first Trump term. 

The existing American legacy base infrastructure in Europe no longer reflects the requirements of the reconfigured geopolitical space post-Cold War.  The sunk cost of permanent installations in Germany need not be forfeited, as these U.S. bases can be used for training, sustainment, reinforcement and medical support of the urgently needed new U.S. forward presence in Europe.   As I argued a year ago, for deterrence to hold in Europe we need at a minimum one American brigade stationed permanently in Finland or one of the Baltic States, two brigades or more stationed permanently in Poland and—should Russia fully subjugate Ukraine—also one U.S. brigade stationed in Romania.  The host countries should be required to cover construction and maintenance cost of this rebasing to add to what some, like Poland, are already doing.  And most of all, we need the countries that are serious about deterring Russia to rebuild and expand their militaries so as to provide the bulk of conventional deterrence and defense capabilities in NATO, with the U.S. continuing to provide the nuclear umbrella, high-end enablers, our conventional component, and C2 integration. 

The United States needs to rethink how it works with the allies geographically farther away from the eastern flank of NATO.  It needs to buttress its relationships with the United Kingdom, historically its closest ally while insisting that London must rebuild it military, especially the army.  Arguably the greatest challenge facing Washington as we craft our new NATO policy will be America’s relationship with Germany.  The next administration should abandon the expectation that we can somehow convince Germany to return to the erstwhile Adenauer-era posture of serving as the cornerstone of the transatlantic security and defense community on the Continent.  For three decades now, Berlin has communicated in no uncertain terms its reluctance to cut its residual economic ties to Russia or to decouple from China.  If anything, Germany’s dependence on Russian energy almost doubled before Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine in 2022, while China has been Germany’s largest trading partner for eight consecutive years.[1]  Germany’s stated preference for “de-risking” – as opposed to de-coupling – is a clear signal that, at least as of today, German industry is determined to stay in China long-term.  For over two decades Berlin’s policy has fostered Europe’s dependence on Russia for energy and on China for production, components, and markets.  As the United States moves to check the PRC’s drive for regional hegemony in the Indo-Pacific, how Berlin shapes its China policy will be decisive for its relations with Washington.

Germany has an important role to play in NATO’s overall strategy and plans, for even though it’s no longer a frontier state, the size of its economy, its population and the geostrategic depth it provides remain vital to deterrence and defense across the Euro-Atlantic area.  The same goes for France which should provide key elements of national power, especially its military, to buttress NATO’s defenses.  The changed situation on the continent following Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine requires a long-overdue and frank conversation between Washington, Berlin and Paris to get to a new alignment on policy that will strengthens transatlantic relations, preserve France’s and Germany’s security but also lower the cost for the U.S..  It is time for America’s NATO allies, especially Germany, to take a clear stand on our China policy, as the status quo that defined globalization for the past three decades is no longer sustainable. 

Also, the incoming U.S. administration should recognize that the current push in the European Union towards ever-greater centralization through a new Union Treaty, is not in America’s interest.  The 1990 reunification of Germany and post-Cold War cycles of NATO enlargement have dramatically changed the Continent’s geopolitics.  Following Brexit and the departure from the EU of America’s closest ally in Europe, Europe’s second largest economy, and a quintessentially naval power, the European Union today is a continental project par excellence.   Here a larger aspect that the incoming administration needs to change when it comes to its Europe policy is the Biden-era assumption that it is in U.S. interest to have one “point of entry” when it comes to engaging with our allies on the Continent, i.e., via Brussels.  In reality, the United States has more flexibility, impact, and influence when it works bilaterally with individual allies, and through them leverages regional groupings.  NATO at 32 is at times too unwieldy to work effectively in toto at the operational level.  We need a regionalized approach to allied security and defense cooperation, while preserving the overall uniform political umbrella in NATO and communicating in no uncertain terms to the laggards that there is no more free lunch.  At the Vilnius NATO summit, every ally signed on to the new regional plans for the deterrence and defense of the transatlantic space.  Those plans have binding capabilities commitments that every ally must provide.  This is not “transactionalism,” for failure to do so would be to default on their treaty obligations. 

States have different interests, and this is not a deal breaker for any alliance.  A shift toward alliance management in NATO based on a regional approach will end the pretense that we can expect all Europeans to work in lockstep despite their differing interests and threat perceptions when it comes to Russia.  It will also allow the United States to end the perennial debate in Europe, driven mainly by France, about “Europe’s strategic autonomy,” for this model is a path to taking resources away from NATO to pursue the chimera of a European army.  It is time for Washington to communicate to our European allies that there is nothing transactional about demanding that they uphold their obligations in NATO, meet agreed-upon spending pledges, and stop reinventing the wheel when it comes to the defense of Europe.  It’s time to call it and move on with the work of rearming Europe in NATO. 

In the final analysis, alliances are a two-way street.  NATO is vital to transatlantic security, and it is a valuable force-multiplier for the United States.  It allows America to secure its position in the Atlantic at a lower cost and prevent local crises from degenerating into a systemic war.  NATO is also a national security and defense bargain for Europe.  But the time has come to ask who America’s fully committed allies are in Europe, who is all-in on collective deterrence and defense and who is a bystander, and to adjust our relationships accordingly.  It's time for straight talk across the Atlantic and a U.S. policy that prioritizes the Northeast Corridor along the flank, while ensuring an equitable division of labor across the alliance.  This approach offers a pathway to preserving America’s strategic commitment to the security and defense of Europe while allowing us to focus on the rising Chinese threat in Asia.

Andrew A. Michta is Senior Fellow and Director of the GeoStrategy Initiative at the Atlantic Council of the United States. Views expressed here are his own. 

[1] The People's Republic of China is again Germany's main trading partner - German Federal Statistical Office