Calls to expand NATO are a reckless response to Russian aggression. Taking on new members without committing to their defense risks hollowing out the alliance and handing Putin an easy victory.
Published on April 2, 2014
Washington has settled on a simple yet vague response to the crisis in Crimea: Stop Russia, but do not fight it. Translating this mandate into action has proven difficult. Amid calls for sanctions and boycotts, one action has received wide support: expand NATO. A bipartisan group of forty congressmencalled for the eventual admission of Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Georgia into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Meanwhile, a group of 56 senior foreign policy experts—including former Senators Joseph Lieberman and Norm Coleman, eight former Ambassadors, and multiple sub-cabinet level officials—sent an open letter to President Obama arguing that the United States “should press America’s NATO allies to agree to a Membership Action Plan for Georgia” and “should also support Ukraine, Sweden, Finland, and other European security partners, if they seek NATO membership.” Likewise, rising Republican foreign policy stars Senator Marco Rubio and Congressman Tom Cotton claimed that the crisis “should break the freeze on NATO expansion that has been in place for the past five years” in order to attack “Russia’s belief that it can bully NATO partners and not face a credible response.” Just as Russian troops were taking up positions in Crimea, the Obama Administration affirmed that Georgia would, one day, become part of NATO.
As Theodore Roosevelt once quipped, words only go so far. They can even do you harm if you don’t think them through or back them up. Is it truly in the American interest to admit additional former Soviet republics, such as Georgia, into NATO? If so, is the United States willing and able to defend these new commitments if confronted? Answering the former should generate healthy debate, but America’s response to the latter must be clear and definitive. Expanding American defense commitments without building and maintaining the force needed to protect them is not only strategically incoherent; it risks a far more dangerous outcome than not proclaiming anything at all. Speaking loudly without a stick is a recipe for disaster.
For two decades, NATO expansion was largely seen as cost-free. Since the end of the Cold War, 12 additional countries joined and an additional four are aspiring to do so. Even as Washington nearly doubled its defense commitments, it more than halved its troop presence in Europe. Whatever Moscow’s irritation at its former satellites joining its archrival, the prospect of fighting a war seemed remote. Moreover, these new members were key contributors to U.S.-led campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Much like European Union membership, the prospects of joining NATO spurred states to reform their institutions and integrate into the “New World Order.”
Recent events are a reminder that future expansion will not be as easy. While a robust response to Russian meddling is a laudable goal, NATO, at its core, is a mutual defense treaty. Its central tenet, Article V, states, “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” Should a member be attacked, each signatory is obliged to take “such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” To date, it has been invoked only once: following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, when NATO went to war. Should Article V be invoked in the future, NATO will likely go to war again. As Crimea dominates the front pages, the United States should weigh the benefits and costs before extending Article V to additional states.
First, what will the United States gain from additional NATO members? The evidence is mixed. To their credit, Georgia committed more than 2,000 troops to Iraq and 1,500 troops to Afghanistan, whereas Ukraine committed 1,700 soldiers to Iraq and remains in Afghanistan to this day. The United States should appreciate these outsized contributions. Moreover, the United States also has an interest in containing Russian irredentism in order to forestall any future aggression against existing East European NATO members. More broadly, the United States does not want other potentially revisionist powers (read: China) to believe that it is acceptable to redraw the map by force in other disputed regions.
At the same time, NATO was never solely about defending the defenseless but also about preventing the industrial heartland of Western Europe from falling into enemy hands. Today, the combined GDP of Ukraine and Georgia is roughly that of Oregon, and Ukraine’s future prospects are poor. Even if it were to embrace International Monetary Fund-led reforms, its labor market will shrink by 15 percent over the next twenty years, and it will likely remain dependent on Russian trade. Both Georgia and Ukraine are energy transit points, not producers, and they are not in particularly strategic locations. Whereas there was a clear-cut case for the defense of Western Europe during the Cold War, there is not the same strategic or economic rationale for either Ukraine or Georgia.
Second, is the United States willing to devote the resources necessary to defending new alliance members? Ironically, just as Russia used its ground forces to destabilize its second country in six years, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel argued for additional steep defense cuts coming on top of his predecessors’ efforts in previous years. In addition to cuts to the other services, Hagel declared, “we are no longer sizing the force for prolonged stability operations” and proposed cutting the Army down to 440,000—its smallest size since World War II—and further reducing the American footprint in Europe. The United States, Hagel argued, no longer needs to “kill enemy tanks on a Cold War battlefield” and therefore will retire all 340 A-10 ground-attack aircraft, which saw extensive action as recently as 2011 in Libya. Additionally, sequestration will likely permanently sideline the KC-10s, air-to-air refueling tankers useful for long-range force projection. For the first time in 13 years, Hagel beamed, the White House was presenting a budget “that’s not a war-footing budget.”
If, however, as some have argued, a “new Cold War” is indeed in the offing, then the strategic assumptions underlying these cuts are questionable. Unlike in the Pacific, deterring Russia is largely a ground and air endeavor. While the United States need not worry about Soviet hordes pouring through the Fulda Gap, deploying additional ground forces and tank-killing aircraft to neighboring states as a tripwire would both reassure jittery allies and deter potential Russian aggression. Given Ukraine’s size and Georgia’s distance, an American commitment to either would place additional demand on some of the force projection capabilities that the Administration seeks to eliminate. Adding insult to injury, the Obama Administration has proposed a 28 percent cut for a Pentagon program that seeks to modernize the Ukrainian armed forces. If America intends to keep its word, it must be willing to pay the bill.
Third, would NATO membership demand an American military response to preexisting conflicts? Russia currently occupies parts of both Georgia and Ukraine. By admitting these countries into NATO, the United States, on day one, would inherit a multi-front territorial conflict with Russia. While the Alliance could liberally interpret Article V to exclude reversing these occupations through anything more than lip service and superficial sanctions, such obfuscation risks cheapening the meaning of the alliance.
NATO’s stance, however, would become untenable should Moscow decide to “protect” other Russian-speaking populations in the future. Leaving aside potential new members, the three Baltic States have large ethnic Russian populations and are all NATO members. As if on cue, the Russian Ambassador to Latvia suggested that Moscow might grant Russian citizenship to ethnic Russians in Latvia, who make up more than a quarter of that country’s population. What would happen if Moscow repeats its Crimean performance in one of these countries and Article V is invoked? Expanding NATO membership to new countries—especially Georgia and Ukraine—will only exacerbate this problem. Is the United States truly willing to consider an armed attack against Tbilisi or Kiev the same as an armed attack on New York City? If not, Vladimir Putin would have exposed NATO as the emperor with no clothes. In this sense, another South Ossetia or Crimea could yield a far greater prize than the territories themselves: After almost seventy years of wrestling with the West, Russia would have succeeded in defanging NATO without a fight.
The answers to all these questions may well be yes. It may be that expanding NATO is worth the costs. However, the United States needs to be clear-eyed about what an expanded alliance means. At the end of the day, especially in these countries, it means the willingness to fight a war—a nasty and protracted land war, not just the quick-strike, light-footprint, drones and special operations version that is in vogue. If so, then America must build and maintain an army capable of fighting such a war and be willing to use it if necessary.
At the moment, while there is a consensus about stopping about Russia, the political Left refuses to maintain a force capable of doing so, and neither the Left nor the Right has the appetite for getting into a land war. Functionally, the United States has two paths forward: It can either shrink its commitments to match its reduced posture, or it can ramp up its force to meet its expanding responsibilities, understanding that it may need to use them, if Russia forces NATO to show its hand. Expanding NATO to new members without committing the resources and political will to defend them is not only inconsistent, but also dangerous and irresponsible. Tragically, this appears to be exactly the course the Obama Administration wants to take: expanding U.S. defense obligations while simultaneously slashing its capacity to fulfill them. The Administration that came into office promising a “smarter” approach to foreign policy would instead be guilty of doing the converse of Roosevelt’s adage: speaking loudly while retiring the stick.
Raphael Cohen and Gabriel Scheinmann are Ph.D. candidates in international relations at Georgetown University.
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