NATO defies “brain death”

PRESIDENT EMMANUEL MACRON of France caused a stir in October when he bluntly told The Economist that “we are currently experiencing…the brain death of NATO.” But the Western alliance has been showing signs of vitality. The most recent evidence comes in a survey just published by Pew Research Centre, a think-tank, covering 16 of NATO’s 29 member countries. Taken between May and August last year, the poll shows strong public support for the alliance: the median score for those saying they viewed NATO favourably was 53%, compared with 27% with an unfavourable opinion.

Mr Macron has not been the only NATO leader to question the organisation’s future. Before becoming America’s president, Donald Trump called NATO “obsolete”. In office he has unnerved his peers by disrupting summits, lambasting allies for not paying their “fair share” and casting doubt about the Article 5 commitment to mutual defence, in which an attack on one ally is regarded as an attack on all. To twist allies’ arms, he even threatened that America might pull out of the alliance if they failed to keep their spending promises.

But more recently Mr Trump has stopped bashing NATO and started boasting about it. Before the alliance’s summit in London in December, Mr Trump criticised Mr Macron’s brain-death comment as “very disrespectful”. According to America’s ambassador to NATO, Kay Bailey Hutchison, speaking at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, on February 6th, NATO is “much stronger now than it has ever been”. At the London summit, she said, Mr Trump “really came out strong on behalf of what NATO has done at his request.” The European allies and Canada have spent an extra $130bn on defence since 2017, she specified, and by 2024 the increased spending will be more than $400bn.

Mr Trump is happy to claim credit for the $400bn figure, chalking it up as one of his successes in his state-of-the-union address last week. And he has discovered that NATO, far from being obsolete, can be useful. After America’s killing last month of Qassem Suleimani, a top Iranian general, he urged the allies to do more in the Middle East, even offering a suggested name for the mission: NATOME (NATO plus the initials of Middle East).

Since then NATO has been busily considering how it might enhance its operations in Iraq, where it deploys about 500 people to help train Iraqi defence and security forces with the aim of preventing the return of Islamic State (IS). The mission has been temporarily suspended since the drone strike on General Suleimani, which took place in Baghdad and caused a backlash among Iraq’s Shia groups. But NATO’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, has been discussing with Iraqi leaders how it might be expanded, under its existing mandate.

That will be high on the agenda of allied defence ministers when they meet in Brussels on February 12th-13th. They might agree that NATO take on more of the training done by the American-led global coalition to defeat IS—in effect a rebalancing of the workload. The ministers will also be keen to hear what America’s defence secretary, Mark Esper, can tell them about his country’s plans in Afghanistan, given the Trump administration’s aim to draw down American forces there. Mr Trump told Congress last week that: “We are working to finally end America’s longest war and bring our troops back home.” But the president gave no details. A reduced American presence in Afghanistan could lead NATO allies to cut numbers too (which for some could make it easier to find extra resources for Iraq).

NATO’s core task remains defending the allies against potential attack, which since President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 has meant once again stepping up deterrence against Russia. NATO is boosting the readiness of its forces and has deployed multinational battlegroups to the Baltic states and Poland. This week the defence chiefs will discuss how to respond to Mr Putin’s arsenal of fancy new weaponry, which is set to expand (without any constraints from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, which Mr Trump abandoned last year). Meanwhile NATO is preparing to liaise with a giant US Army exercise called Defender-Europe 2020, which will bring a division-sized American force to Europe this spring (some 20,000 troops, the largest deployment of US-based forces to Europe for more than 25 years), in a test of allied capacity for reinforcement and military mobility.

Yet the ability to mobilise also involves bringing the public with you, and a closer look at the Pew poll suggests there are no grounds for complacency. True, overall ratings for NATO are strong, but opinion on the alliance’s core Article 5 promise is far less robust. Across the 16 member states, the median score of those who would oppose using force to defend an ally if it got into a serious military conflict with Russia was 50%, compared with only 38% in favour (though respondents are far more confident that America would intervene in such circumstances).

 

In some countries, NATO’s ratings have declined markedly over the past decade. Favourable views of the alliance in France have slipped by fully 22 percentage points, from 71% in 2009 to 49% in 2019—which might help to explain Mr Macron’s harsh judgment of the state of the alliance—and those in Germany have dropped by 16 points. Greece and Turkey stand out as members where views of NATO remain strongly negative: in both, more than half of those asked have an unfavourable opinion of the organisation. Relations between the two countries are uneasy at the best of times, but have become especially tense of late. Greeks have been outraged by Turkish territorial claims in a treaty with Libya, which draws a maritime boundary close to Crete, in an important area for the development of the eastern Mediterranean’s natural-gas resources.

In America itself, support for the alliance stands at 52%, around the average level for 2009-16 but a 12-point drop since 2018. The partisan divide is worrying, too. Support among Democrat-leaning voters is 61%, compared with 45% among Republican supporters.

So although NATO has come through a challenging time alive and well, the picture is patchy. Divisions could easily grow, not least over how to handle China and whether to deal with Chinese companies (such as Huawei, a supplier of 5G telecoms kit) that America views with deep suspicion. From China to Russia to the Middle East, the allies have lots to think about. When defence types gather at the annual Munich Security Conference on February 14th, on NATO they can expect brain-stretch rather than brain death.