The Warsaw Summit of NATO heads of state this past weekend affirmed the strategic and ideological importance of the U.S. to the alliance and vice versa. NATO provides security to the European continent. “Europe being secure makes the U.S. more secure because we can do more things in more places to deal with threats before they come to our own borders,” says Jeffrey Rathke, Deputy Director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). This security allows the U.S. to focus on other global issues directly affecting U.S. vital interests both with NATO allies, like in the anti-ISIS coalition, and without NATO partners in other regions of the world.
For example, the U.S. and NATO allies are working together in Afghanistan to thwart terrorism and deal with instability leading to migration. At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on July 7, Senator John McCain (R-AZ), Chairman of the committee, said, “A strong NATO is in America’s national security. Nowhere has that been made more clear than in Afghanistan where our allies have sacrificed blood and treasure fighting alongside us for 15 years, and our shared mission is not over yet.”
In this sense, NATO offers a guarantee for U.S. security, while at the same time, the U.S. guarantees European security via its involvement with NATO. Sticking with the Afghanistan example, Rathke notes that President Barack Obama’s decision last week to keep more U.S. forces in the country than planned “provides the backbone and framework for NATO allies, who are also contributing significant numbers of troops to the training and support mission, to continue doing so.”
NATO’s open door policy of extending membership to nations who fulfill both the strategic capabilities and democratic values of NATO countries continued at the summit as the Alliance confirmed its extension of membership to Montenegro, although the ratification process is not yet complete. Jeff Lightfoot, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a senior associate at global business advisory firm Jones Group International, explains, “The admission of Montenegro to NATO was a huge accomplishment given Russia’s vociferous opposition to NATO enlargement. Just two weeks after Brexit, Montenegro’s entry to NATO sends a powerful signal to aspirant members of the Alliance and a crisis-stricken European Union that the Euro-Atlantic enlargement process is not dead. And it undermines Russia’s deliberate strategy of preventing former Communist states from moving toward the West.”
Deterring Russian aggression is a high priority for NATO. Deterrence and dialogue is the official strategy, yet the former topped the agenda at the Warsaw Summit. The alliance countries announced the deployment of one rotational battalion – about 1,000-strong – to each of the Baltic nations – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – and Poland, in addition to a tailored forward presence in Romania and Bulgaria. The four battalions will be led by the the UK, Canada, Germany, and the U.S., respectively.
Rathke points out that the four countries supplying troops are either non-European Union (EU) members or planning to exit the EU, which means a stronger leadership role from EU countries in NATO is needed.
The EU and NATO are attempting to iron out their historical differences and cooperate more in various fields, including cyber security, information-sharing, and sea operations. For the first time, NATO formally declared cyberspace a potential battlefield – like the land, air, and sea – and committed itself to working with the EU to “coordinate the ways in which the EU and NATO respond to cyber elements of security policy,” says Rathke.
NATO is also establishing a new Assistant Secretary General for Intelligence and Security (ASG-I&S) and an Overarching Intelligence Policy (OIP), a position strongly advocated by the U.S. and touted by U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Marcel Lettre in an exclusive to The Cipher Brief.
However, Rathke notes the Joint Declaration of NATO and the EU does not specifically address intelligence sharing, partially because intel-sharing is convoluted between the EU and member states as well, a problem the EU has been working to fix, in light of recent terror attacks on the continent. Still, “cooperation in this area will increase,” says Rathke.
Cooperation with allies is the name of the game. “In a world of rising instability, U.S.-led alliances enhance our security, bolster global stability, and enhance U.S. influence globally,” said former NATO Supreme Allied Commander General James Jones at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last week. Vice President Joe Biden’s former Deputy National Security Advisor, Julianne Smith, added, “We have to ensure that NATO can continue to rely on U.S. leadership, which has been a key ingredient to the alliance’s success over many, many decades.”
Former U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO Nicholas Burns told the Senators that our strongest link is that the U.S. and NATO countries are democracies, but, “many of us, including our own country, are confronting a wave of isolation […] and in some cases, extremism.” He continued, “NATO is going to need strong, unflinching American leadership to cope with these challenges. The next American president will have the opportunity and the obligation to provide such leadership to weather these storms.”
Kaitlin Lavinder is a reporter at The Cipher Brief.
