The start of a new U.S. administration, elections across Europe in 2017 that could drastically alter politics on the continent, and an increase in the number and kinds of external threats facing the world over the past few years rattle the NATO transatlantic defense alliance. Add to that President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric about not standing up for NATO partners unless they start spending more on their own defense, and the future of the alliance seems questionable. The Cipher Brief’s Kaitlin Lavinder spoke with Admiral James Stavridis, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander from 2009-2013 and Dean of The Fletcher School at Tufts University, about his thoughts on NATO’s future and the incoming administration’s policies toward the transatlantic partnership.
The Cipher Brief: Why is NATO beneficial to the United States?
Admiral James Stavridis: Let’s look at it from a business case perspective. The U.S. currently spends $600 billion a year on defense, a lot of money. The Chinese spend about $140 billion. The Russians spend about $80 billion. The Europeans are right in the middle; they spend $300 billion a year on defense. In other words, they spend more than Russia and China combined. So they are at the table contributing.
Secondly, they have 2 million men and women under arms, almost all of whom are volunteers, and they’re very capable soldiers and sailors and airmen who have operated in Afghanistan, Libya, the Balkans, Syria, and a number of other places. So they bring a ton of capability to the table.
Now, we want them to hit that 2 percent of GDP spending on defense goal that they have set for themselves. And they should do that, and we should put pressure on them to do it. But it would be a mistake for us as a business proposition to simply walk away from all those assets and all of that capability and all of that partnership, which has been on display in real world operations over the last decade.
So I think overall NATO and a leadership role for the United States makes terrific sense.
TCB: Does it seem like the incoming administration recognizes this?
JS: On the campaign trail, we heard President-elect Trump make several disparaging comments about NATO – generally predicated on his feeling that they were not spending enough on defense, which is, as I said, a legitimate criticism.
Since the campaign, I have spoken personally to President-elect Trump about NATO, and I feel confident that he will accept NATO as a strong and vibrant partner, he will put pressure on our allies to increase their defense spending, and he, of course, intends to increase defense spending here in the United States as well.
So I think he’ll look at it as a businessman, and he will put pressure to get more resources from the Europeans. But my sense from my conversation with him is that he understands the value of NATO.
TCB: Can the relationship between the U.S. and NATO be used as a broader example of U.S. foreign policy? I’m thinking specifically of a comment that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made at a U.S. Institute of Peace event on January 10, which you were also a part of, about how the “indispensable nation” does not mean a nation alone, but one that needs and works with allies. Is NATO representative of that, and do you think the incoming administration will carry on this concept of how the U.S. engages with the world?
JS: I certainly hope so. I do think that NATO is the absolute exemplar of a strong, in this case transatlantic, link between the two strongest bastions of military power in the world – the U.S. and Europe together – and the two strongest economic functionalities in the world. Between them, the U.S. and our NATO European allies constitute 52 percent of the world’s GDP.
The way to think about foreign policy is there are differences between alliances, coalitions, partnerships, and friendships. Alliances are the highest coin of the realm; they’re absolutely the gold standard. They imply military defense of each other. And they always indicate reasonable levels of political alignment. NATO is an alliance. We also have alliances with Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and others.
Coalitions, the next step down, are how we have come to conduct much foreign policy and many military operations, in places like Afghanistan. The ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) coalition at one point had 50 nations in it. The coalition against the Islamic State today has 60 nations in it. There’s less perfect alignment, but coalitions can be larger than alliances and I think need also to be a strong tool for the United States.
Thirdly, you have partnerships, like the United States has with Israel and a number of other nations.
And finally you have friendships, like the United States has with India.
So you need to use all of those tools, with alliances being at the top, and yes NATO is a very good example of that.
TCB: What areas do you think NATO needs to work on in the next four years?
JS: I’ll give you three that I think are particularly important. One is cyber and cybersecurity. I think we can all agree that the level of vulnerability for nations and alliances is increasing and the vulnerabilities are increasing. So we need to work together as a NATO alliance to conduct better cyber defense of the alliance and of each of our nations individually. We can leverage this out of the Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Tallinn, Estonia, which is a NATO entity.
Secondly, NATO needs to work on increasing our partnerships with non-NATO nations, in coalition-type activities. Here I’m looking at strengthening our linkages, already strong admittedly, with Sweden, Finland, Austria, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and others. This is not expanding the membership of NATO so much as it is bringing in non-NATO partners to interact with us.
And then a third area for improvement, which may or may not surprise you because we don’t talk about it enough, is we need to spend more time thinking about the Arctic, what the Canadians call the High North. This is an enormous NATO border. We have five NATO nations up there, and two very close partners in addition – Sweden and Finland. And across the Arctic Ocean we see Russia, which is conducting a military buildup in the region. I think NATO needs to be more involved, not in a military combat kind of sense, but in a surveillance, monitoring, operating under the ice, operating in the sky, and – as global warming unfortunately melts the polar cap – operating in a maritime dimension there. We need to do that because Russia will continue to push in that zone. And just as we deter Russia on our eastern border and just as we deal with waves of migration on our southern and southeastern border, we need to think a bit more about the High North.
TCB: Obviously the United States will need to be a big player in these three areas in order for progress to happen, but do you think that European nations are now – more so than in the past – capable of dealing with these issues by themselves if they were forced to do it alone?
JS: I think that we are in a period of some centrifugal force that’s pulling apart what many had assumed was a done deal – this idea of the European Union, of a continuous march toward integrated foreign policy and integrated defense policy. The fact that the Brits have chosen to leave the European Union has created this, the financial problems in Greece has created this, the migration issue and the controversy over it and the differences of policy opinion amongst European nations has created it.
This is unfortunate for the United States because our strongest pool of partners is a unified, cohesive Europe, Western Europe in particular, but really all of Europe. So what the United States should do is be encouraging in every way a strong transatlantic relationship, because I think over time that will help our European colleagues to work more coherently together.
But we are in for some challenging and centrifugal forces pulling at our European partners, and it’s a good time for us to stay very, very engaged in Europe, and try to provide a countervailing view to the idea of separation and individual action by the Europeans – which is much less efficient, and much worse for us.
TCB: And last question – do you think the Trump Administration is going to do that and provide that vision?
JS: I don’t know. Certainly the campaign would tell us that the Trump Administration wants to focus on America first. They want to make America great again. They want to work on infrastructure and challenges here in the United States. They’re very focused on business and the economy. So it’s unclear to me whether we will have a strong policy of engagement in the world. I hope we do. I’m encouraged by the choice of General Jim Mattis for Secretary of Defense, Rex Tillerson for State, John Kelly for DHS – these are first-rate people who understand the importance of America’s role in the world, and that’s encouraging.
We have to lay that alongside some campaign rhetoric that talked about building walls between us and our partners to the south, putting tariffs on big trade partners – those are not policies that will enhance our ability to interact and lead in the global environment.
So the short answer to your excellent question is I hope so. But we won’t know until probably about a year or so into this administration.
