A proliferation of external threats, including terrorism and cyber attacks, combined with a fractious European Union places Europe in a vulnerable position at the start of the new year. The Cipher Brief’s Kaitlin Lavinder sat down with former Deputy Secretary General of NATO (2012-2016) Ambassador Alexander Vershbow to discuss the future of European defense.
The Cipher Brief: John McLaughlin, the former Acting Director of the CIA and Cipher Brief network member, mentioned a few weeks ago that Europe is likely to face even more ISIS-targeted terror. We’ve already seen attacks on the continent over the past year. At the same time, Europe’s holding elections across the continent in 2017, and there’s fear of Russian hacking in those elections. Are these fears validated, and do you think Europe is able to respond?
Ambassador Alexander Vershbow: I think these are justifiable fears. I mean, we have seen terrorist attacks in Europe both planned by ISIS or home-grown ones inspired by ISIS. I think that it’s inevitable that with elections coming, with changes in the transatlantic relationship, that ISIS will try to find fault lines and try to kind of demoralize and destabilize European societies – that’s their objective worldwide. And since they’re somewhat on the defensive on the ground in the Middle East and may suffer even more setbacks if the new U.S. administration escalates its offensive in Iraq and Syria, then they may try to get more attacks on our own countries.
At the same time, I think European governments have made a lot of progress in better sharing information and trying to prevent terrorist attacks, so it’s not foreordained there will be spectacular attacks. But inevitably some networks will get through, and we all have to be prepared for that and stand together.
I’m more worried about the internal threats to Europe now caused by the divisions over migration and how to resettle the Syrian refugees who already arrived, and what to do with those that are inevitably going to try to cross the Mediterranean to get into Europe, as long as the chaos still persists in Syria and in North Africa. This is leading to a kind of political breakdown that threatens the very unity of Europe and which I still think is a vital American interest. President Trump doesn’t seem to think European integration is all that valuable, but I think looking at the peace that it has brought to Europe and the prosperity and also the dynamic market that it has created for the United States, we would undermine European unity at our peril. But there the Europeans have to get their own act together.
TCB: So you mentioned information sharing across the continent and how it has been bolstered over the past year or a couple of years. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
AV: The Europeans have started from a pretty low base. They have some of the same problems among them as countries and among their internal security services that the United States had before 9/11, in terms of stove piping and lack of sharing of information with countries that might be able to actually contribute to tracking and breaking up terrorist plots.
They’ve improved the communication among their law enforcement and interior ministries, but they still don’t have the infrastructure that would be needed to pass classified and threat information on a real-time basis. They depend still heavily on bilateral relationships between neighboring countries, which is not insignificant, but they don’t have the unified approach that the U.S. government more or less achieved after 9/11.
That’s something where the U.S. could be helpful, where actually NATO could assist the European Union because NATO does have mechanisms for sharing intelligence if the nations want to use them. And that could be something that could perhaps be extended to the European Union, which has mostly the same members – it has countries like Finland and Sweden, which aren’t in NATO but have all the same high-level security clearances. So I’m hoping that the U.S. can contribute to that because we’re all in this together.
TCB: So are you saying that there would be a NATO centralized information sharing system, which NATO already has now, and then a European Union one? And, if so, why separate those two?
AV: NATO has classified intelligence networks for its military forces and also among the national intelligence services, but the focus of the information that is shared – and it’s all voluntary – is largely on military developments, international political trends; it’s not so much on where this ISIS cell is operating and which illegal weapons supplies have been moving across this or that border – that’s more handled in internal security channels. But the networks themselves could be used by the 22 members of NATO that are in the EU – and maybe extended to other EU countries that meet whatever security test – so that this information can be moved more readily, the way that the military information is moved now.
TCB: With the Trump administration here in the United States and with, as you mentioned earlier, European unity in a very fragile state and with a proliferation of external threats, like from ISIS and cyber hacking, is NATO prepared to face this environment, and if not, what does NATO need to restructure or change to meet the external threat environment?
AV: I think there has been a lot of efforts by NATO, particularly since 9/11, to be more focused on countering terrorist threats, and of course the intervention in Afghanistan, where NATO troops have been fighting with the U.S. to counter the Taliban and al Qaeda, shows that NATO has a lot of capacity to fight terror. And there have been other missions that focus on trying to monitor and cut off supplies of weapons and illicit materials to terrorist networks. So there’s a base on which to build.
But when it comes to ISIS, that campaign has been done largely outside of NATO – some of the same countries, but it hasn’t been NATO as an institution dealing with those threats. So one thing that allies could agree to is to have NATO take more of a direct role in coalition efforts to defeat ISIS. They could also – again using the upgraded intelligence structures that NATO has been developing over the last couple of years – use NATO more as a forum for assessing terrorist threats, exchanging analyses, and forging more of a common strategy against terrorism, which right now is largely done again outside of the NATO framework.
But I think the area where NATO has the most capacity that could be increased is in the preventive aspect of fighting terrorism, which is in terms of training local forces, helping neighboring states, whether it’s Jordan or Morocco or Iraq, to better equip themselves to fight terror at home. It’s partly just about professionalizing their armed forces, training their special operators, and integrating intelligence with counterterrorism planning. NATO has a lot that it could teach partners, and they’re doing a little of this, but it’s on a much smaller scale than I think is necessary and which NATO is certainly capable of if the nations decide to give the resources to do this.
They just announced, for example, that NATO is going to set up a counter-IED [improvised explosive device] training program in Iraq, which is good news. The NATO people are saying this is just the beginning; it could grow. But right now it’s just a few dozen trainers, and if this were scaled up by a factor of five or ten, with training in different parts of Iraq, they could have a much more substantial impact on raising the proficiency of the Iraqi security forces.
Another place where NATO has talked about helping is Libya – which if there is ever sort of a stable government that is ready to be a partner for NATO, NATO could also go in there and do everything from setting up a defense ministry and national security structure to the training of troops and putting them under an integrated command so that the different, fractious parts of Libya could hopefully come together, with a common security strategy.
TCB: What about on the cyber front?
AV: Well there are two aspects. First, defending your cyber networks against attacks – debilitating attacks – by hostile adversaries, whether it’s Russia or non-state actors like ISIS. And NATO has been doing a lot in that regard to harden its networks, to set up computer incident response capabilities, rapid reaction teams to help a member state if it was zapped by cyber attacks or a denial of service attack. And some of that involves working with nations who have to do their own cyber protection, harden their banking systems, their civilian infrastructure. So this is an area where NATO and the EU are increasingly working together since their mandates kind of overlap.
The other aspect of cyber is of course the disinformation, the misuse of cyber space to promote instability; to build support for extremist parties, which we’re seeing in many European countries; even to hack elections, which we saw in the United States. And that’s not naturally something that NATO has done in the past, but it may be something that NATO needs to work on in the future, because you could say that threats to our institutions and our social stability is almost as important, or maybe more important, than defending our borders. But here too it’s not traditionally NATO’s area of responsibility to help governments counter malicious propaganda about their domestic policies or treatment of ethnic minorities. So NATO – maybe working with the European Union, with the member states, even with civil society in new ways – can at least play a role in countering this sort of abuse of cyber space.
TCB: You’ve talked about NATO working with the European Union in a more substantive way in the future than it has in the past. Can you talk a little bit about integrated command structures within Europe? I’m thinking specifically of the integrated command that Germany has with the Netherlands. Do you foresee this as being a way forward for European defense, in which there’s bilateral, trilateral integrated command? Or do you foresee the idea of a European pillar in NATO coming to the forefront of the agenda again?
AV: Those are interesting issues that have been debated many times over the years, but I think may be ripe again for consideration now. Of course NATO and the EU have many different dimensions, and what I was talking about before is more kind of political and institutional cooperation, and there has at least been some encouraging decisions, even a joint declaration by the leaders of NATO and the EU at the July summit last year in Warsaw, on working on these overlapping issues more.
But when it comes to the defense side, it definitely is important for Europeans to take more responsibility, and in some cases, it may be through the European Union that Europe may need to act – whether it’s a peacekeeping mission in North Africa or even defense capacity building in Tunisia or some other neighboring country. Where they have the capacity, where you don’t necessarily need to use big robust NATO, I think can lead to kind of a division of labor.
NATO and the EU have debated over the years, how could NATO lend the use of its planning and some of its military headquarters to command European Union-led operations? This has all been worked out in theory, but it’s never really been put to the test in practice because of political problems, not least the unresolved Cyprus dispute and Greek-Turkish tensions. But maybe with the rising threats on the periphery, this may be the time – and also with President Trump’s quite clear desire to see the Europeans shoulder more of the burden, maybe this is the opportunity to make these theoretical structures work in practice.
It becomes a bit more awkward with Brexit because 20 percent of the EU’s military capabilities is about to leave the European Union, but if the UK still wants to stay engaged with its European partners on security, maybe it can be kind of the hinge between NATO and a more active EU that takes the lead in some particular missions and operations.
TCB: The rising threats on the periphery seem contradictory to the disunity happening in Europe right now. So that sounds very great, that theoretical plan to be implemented to meet external threats, but this seems like the time at which that would be the least likely to happen. Do you agree?
AV: There’s a risk that the Europeans will, because of their internal problems, focus on mending fences at home, or alternatively they may descend into some bitter divisions and disputes over migration and unwillingness to share those burdens, which could undermine their ability to take decisions on security issues. It could mean a less engaged, less activist Europe than they need and the world needs and the United States needs going forward.
I hope that’s not the case. That’s why I think it’s in the U.S. interest to sort of encourage them to find an amicable way forward on Brexit, to focus on where we can work together rather than promoting further divisions across the Atlantic and within Europe.
TCB: You were the Deputy Secretary General of NATO until last October. What is the one thing you learned in that position that has stuck with you since then?
AV: First of all, the changes that we thought were irreversible at the end of the Cold War weren’t and that you never take anything for granted.
That’s why I think it has been important that NATO stayed in existence after the end of the Cold War, shifted its focus away from collective defense to integrating Europe. And I think that was one of those sort of thank god we did it when we could moments, to widen the zone of democracy and stability, as a hedge against the possibility that Russia could become an adversary again. And since then NATO has shown it is quite adaptable in going back to collective defense, but without giving up the new missions it’s been assuming in the post-Cold War period, including fighting terrorism, exporting stability to its periphery, and reaching out to partners across the globe.
The other thing I learned – this I learned earlier – is the indispensable role of the United States in NATO. It’s a unique organization, where the U.S. is the first among equals and accepted as the leader but at the same time, respected because it listens. It doesn’t impose its will on its allies but tries to work for a consensus that takes into account the interests of the big and the small countries.
I played that role when I was the ambassador [to NATO from 1998 to 2001], and it was interesting to become the honest broker as the sidekick of the Secretary General [when I became Deputy Secretary General of NATO in February 2012] – trying to be the honest broker among the fractious allies. But in the end, with 28 countries, NATO’s kind of too big to fail. And the 28 members know that. So they make it work.
