While the EU concentrated on expanding its membership by initially incorporating rich, formerly neutral European countries, NATO opened its doors to the east, inviting the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland to join while affirming that membership would remain open to all qualified European countries. Its members—old and new alike—have yet to fully agree on what a military organization born and raised in response to an overwhelming military threat emanating from the Soviet Union ought to do now that this threat has disappeared.
Should its primary purpose remain to defend the territory of its members against direct attack, which, though less likely, remains a possibility in an uncertain and unstable world? Alternatively, should the Alliance aim to extend security and stability throughout the Euro-Atlantic region, accepting new members that meet the basic standards of market democracy, the rule of law, and a commitment to resolve internal and external disputes by peaceful means?
Or should NATO extend its reach both geographically and functionally, defending not just the common territory but also the common interests of the Alliance members wherever these might be threatened?
NATO is a major contributor to international peace and security and is the cornerstone of Canadian security and defence policy. Canada's participation in NATO operations around the world exemplifies our commitment to the Alliance. NATO is an active and leading contributor to peace and security on the international stage.
It promotes democratic values and is committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes. However, if diplomatic efforts fail, it has the military capacity needed to undertake crisis-management operations, alone or in cooperation with other countries and international organizations.
The coordinated and deliberate drawdown of all US and RSM forces is due to be completed within a few months. NATO Allies and partners will continue to support the ongoing Afghan-owned and Afghan-led peace process after the withdrawal of troops.
But to save the alliance and advance the democratic values it was founded to defend, its leaders must take aggressive, creative action. The original alliance was optimized for the lengthy, bipolar Cold War and had a relatively simple mission: stop the Soviets. It was a very costly approach that required massive expenditures on troops in Europe—around , at one point, compared with 62, today.
But with only a dozen original members and a few added along the way, NATO was relatively tight in both size and mission. Bush envisioned it, felt distinctly possible. At the same time, NATO 2. I felt this constantly in Brussels as Supreme Allied Commander, briefing the leadership of the then 28 nations: the air and sea campaign in Libya truly split the alliance; the Afghan campaign, with its rising casualty count, appeared to be a quagmire; and, later, debates over whether to have a formal NATO mission in Syria, on the border of NATO member Turkey, led to difficult sparring matches in the North Atlantic Council, the governing body of the alliance.
It felt like the organization was fragmenting badly at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century. I vividly remember attending an alliance meeting shortly after I took command in during which Chiefs of Defense of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania laid out a passionate, intelligence-based briefing on the possibility of Russian intervention in the Baltic countries. I assessed it to be a very low probability at that moment, but in the years afterward, I became increasingly concerned.
We updated our NATO defensive war plans, conducted significant training exercises and requested additional forces across the organization to maintain a higher level of readiness. But even as NATO reawakened, the challenge from outside was changing. A lethal mixture of propaganda, social-network manipulation, cyberoperations, special forces and unconventional terrorist-like attacks poses a different kind of threat than the tanks and missiles of the Cold War.
Unlikely, but possible. And that threat only gets more difficult to counter with the advent of advanced military technology. As the tools of offensive cyberwarfare continue to grow—making definitive attribution of an attack difficult to achieve—Russia might be tempted to subvert smaller NATO allies in the Baltics or the Balkans. Doing so, Moscow might calculate, could create fissures in the alliance as the larger nations debate their willingness to fight for a tiny ally.
It would be a smart tactical move by Putin, who seems increasingly prepared to bet that the answer to the foundational question—Would you die for NATO? President Trump is compounding that danger. He excoriated the alliance during the campaign and hectors the allies at every turn to increase their level of defense spending. That tactic admittedly has had some effect, as several allies have finally stepped up their spending to pledged levels.
A third issue was the question of scope. The Brussels Treaty signatories preferred that membership in the alliance be restricted to the members of that treaty plus the United States. Together, these countries held territory that formed a bridge between the opposite shores of the Atlantic Ocean, which would facilitate military action if it became necessary.
The result of these extensive negotiations was the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in In this agreement, the United States, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United Kingdom agreed to consider attack against one an attack against all, along with consultations about threats and defense matters.
This collective defense arrangement only formally applied to attacks against the signatories that occurred in Europe or North America; it did not include conflicts in colonial territories. After the treaty was signed, a number of the signatories made requests to the United States for military aid.
Soon after the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the outbreak of the Korean War led the members to move quickly to integrate and coordinate their defense forces through a centralized headquarters. The North Korean attack on South Korea was widely viewed at the time to be an example of communist aggression directed by Moscow, so the United States bolstered its troop commitments to Europe to provide assurances against Soviet aggression on the European continent.
West German entry led the Soviet Union to retaliate with its own regional alliance, which took the form of the Warsaw Treaty Organization and included the Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe as members.
The threat of this form of response was meant to serve as a deterrent against Soviet aggression on the continent.
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