International Relations

Answer: North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) is the largest military alliance on the planet. It was established in 1949 as a bulwark against the Soviet armies after the Second World War. It guarantees the freedom and security of its members through political as well as military means. Born from a desire for collective defence and containment of the USSR, its mandate post Cold War morphed to include nation-building, peace-keeping, military-civil relations and the never-ending fight against terrorism and organised crime, with varying degrees of success. Since then, NATO has been struggling to remain relevant and faces challenges in redefining its role:

• Failures of NATO: The notion of collective security has receded in the background post USSR era. However, it needs to be re-invigorated. For instance, the 2014 bloodless assimilation of Crimea into Russia and recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia have sent shockwaves, especially amongst Russia’s neighbours.
• Shift in focus of collective security from within Europe towards east: The old East-West partitions have become a thing of the past and new fault lines dividing the increasingly worried Baltic States and Poland from a resurgent Russia, have emerged.
• NATO has always been a fractious alliance: The attempts to consider the national wants and needs of all its member states at times seem to be an impossible task. For instance, France left NATO in 1966, only to return, under certain conditions, decades later in 2009.
• Differences within NATO: Turkey, a vital member of the Alliance, has recently involved itself in conflicts on its doorstep in Syria and as far away as Libya. In these civil wars, NATO members have at times found themselves on opposing sides.
• Issue of economic burden sharing: Failure to share the costs of NATO operations more equitably pose risks of unravelling of the alliance as the issue of “burden sharing” has been revived.

Throughout history, military alliances have formed to balance the countervailing power. They have collapsed when the need for a balance disappeared as a result of either power crumbling or changing threat perceptions. However, the collapse of Soviet imperial rule in the late 1980s did not lead to NATO’s demise rather it has evolved, Le.:

• Maintain strategic balance: Post Cold War, NATO identified the need to “preserve the strategic balance in Europe” and adopted it as one of its fundamental security tasks. Under this, it would provide security to democratizing countries, solidifying their transitions from communism and opening new economic prosperity through greater connections with the European Union.
• Reconceived as a “cooperative-security” organization: Under this, NATO has two main objectives, Le., to foster dialogue and cooperation with former adversaries in the Warsaw Pact and to “manage” conflicts in areas on the European periphery, such as the Balkans.
• Pluralistic security community: NATO grew from being a military alliance principally dedicated to protecting its members into institutional expression of the transatlantic community of states and the western values that both defined and united them. Further, the NATO grew into a pluralistic security community where use of force for settling disputes among its members has been ruled out.
• Redefined its missions: Politically, NATO has sought new missions to retain its relevance from peacekeeping to countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to counter-terrorism etc. While on the military side, it has streamlined and created a more flexible command structure capable of deploying military forces rapidly and over greater distances than was the case during the cold war.

Thus, post Cold War, the NATO has not only survived but been transformed into a politico-military entity. NATO of today is a confluence of like-minded democratic ideals and of shared values. The world order has changed and it is in this climate that NATO now has to operate. Unlike the Cold War era, with one clearly defined adversary, today there is a need to fight a patchwork of local conflicts while maintaining an ever-growing alliance between countries.