Can NATO Still Keep the Peace

Introduction The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was established in 1949 as part of the post-war effort among the nations of the West to work together to establish the peace. Throughout the Cold War, NATO was more of a symbol than an actual military alliance. It was not until the Cold War ended that the first joint military NATO operations were conducted. The first was in 1990 and the second in 1991—Anchor Guard and Ace Guard were NATO’s response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

The Gulf War that followed, based on Bush’s trumpeting of the same kind of unsubstantiated claims that his son would make with U.S.’s second Middle Eastern intervention, was the first demonstration of NATO’s force[footnoteRef:2]—i.e., NATO as a wing of the U.S. military and a kind of political and international justification and show of support for what Bush wanted to do to Saddam Hussein.

Bush used NATO forces for air cover from Turkey and then a small quick-reaction force was sent to the region.[footnoteRef:3] Bush pushed Hussein back into Iraq and then left the region: the U.S. and NATO together had demonstrated that it could maintain order, even though the collaboration was not without its controversy (due to the bogus allegations of war crimes the Bush administration leveled at Iraq at the time). Controversy only grew with NATO’s role in the Bosnian War in 1992.

Bombing of Kosovo in 1999, and Afghanistan post-9/11, followed by Iraq, the Gulf of Aden, the Libyan intervention which eventually led to regime change and the brutal murder of Gaddafi (and now a failed state), all showed signs of NATO speeding up its “peacekeeping” missions now that the Cold War was over: humanitarian aid at the barrel of a gun or on the back of a bomb—this was its delivery method, and critics accused NATO of simply being the international wing of the U.S.

[2: Douglas Walton, “Appeal to pity: A case study of theargumentum admisericordiam.” Argumentation 9.5 (1995), 771.] [3: NATO Operations, 1949-present, https://shape.nato.int/] Key Terms NATO refers to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization formed in 1949 of 12 members and expanded today to include 29 member states from North America and Europe. A key article in the treaty is Article Five, which affirms that an attack against any one member state of NATO is an attack against all, and all may retaliate with force against the attacking country.

International institutions refers to any collection of member states, such as the United Nations (UN) that serves to bring an alignment of interests and ideals to the global stage in the preservation of universally recognized goals, such as human rights, an end to hunger and poor health, and so on.

International institutionalism or liberal institutionalism as a theory in IR has been defined by Robert Keohane as focusing “on the idea of complex interdependence…placing emphasis on four characteristics which differentiate institutionalism from realism”—i.e., no distinction between high and low politics, and complete interaction among actors across national borders.[footnoteRef:4] [4: Rebecca Devitt, Liberal Institutionalism: An Alternative IR Theory or Just Maintaining the Status Quo? https://www.e-ir.info/2011/09/01/liberal-institutionalism-an-alternative-ir-theory-or-just-maintaining-the-status-quo/] Maintaining the peace refers to the practice of preventing war or using military force to prevent one nation from attacking another, committing genocide, or engaging in any destabilizing activity.

Peace is a term that refers to the opposite of devastating world wars: it refers to agreement and good relations among the great powers or nuclear powers; it refers to the avoidance of large-scale nuclear war. The Question The question can thus be relevantly put forward: Can Cold War international institutions such as NATO still maintain the peace? The answer should be a resounding no—as there has been anything but peace since the end of the Cold War.

Moreover, the post-Cold War shift to multipolarity,[footnoteRef:5] with Russia and China now top contenders as co-powers along with the U.S., and the break between the U.S. and Europe over how to deal with Iran, Russia, China and other countries that the U.S. sanctions, all signal that the relationship that supported NATO in 1949 is no longer strong or useful today.

[5: Martha Finnemore, “Legitimacy, Hypocrisy, and the Social Structure of Unipolarity,” World Politics 61 (2009), 59.] This paper will explain the answer by first providing a sense of where NATO fails, then examining those failures and showing why NATO’s legitimacy does not stand up in the light of today’s criticism and facts.

By using evidence from Asle Toje, John Mearsheimer, Martha Finnemore and others, it will show why NATO is not capable of keeping the peace, though it could, if altered and updated, transition into a more diplomatic organization that respects the rising multipolar world order.

The Role of NATO The argument that NATO can play a role in maintaining the peace in the post-Cold War era goes like this: NATO has been instrumental in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, has helped in humanitarian interventions, such as Bosnia, Kosovo and Libya, and has prevented aggressive and hostile nations like Russia and Iran from causing harm to the West. This standard boiler plate argument represents the typical neoconservative viewpoint in the West, which views NATO as the international validation of American interventionism.

As Mearsheimer puts it, the “false promise of international institutions” like NATO is used as a cover for ulterior motives of the main power behind the scenes[footnoteRef:6]—and that power in the U.S. is the West, and it has without a doubt a special relationship with Israel, a country in the Middle East that has actually been identified by the UN as human rights violator.

Mearsheimer objects to the idea that NATO and other international institutions are helpful because they enable collaboration: he states, “Although there is much evidence of cooperation among states, this alone does not constitute support for liberal institutionalism. What is needed is evidence of cooperation that would not have occurred in the absence of institutions because of fear of cheating, or its actual presence.”[footnoteRef:7] In other words, nations can cooperate without international institutions just fine. [6: John J.

Mearsheimer, ‘The False Promise of International Institutions’, International Security, 19:3, 1994-5] [7: John J. Mearsheimer, ‘The False Promise of International Institutions’, International Security, 19:3, 1994-24.] From the standpoint of collective security theory, which admits that military power is a basic element of international politics and one that can be used to cause peace, the main focus is on managing military power. This is where NATO could be better used in diplomatic terms.

Just because the power is there does not mean it has to be used—and the risk of that power being misused or misapplied (whether one is pointing to Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq or Libya) also has to be considered. What has been the outcome in Iraq or Libya for instance? One is a failed state and the other was obliterated and out of its ashes came ISIS.

How could NATO’s role in either intervention be seen, therefore, as being remotely related to keeping the peace or to causing peace? Far from it, NATO-led interventionism supported U.S.

aims only and peace had nothing to do with those aims: the entire goal was destabilization of Israel’s enemies in the Middle East, as described in the Oded Yinon policy paper from the 1980s.[footnoteRef:8] [8: Oded Yinon, “A strategy for Israel in the nineteen eighties." KIVUNIM (Directions): A Journal for Judaism and Zionism, 14 (1982), 5742.] From the beginning, NATO was always about power and control—not exactly about peace.

This is shown by Toje, who notes that “the rationale underpinning NATO was…captured in the motto of the Alliance’s first Secretary-General, Lord Ismay, who stated the need to ‘keep the Soviets out, the Americans in and the Germans down’.”[footnoteRef:9] Post-war Europe had essentially been beaten down and devastated by two world wars, neither of which impacted the infrastructure of the U.S.

Britain, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain—they had all been wracked by war in the 20th century and the U.S. emerged as the sole dominant power. NATO was less about ensuring peace than it was about the European states hitching their wagons in a docile manner to the guiding ship that was the U.S.

Toje explains Europe’s willingness to enter NATO in this manner: “The drawbacks of the dependence on the United States (US) during the Cold War was for the Europeans by far outweighed by the security guarantee embedded in the American commitment to Article 5 of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty.”[footnoteRef:10] The main threat at the time was the Soviet Union, and the Berlin Wall served as the symbol of that threat.

It helped that every president from Kennedy to Reagan used the Red Menace as a cudgel with which to beat Europe over the head as a reminder that it needed the U.S. more than the U.S. needed Europe. However, the truth is that Europe lent the U.S. a degree of legitimacy in terms of acting on the world stage in European and Middle Eastern affairs. Starting with the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was no longer a threat, the U.S.

began to use NATO en force. The Berlin Wall came down at the end of the 1980s, and immediately NATO was bombing countries. If NATO had been about keeping peace, why was it necessary to suddenly begin bombing campaigns when the greatest threat to peace (the Soviet Union) was dissolved? Now that Russia was out of the way, a vacuum had opened up in terms of controlling the chess pieces on the geopolitical stage, and the U.S. stepped in with NATO acting as its white knight.

[9: Asle Toje, “The first casualty in the war against terror: the fall of NATO and Europe's reluctant coming of age." European Security 12, no. 2 (2003), 63.] [10: Asle Toje, “The first casualty in the war against terror: the fall of NATO and Europe's reluctant coming of age." European Security 12, no. 2 (2003), 63.] The use of liberalism as a screen has long been the dominant gesture of the West (i.e., the U.S.) in terms of foreign policy.

Bombing campaigns are dubbed humanitarian interventions and the well-known CNN effect has long been documented by researchers showing the extent to which the media plays a role in the exercise of soft power.[footnoteRef:11] Liberalism has been defined as the focus “on how human reason, progress, freedom, and individual rights can contribute to peace and security.”[footnoteRef:12] The ideal that frames this definition is essentially rooted in the optimism of the West, the notion that WW2 was the Good War and that the good guys won.

Yet implicit in that notion is the assumption that the war was one of good vs. evil. The films over the past 60 years have certainly emphasized that simplistic approach to history—but the reality is rather far more complicated and complex and rooted in geopolitics and ideologies. NATO was a geopolitical treaty, a pragmatic solution for European that wanted Marshall Plan funds to rebuild during the Cold War. For the U.S., it was a way to bind Europe to the U.S.

Liberalism had very little to do with it other than to serve as a pretext to that binding. By the end of WW2, few believed in reason, progress, freedom or individual rights any longer. The UN Declaration of Human Rights was long a hollow gong that still goes on ringing while the bombs keep on falling and the devastation wrought by “humanitarian intervention” keeps occurring. The effect of all this peace is that a million plus immigrants from Syria and Iraq are now displaced and scattered across Europe.

Nations in the EU want out because they do not want open borders. Nationalism is rising and populism along with it. The U.S. is attempting to browbeat countries into backing away from the multipolar world order that is now rising up. Russia and China are bypassing the USD in their energy trades, and China has instituted the gold-backed petro yuan, which serves as an attractive alternative to the petro dollar. The world order that the U.S.

has clung to so tightly since WW2 is slipping through its fingers and NATO has served as the pail to keep that order from spilling into the ground; that pail, however, is no longer as useful as it once was. It is full of holes and those holes are in the form of NATO members not wanting to pay to be part of Team America. As Finnemore notes, “one would expect a U.S.

unipolar system to look different from a Nazi unipolar system”[footnoteRef:13]—but it does not, and that is why the multipolar order looks attractive to so many countries who no longer want to be sanctioned or bullied by the U.S. and its international military wing NATO. Even members of Europe do not see eye to eye with the U.S. anymore in terms of trade, relations with other nations like Iran and Russia, and security.

[11: Piers Robinson, The CNN effect: The myth of news, foreign policy and intervention (Routledge, 2005).

3.] [12: Thomas Walker and David Rousseau, ‘Liberalism: A Theoretical and Empirical Assessment’, in Cavelty and Balzacq (eds), Routledge Handbook of Security Studies, 22.] [13: Martha Finnemore, “Legitimacy, Hypocrisy, and the Social Structure of Unipolarity,” World Politics 61 (2009), 59.] As Waltz points out, the democratic peace thesis is what was used to prop up NATO theoretically speaking—“the democratic peace thesis holds that democracies do not fight democracies”[footnoteRef:14]—and yet democracies are fighting and the U.S. is right in the thick of it.

NATO protected Europe from Russia during the Cold War. Once the Cold War ended, NATO was suddenly flung into action—for the first time ever. It began its campaigns of aggression, allowing the U.S. to intervene in European and Middle Eastern affairs under the guise of promoting “democratic peace”—but all that has really happened is that more and more democracies are now turned against one another. England has voted to leave the EU. Italy has threatened.