How the War in Ukraine in Reinvigorating the NATO Alliance

NATO and Russia: Selected Essays

Essay #1

\\\\\\\"NATO should not be considered the most successful military alliance in the history because it \\\\\\\"won\\\\\\\" the Cold War by default. Taking into consideration that Europe failed to field sufficient conventional military forces, the Cold War ended not because of effective Atlantic containment, but because of the internal demise of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR.\\\\\\\" Discuss and opinionate. In your essay, explain, exemplify, and assess the impact of the considerable disagreements and dissent between the US and its European allies during the Cold War. What was the role of Transatlantic relations and of NATO in ending the Cold War? Explain and justify.

Although many Americans and Western Europeans today believe that the primary catalyst for the end of the Cold War was President Ronald Reagan’s call to the Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev in 1987 to, “Tear down this wall,” the actual causes are far more complex and multifaceted. It is true, however, that Reagan’s speech coincided with many of the momentous events that would eventually spell the end of the Cold War, and his firm commitment to outspending the Soviets militarily certainly hastened the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Similarly, even though it was technologically doomed from the start, Reagan’s call for a “Star Wars”-type defensive shield clearly shook the Soviet leaders to their core, and an acceleration in their defense spending was the result. Likewise, as discussed further below, other factors such as increasing internal political dissent from Soviet satellite nations, the Soviet Union’s costly invasion of Afghanistan and the downturn in the Soviet economy also played a major role in ending the Cold War.

Therefore, while it is accurate to assert that NATO should not be considered the most successful military alliance in the history because it “won” the Cold War by default, NATO did in fact contribute to this outcome in a number of substantive ways, most especially by maintaining strong military pressure on the Soviet Union. This pressure became especially acute when the Soviet Union inexplicably decided that it needed its own version of Vietnam in its invasion and subsequent lengthy 10-year occupation of Afghanistan which drained the Soviet budget and cost more than 15,000 Soviet lives. The clandestine military, economic and technical support that was provided the U.S. to the Afghan mujahedeen ensured that the Soviet military would lose massive amounts of national treasure and blood, and the Soviet economy simply could not sustain this costly war.

Certainly, there were also a number of serious disagreements between the NATO member-states in the years leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In particular, then as now, the United States was concerned about the lack of defense spending as a percentage of GDP by its NATO allies, and it was obvious that many Western European nations were prospering economically as a result of the nuclear and conventional weaponry umbrella of defense provided by the U.S. which allowed them to concentrate on economic development at the expense of their military spending. In fact, defense spending represented one of the main issues of Transatlantic contention between NATO members, just as this controversy continues today.

Nonetheless, it is not entirely accurate to suggest that NATO failed to field sufficient conventional military forces to counter the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. For instance, while there were multiple hotspots around the world that involved both Western and Soviet proxies, including most especially Vietnam and Korea, the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations essentially kept their distance from NATO-allied nations in Europe. This eventuality indicates that despite assertions to the contrary, NATO did in fact field sufficient conventional military forces during the existence of the Soviet Union.

It is true, though, that the Soviet Union fielded far more conventional military forces than were needed to protect the integrity of its borders from incursions by NATO. For example, the final comparison of NATO and Warsaw Pact military forces conducted by the German Federal Ministry of Defense (1987) came to the prescient conclusion that, “The Warsaw Pact still maintains far more armed forces than are necessary for the defense of its territory. This raises the question why it places such a great burden on the national economies of its members” (Force Comparison: NATO and the Warsaw Pact, 1987, p. 5). It is also true that the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact consistently outspent NATO on conventional forces such as battle tanks and artillery systems, but the collapse of the Soviet Union and dissolution of the Warsaw Pact alliance just a few years later indicates that NATO did in fact field sufficient conventional forces to compel the Soviets to outspend the West, thereby hastening its end.

In addition, none of the centuries-old hostilities that existed between the European members of NATO simply vanished upon their accession to the alliance, and intra-alliance disagreements over optimal political and military strategies were inevitable and frequently protracted. Given the diversity of national interests that were involved, though, these disagreements were predictable then just as they are at present. Nevertheless, such disagreements served to bolster the views of critics of the alliance, and there was the constant threat that NATO could come apart at the seams as a result. After all, France withdrew from NATO in 1966 after hosting the alliance for 15 years, a move that came as a shock to the leaders of member-states who were forced to quickly transfer its headquarters to a new home in Casteau, Belgium. Even though France remained closely allied with NATO immediately thereafter, this eventuality made it clear that the NATO alliance was not rock-solid impervious to change.

In addition, there were also other salient factors involved in the end of the Cold War calculus that must be taken into account. For instance, Turkey played both ends against the middle in its relationship with NATO member-states and the Soviet Union, just as it continues to do currently with the Russian Federation and its negotiations over the accession of Sweden and Finland to the NATO alliance. In fact, it is reasonable to posit that the current state of Transatlantic relations between the U.S. and Europe are far stronger, and may even result in the acceptance of Ukraine into NATO in the foreseeable future. The current state of comparatively rosy Transatlantic relations, however, is a far cry from the years leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

Against this backdrop of disagreements and dissent between the U.S. and its European allies during the Cold War, the fact that NATO is still in existence today and definitely larger and stronger and more cohesive than ever as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is proof positive that it has been a successful military alliance in many ways, even if it was not solely responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Indeed, while it can be argued that a combination of geopolitical forces caused the end of the Cold War, it is clear that NATO was at center stage of this historic outcome. During its existence, the Soviet Union and its erstwhile Warsaw Pact allies were widely regarded as the major, monolithic threat facing the West. Given the dissensions that existed between some NATO member-states concerning how best to protect Western Europe’s interests, the only viable approach to countering this threat at the time from America’s perspective was the NATO alliance even if it was disproportionately funded by the United States.

The rationale behind the viability of the NATO alliance in countering the conventional military threat represented by the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact loosely resembled the “mutually assured destruction” which was understood to mean that any nuclear attack on a Western power would be countered by an overwhelming nuclear response by the United States. Likewise, NATO was established on the fundamental principle of collective defense, meaning that an attack against one member-state would be considered an attack against all member-states. During the years leading up to 1991, few Western observers could have predicted that the Berlin Wall would ever come down in their lifetimes, let alone the collapse of the seemingly mighty and insoluble Soviet empire. These positive outcomes for the West happened because the Transatlantic relations and NATO alliance were sufficiently cohesive to withstand the internal disagreements and controversies that frequently characterized the relationship between NATO member-states.