GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES

As NATO Turns 70, Strategic Questions Await American Answers

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Ian Morris
Board of Contributors

Mar 14, 2019 | 16:56 GMT

This photo shows Rose Gottemoeller, deputy secretary-general of NATO, delivering a speech in Prague, Czech Republic, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the military alliance's eastward expansion.

NATO Deputy Secretary-General Rose Gottemoeller delivers a speech during a ceremony marking the 20th anniversary of the eastward expansion of the NATO military alliance on March 12, 2019, at the Prague Castle, Czech Republic.

(MICHAL CIZEK/AFP/Getty Images)

Highlights

  • To gain perspective on the questions American strategists will need to answer in Europe in the 2020s requires a look at the long-term trends that have driven NATO's history.
  • In the words of its first secretary-general, NATO was founded "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." Seventy years later, the opposite appears to have happened.
  • Having tossed the Russians out after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Americans got out too — with the result that the Germans did not stay down for long and the Russians also came back in. Now the United States has to decide what to do next.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded in April 1949. Its first secretary-general, Hastings Ismay, was brutally clear about what it was for: "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." With just three weeks to go to NATO's 70th birthday, however, its efforts appear to have produced precisely the opposite results. In ways that were unimaginable just a generation ago, Europe seems to be entering an era in which the Russians are in, the Americans out and the Germans up. This is one of the greatest geostrategic shakeups of modern times, but explaining it requires us to look back well beyond NATO's birth to identify the long-term trends that have driven NATO's history. Once we do this, we gain a new perspective on the questions American strategists will need to answer in the 2020s....

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