NATO at 50, at Risk

The heads of state of the 19 NATO countries will gather in Washington this week to celebrate the 50th anniversary of an organization that is struggling to redefine its purpose and maintain its unity. NATO has often been called the most successful alliance in history, but that came in deterring potential aggression from the Soviet Union, providing the shield that allowed Western Europe’s self-confidence to flourish and its economic strength to grow. Now, in the Balkans, NATO faces a far different test of its effectiveness and cohesion. For the first time the alliance has gone to war. If it fails to prevail over Yugoslavia--if it is unable to achieve its political objectives in Kosovo--not just its military credibility but its very reason for being will be questioned.

That NATO’s viability may be determined by what happens in an obscure Balkan province seems almost absurd. Yet Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic’s brutal campaign to rid Kosovo of its majority Albanian populace is exactly the kind of challenge to peace and security the Clinton administration has in mind as it seeks to direct NATO toward a new strategic concept.

The administration sees the NATO it has sought to expand and reinvent as essential for maintaining stability, encouraging democratic values and keeping the peace, first of all in Europe but not excluding areas beyond Europe’s borders. Those may be noble aims. But NATO’s response to events in the Balkans over the last four years has shown clearly just how reluctant most of its members are to take on the political risks of engagement or to put their armed forces in harm’s way, no matter how greatly regional stability might be menaced.

For half a century, NATO has been at the center of U.S. efforts to organize a system of international collective security to resist aggression. Even though a sulking France absented itself from the military command structure of the alliance for more than 30 years and two other members, Greece and Turkey, feuded and fought, the alliance held together in the face of a shared danger. With the Soviet Union’s collapse the nature of the danger has changed. Now it is not Red Army tanks thrusting westward that NATO must be ready to face, but aggression from tinpot tyrants like Milosevic and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, cross-border terrorism and ethnic conflicts that contain the seeds of humanitarian disasters.

Even if NATO proves to have the stamina and the will to meet its responsibilities in Kosovo--and that is by no means a given--its survival will depend on how well it is prepared to confront other threats to peace and stability. Everyone in NATO, even the French, who are most envious of U.S. military and political power, agrees that American leadership remains indispensable to the alliance’s existence and, indeed, to European security. The United States continues ready to lead in organizing and energizing its European allies. But it is likely to be far less willing to go on indefinitely bearing a disproportionate share of the burden of collective security.

In some areas, as the military effort in Kosovo again shows, a disproportionate U.S. contribution is all but unavoidable: in strategic bombing, intelligence, airlift capability, for example. But the Europe of 1999 is not the Europe of 1949. Today the combined wealth and population of the other 18 NATO members equals or exceeds that of the United States. Yet Europe collectively spends only about 2.2% of its gross domestic product on defense, one-third less than the United States.

Europe clearly is able to contribute more, and it should be doing so. If there is to be a remade NATO capable of protecting the shared interests of its members in the 21st century, a fairer level of participation and sacrifice by all of its partners is essential.