Strategic reassurance as a NATO mission
- By defencematters
An interview with Ronald Asmus, former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs (1997-2000), one of the architects of the post Cold War enlargement of NATO
by Octavian Manea
An interview with Ronald Asmus, former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs (1997-2000), one of the architects of the post Cold War enlargement of NATO.
Statecraft is also about stagecraft. How should NATO be for a 21st century profile in order to perform its classic functions (both deterrence and reassurance) with maximum effectiveness?
To make it simple, the Alliance needs to be able to maintain peace and stability on the continent and protect members from new threats from beyond the continent. That requires us to be able to deter those threats at home and abroad and to provide the kind of reassurance to more exposed allies that there are plans and strategies in place that actually will accomplish that goal. Reassuring allies that NATO is willing and able to respond to incipient trends of instability to nip potential conflicts is a core mission today. We need to develop a level of capability and readiness that can be quickly and flexibly tailored to meet rapidly emerging threats.
The need for reassurance is in part generated by the fact that certain Eastern European countries have doubts about the West's commitment to their defense. How can this solidarity problem be fixed, restoring the faith in NATO? After all, the devil is in the details.
This is not a new problem and the answer is not rocket science. NATO has wrestled with it since its creation. Nearly every multilateral alliance in history has had to deal with some version of it. Political commitments need to be backed up by defense arrangements and planning that create solidarity and dependability. The goal is a state of affairs where the strategy underpinning Alliance cohesion and solidarity ensures that all members have the confidence that they are secure in an alliance of indivisible security.
After all, the power of Article 5 was never simply the words on paper. It was always the fact that these commitments were backed up by planning, exercises and boots on the ground. What gave those words meaning was that they were backed by political will as expressed through the means and mechanisms to actually come to each other’s defense. You need to train and work together to help create the cement and glue that makes allies allies. We know how to do this if given the political mandate to do so.
How could we creatively exploit the provisions of the NATO-Russia Founding Act in order to get the defense dimension of reassuring the Eastern flank countries right?
When we negotiated the NATO-Russia Founding Act, we made clear that we had the right to do exactly the kind of defense planning and preparations we needed to have credible Article 5 commitments. The problem is not the provisions of the Founding Act. The problem is that we have not used the flexibility we have to implement those provisions. The founding act consciously created the space for NATO to defend the new members through “necessary interoperability, integration, and capability for reinforcement”.
Why should reassurance be a precondition of the Alliance in resetting policy with Russia?
Because we will never be able to sustain a reset policy over time if a good number of allies who are in the Alliance feels insecure. Today the Alliance is divided over whether reassurance or reset should take priority. We have to do both. It is only when all allies feel secure that they will be more willing to be bolder in reaching out to Moscow as well.
To what extent is Russia a revisionist power? What is the target of this anti-status-quo behavior?
Russia has concluded that all the norms and agreements negotiated in the 1990s ended up legitimated in an expansion by the West into what it considers its own space of influence. And they therefore want to rewrite those rules of the game or at least reinterpret them and dilute their legitimacy. Russia's goal is a buffer zone at their doors.
Russia is a revisionist, but also a declining power. That combination might make it temper its foreign policy ambitions or make it more reckless and challenging to deal with. We don't know how Russia will act or what it is capable of in its decline. I am not worried that Russia poses a territorial threat or that it would launch an attack on Europe. That is absurd. I do still worry about unresolved limited conflicts emerging or being induced and then escalating. NATO is perfectly capable of taking care of the former. Today it is not well prepared to handle the latter.
- This interview was published by Foreign Policy Romania in September 2010. We decided to republish this piece for its prescient power. Most of the nuances discussed then – reassuring the most exposed allies, the credibility of article 5, Russian revisionism – are part of what we can call the new norm on the Eastern Flank, especially after Ukraine.
