Episode 166: NATO Alliance

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Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. This week we're going to discuss the transatlantic alliance and in particular NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, an organization that I think historians agree is one of the most, if not the most successful alliance in the history of the world.

And today we're going to discuss why this alliance exists and what role it's played and how we should think about the future of this alliance, if it has a future, and its relationship to democratic relations across societies and alliances on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. A very important issue for politics and international diplomacy.

We're joined by two friends and scholars and teachers who have written some of the most important work on NATO, two people who have taught me much of what I know about this alliance, Joshua Shifrinson and James Goldgeier. Hello gentlemen.

Hello.

Hello.

Josh Shifrinson is an associate professor of international relations in the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His first book, which is a wonderful book with a bright yellow cover, I can see it on my bookshelf now, it always stands out on your bookshelf because of the bright yellow color and the brilliance of what's inside of it, Rising Titans, Falling Giants, How Great Powers Exploit Power Shifts, a really thoughtful explanation of how countries, big countries deal with shifts in international power. Related to this, Josh has written numerous articles, particularly on NATO, on the durability of NATO, on its expansion at the end of the Cold War, and various related issues.

James Goldgeier is a professor of international relations and the former dean of the School of International Service at American University, and he survived his deanship and remained an active scholar. I think no one has ever done that before. Jim, you're the only one who's managed that. He's also the Robert Bosch Senior Visiting Fellow at the Center for the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institute, and he serves as chair of a committee that I have great reverence for, the State Department Historical Advisory Committee, which helps us to get documents that we as historians can use for our research. Jim has written numerous books. I think still the best book on the period from the end of the Cold War to 9-11, America Between the Wars, that he co-wrote with Derek Chollet, also Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy Toward Russia After the Cold War, that he co-wrote with now-former Russian Ambassador Michael McFaul. And particularly for our subject today, Jim wrote the first, and I still think the best book on NATO expansion, Not Whether But When: The U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO.

So we have two scholars and public intellectuals who clearly know more about this topic than anyone else and a lot to share with us.

Before we turn to our conversation with Josh and Jim, we have, of course, Mr. Zachary Suri's poem. What's the title of your poem, Zachary?

Transatlantic Elegy.

Transatlantic Elegy. Okay, let's hear it.

Out of the dust, can you see it now, over there? The giant sits alone, a figure in a wrought iron chair. Arisen from the hole he himself has piled up, the giant looks around, wants your wine inside his cup. It is a lonely habit, overlooking all your friends. It is indeed a lonely hour when they retreat into their dens. But you, giant over there, you behemoth in your gold-plated lair, you have not been forgotten, only tastefully ignored. They remember all your blessings, and they remember how you snored. It is a solitary sport, this gallivanting hopefulness, the smile, the embrace, the recognition of your soulfulness. You sit as if in the impression of a painting on the wall, and they stand beside your picture frame, relating, recall, we believed you were arisen in Kabul before the fall.

Interesting.

Wow. That is amazing.

This is why we have the podcast. We have Zachary's poetry to open up our eyes.

That's the best thing ever written on NATO.

Now, Zach, I heard it was called Transatlantic Elegy. Does this mean you'll be running for the nomination in Ohio at some point?

No.

No, no J.D. Vance is here for us.

No J.D. Vance is here. Very good.

Zachary, clearly your poem had impact already. What is your poem about?

My poem is really about the ironic position the United States finds itself in as the former center of the transatlantic alliance that was in many ways the strongest alliance of the late 20th century, but now as someone who's seeking to reclaim that, but at the same time trying to make decisions like pulling out from Afghanistan without really consulting our allies in the ways that we have in the past, or at least aspired to.

We'll come back to that, of course, but I think your poem also implies that there was a golden moment. There was something there. Maybe Jim, how should we start our history of NATO? What is NATO about? Why was it founded and what did it do well in its time?

Well, I think we start with Zachary's poem and bringing the giant out of the lair. This was the...I think it's really important to remember that this alliance formed in 1949 among the United States, Canada, and 10 European countries that then added four more European countries during the Cold War and then expanded with 14 more after the end of the Cold War. It was a big deal to form this alliance in 1949 because it really went against the ideas of the founding of this country, George Washington's admonition against permanent alliances, Thomas Jefferson's argument against entangling alliances.

We got involved in the alliance, the Grand Alliance, in World War II because the world was at stake, but the idea was that when that was over, that would be that. Who thought we would be forming some kind of permanent alliance with Canada and our European allies? There we were in 1949 forming NATO and, of course, other alliances as well during the Cold War. The Soviet threat was deemed to be so sufficiently dangerous to the United States and its partners that the United States did go about forming these alliances only a few years after it had been allied with the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom in the Grand Alliance of World War II. So, it really is hugely important that it was established and that here we are in 2021 and Zachary's poem has pointed out that there are some cracks in the thing, but it's still standing all these years later.

It's amazing. You're certainly right, Jim. As a historian, I always remind my students that the United States, after the revolution, when we had an alliance with the French, we never formed another alliance again until World War II. So, our tradition, as you said, was not to have alliances like this.

Josh, it's often said, and the quote is apocryphal from Lord Ismay as far as we can tell, but it's often taken as an apocryphal statement that NATO was created to keep the US in, the Soviets out and the Germans down. Is that accurate?

I think that is highly accurate and it gets a duality in NATO's founding purpose, and I think Jim alluded to this, but it's worth putting a point on it. We think of NATO retrospectively as this exercise in using American power to deter the Soviet threat, to keep the Red Army and the Soviet Union's political influence in check. But of course, founded in 1949, the states of Western Europe and Canada aren't only, even primarily even, worried about the Soviet Union. There's this country called Germany that sits in the heart of Europe.

Now, of course, Germany in 1949 wasn't a sovereign actor and it was divided between the victors of the Second World War in Europe, but there's a real fear about the resurgence of German power akin to what we saw after the First World War, and this worry that the Germans would run amok again if not checked. So Lord Ismay's apocryphal statement, keeping the Americans in, the Germans down, the Soviets out, really gets at the idea the Americans were going to project power into the heart of Europe and try to manage European security affairs to, on the one hand, check the Soviets, but also check the Germans. And so American power was to focus in this very dual-hatted fashion.

And how did this actually work in practice, Jim? You've written a lot about this. NATO was actually a relatively consultative structure and still is, right? It wasn't just the United States getting its way all the time, correct?

Well, yeah, a little bit of both. I mean, the United States clearly has been the dominant actor within NATO, but it is an organization that does operate by consensus. You know, nobody has a veto within NATO, and it's interesting. I have a former PhD student from American University, Balazs Martonffy, who wrote a great dissertation on NATO decision-making in the middle of the Cold War period, and he used archival materials from NATO and showed that actually there were lots of times, lots of conversations within NATO when smaller countries were able to push back successfully against the U.S. position.

So especially at the end of the Cold War and soon after, we tend to think of the United States as this truly dominant power within NATO, and it provided so much of the wherewithal for NATO to be able to deter the Soviet Union that it definitely had a pretty overwhelming voice. But it does have to consult, and it does have to work with its allies within the institution.

And Jim, just following on that really interesting point, and thanks for mentioning that dissertation. I haven't read it. I need to read it myself. Would you say that NATO spread or encouraged democracy in Europe?

I think that's really more of a post-Cold War phenomenon. When we look at the establishment of NATO, I mean, we think about it as this alliance of democracies, but there were countries during the Cold War, Portugal initially, Greece, Turkey. Greece and Turkey come into the alliance in 1952, and both in the 1960s go through challenging periods. It is the case that Spain doesn't come in until 1982, post-Franco, but I mean, the emphasis during the Cold War really was strategic, but it's in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War and the effort to think about NATO as a more political institution and trying to figure out what to do about Central and Eastern Europe and how one could help encourage democracy and respect for human rights and rule of law.

It's really in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War that NATO becomes more geared toward trying to help develop democracy in these potential new members, whereas I think during the Cold War, it was really much more focused on its strategic purpose.

And Josh, on this point of the strategic purpose, which I think Jim is obviously correct about, was at the core of NATO, would you say, before we talk about the end of the Cold War, during the Cold War, did NATO succeed in containing Soviet aggression and did it succeed in, as you discussed before, bringing Germany into the Western alliance in a way that was comfortable and effective for the countries of Europe and for the United States and Canada?

Oh, I think beyond the shadow of a doubt, by which I mean there was no World War III and the Soviet Empire did not expand in Europe beyond its late 1940s borders. That's a pretty big success in at least overtly stopping the Soviet threat. Now with the turns, you obviously never know if the other side actually intended to act, but just on the surface of it, there was no further Soviet expansion. So that's a win.

And on the Germany side of the equation, you know, one thing we've only loosely talked about, but I think speaks to this issue that you've raised, Jeremi, is that the initial American plan was to integrate Germany so thoroughly into the European order, the Western European order, if you want to use that term, that the Americans could eventually withdraw, right?

The plan was for eventually Western Europe to stand on its own two legs against the Soviets and the Americans could move more offshore. Judged against that very high standard, NATO during the Cold War didn't quite meet its goal as Mark Trachtenberg has written quite elegantly on how this problem came about, how these tensions lingered. But in terms of making Germany acceptable to other countries and making France and Britain, Belgium, Holland, so on and so forth, comfortable with Germany, NATO managed to succeed in that mission. And American influence was critical to that project.

So I often hear NATO spoken of sort of as almost analogous to the Warsaw Pact, but obviously there was much more of a back and forth between the countries. How much did internal relations between NATO members shape NATO policy during the Cold War?

Jim?

Yeah, I mean, it's not comparable to the Warsaw Pact. I mean, the Warsaw Pact, I mean, the Soviet Union dominated Eastern Europe. I mean, those countries are really, you know, properly known as client states. And you know, the Soviet Union in most cases installed the leadership of those countries and controlled those leaders, although there were some exceptions and especially as time went on.

I mean, the United States, you know, did have to work with its allies. And it had some, it had some difficult allies. Tim Sale's written a great history of NATO called Enduring Alliance. And, you know, I was fascinated when I read the sections on, you know, French President Charles de Gaulle. I mean, his, I mean, was just exasperating for American presidents. I mean, a lot of the sort of the ways in which de Gaulle was threatening to walk out, you know, sort of echoed the way Donald Trump would argue about threatening to walk out.

But of course, it's a big deal for the United States to walk away from NATO. France walked away from the Integrated Military Command and, you know, it's France, not the United States. So it wasn't the end of the alliance. And, you know, of course, it's since come back in recent years. But you know, there certainly, you know, there were some interesting personalities and there were some some issues that had to be managed during the course of the of NATO's existence. And, you know, the old joke is sort of that NATO's always in crisis. Every time we talk about NATO in crisis, it's like, yeah, you know, we've seen this movie before because there's always some issue that's dividing the allies.

Right. And yet they managed to stay together. That's a that's a perfect segue to to to Josh and your work on NATO expansion. And of course, Jim's written about this as well. So we'll get both of you in on this. What happened at the end of the Cold War, if ostensibly the most obvious reason for NATO to exist was the Soviet threat when the Soviet Union no longer existed after December 25th, 1991. Why did NATO not only continue to exist, but actually expand into places like Poland and the Czech Republic, places that had been part of the Warsaw Pact that Jim just just discussed? Josh, give us give us your understanding of expansion.

Sure, I'm happy to.

Well, so first of all, we have to remember that at the end of the Cold War, there were any number of plans and a number of calls to wrap up both of the Cold War alliances. The Warsaw Pact obviously fell apart and there were calls in some quarters for NATO to close up shop and to be replaced with either a new European security organization to anchor European security on the European Union, then the European community, but slowly coming together. The Conference on Security Cooperation in Europe. So there were all these calls to abandon ship or change course.

But when the Cold War ended and the Cold War ended, above all, with Germany's unification with East Germany melding into West Germany, the Lord Ismay statement of keeping the Germans and the Soviets out, you know, the Soviets were gone, but keeping the Germans in check remained a real concern, number one. And German leader Helmut Kohl at the time was very much aware of European concerns with newfound German power. And so there was a lingering desire to keep the Americans engaged in Europe, keep NATO alive.

And at the same time, the states that were formerly in the Warsaw Pact, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, so on and so forth, you know, they've just lived on the communist jackboot for 45 years. They're deeply concerned with the Soviet Union coming back. And it's not irrational at the time, right? Russia is going through any number of internal turmoils in 1993, of course, Boris Yeltsin, then Russian president, fires on the parliament. This is not a stable situation if you're living in Eastern Europe.

So even as NATO is staying alive in Western Europe, there's a real desire on the parts of these former Warsaw Pact states to get the security benefits that come with an alliance with the United States. So that generates to have a perfect storm of external conditions that mobilize the United States to begin looking east. And at the same time, as Jim's written quite elegantly, President Clinton, starting office in 1993, is really invested in keeping the Americans, keeping the United States involved and in some ways in charge of European security affairs. So pulling NATO east, taking NATO east also satisfies American strategic concerns.

Jim, you have written what I still think is the best book on this, not whether, but when. Why was Bill Clinton so committed or why did he become so committed to NATO expansion?

Well, I think there were both policy and political reasons for him. And I think it's just really important to remember that both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton were very concerned about isolationist sentiment in the United States, very concerned that the American public would not support international engagement. With respect to Europe in particular, the lesson of the 20th century was that they had internalized was when the United States leaves, as it did after 1919, bad things result. You know, staying after 1945 was good for Western Europe.

The fact that war had broken out in Yugoslavia in 1991 led people to believe that that kind of ethnic conflict could break out all over Eastern Europe. People talked about ancient hatreds. People didn't know that much about Eastern Europe and there was fear that there would just be conflict breaking out all over. So there was a there was a policy reason for trying to figure out how to ensure security and stability.

But then there was also political calculation was very important in the 1992 campaign for Tony Lake, who was advising Bill Clinton on foreign policy, that Democrats try to woo back the neoconservative elites who had left for the Republican Party in 1980 and supported Ronald Reagan and also voters of Central and Eastern European descent, sort of Reagan Democrats, particularly Polish-Americans, you know, sort of the idea that the Democrats had lost these voters in the 1980s in the two Reagan election victories and then the Bush 88 victory. And George H.W. Bush was seen as slow to recognize the change that was taking place across the communist world. And and Tony Lake thought that using sort of democracy promotion was a way to woo these neoconservatives and also voters of Central and Eastern European descent back to the Democratic Party.

And Clinton, the Clinton team felt they did that successfully in 92 and they were going to keep those supporters in 1996. And it's no accident then when Bill Clinton makes his big announcement about NATO enlargement in October 1996, it's no accident that he goes to Hamtramck, Michigan, to speak before a largely Polish-American audience. You know, this this this this this constituency in the Midwest and Northeast was very important to the Clinton Democrats.

And your compelling account, Jim, belies the notion that domestic politics are separate from foreign policy. Clearly, they're integrated even in something that is sometimes a more archaic issue like foreign alliances, right?

Yeah, and I just think in this case, you just had, you know, again, especially for somebody like Tony Lake, the sort of the political needs and the policy desires just meshed together so well. You know, in political science, we would talk about over to overdetermination of the outcome. I mean, I think, you know, there were just a lot of factors that went into this. And and it also was a reason why you could get both Democratic and Republican support. You had people who wanted NATO enlargement because it would help promote democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. And you had others, particularly Republicans, who looked at NATO enlargement as a way to to ensure that Central and Eastern Europe was protected against Russia in the future. And and so you had lots of people supporting this for for a number of different reasons.

Josh, you've written quite a bit about how the story that Jim is telling ran against, as you show, commitments the United States had made or at least commitments the Soviet Union and the Russian leadership believed the United States had made not to expand NATO. Tell us about that.

Sure. So a little bit before the period Jim just described, this is early 1990, the heyday of the politics behind German unification, reunification. There is a question over what it would take to get the Soviets to consent to allowing East Germany, then a Soviet client state, to reunify with West Germany, right? And the Americans were really eager to do this rapidly and to do this without causing a crisis in European security affairs.

So in February 1990, then Secretary of State Jim Baker, along with some other officials, including then Deputy National Security Advisor Robert Gates, flew to Moscow for meetings with the Soviet leadership. And in the course of these conversations, Baker pledges that if the Soviets consent to German reunification, that there would be no expansion of NATO's presence one further inch to the east. And this sort of idea that NATO expansion would be kept in check is repeated throughout the spring and summer of 1990 in various ways, culminating in the formal reunification of Germany in October of 1990.

Now, we also know from archival releases that even as this deal was coming together, as these promises were being made, and I should add, this was never codified, right? These are diplomatic assurances of the kind that leaders give to one another very often. But even as these assurances are being offered, behind the scenes, the American other policymakers are realizing, hey, look, this is an opportunity to kind of consolidate or begin expanding American influence in Europe. And maybe we don't want to expand NATO right now, but we don't want to foreclose the option. Maybe we even want to think through the conditions under which we'll expand NATO going forward, despite what we told the Soviets. And that conversation really takes off in 1990, 1991, 1992, even before Clinton comes to office.

So to go to the period that Jim was mentioning, by the time Clinton gets into office, there's already been a lot of discussion and a lot of thinking behind the terms and conditions as to when the U.S. would consent or allow or push for NATO expansion. I've always been struck by then State Department Counselor Robert Zoellick's statement that had Bush been reelected for a second term, he was convinced that Baker and Bush would have pursued NATO expansion, just as Clinton did.

So is Vladimir Putin, though, correct when he says this was a double cross by the United States, Josh?

You know, Putin has his own narrative on this one. I would just say that when it comes to world politics, and Jim and I have discussed this at length in our own studies of this topic, you know, in international politics, state policy is often determined by external factors, right? By balance of power, realpolitik, strategic concerns.

And in 1990, when the U.S. was seeking to unify Germany, it made lots of sense for the U.S. to promise the Soviet Union not to expand NATO. But then once the Soviet Union declined further and the Soviet Union fell apart, there's really nothing to keep the United States in check. Russia certainly wasn't the Soviet Union. So whereas Putin calls it a double cross, as if it's some nefarious long term plan, I would simply say this is world politics. Deals change all the time. It doesn't mean we should accept the outcome. It doesn't mean we should support the American policy in this position. Doesn't mean we shouldn't have anticipated some blowback. But I think it's a little harsh to call it a double cross.

And Jim, there were efforts that again, you've written about by the United States to to bring this Russia in somehow, right? Not necessarily as a member of NATO, but to make this palatable to them. And of course, that carried forward well beyond the period of expansion. What what was accomplished, if anything, by those efforts, the partnership for peace and things of that sort?

Yeah, I mean, you know, it's it's a it's a really fascinating thing. I've been fascinated and did a piece in the Journal of Cold War Studies in 2020 because I was just interested in this idea that, I mean, Bill Clinton was so eager to develop a partnership with Russia, was so eager to develop a partnership with Boris Yeltsin, saw Russia as a partner, as being really important for his own for his own agenda, that, you know, he he believed that if if Russia was no longer an enemy, that that would free up defense dollars to be used for his domestic his domestic agenda.

And so, you know, the obvious question is, well, how is it the person who's so responsible for pushing NATO enlargement is also a person who wanted a great relationship with Boris Yeltsin and wanted the US to have a new relationship with Russia? And I you know, my conclusion was he convinced himself he could do both and that I think that he convinced himself it was largely a political issue, that if he could just keep the process going, but not in a concrete way until after Yeltsin was reelected in in July of 1996, but then make it more concrete before his own reelection in November of 1996, that that that would really solve a lot of the problems.

I also think from a US standpoint, you know, I mean, Josh mentions the specifics about what was said in 1990, and he's done more than anybody else to illuminate sort of those conversations and what they mean. There's a broader assurance that the United States is giving to the Soviet Union and then the Russians, which is basically we won't take advantage of your retreat from Europe to undermine your security. And the US officials throughout this period, they believe they stuck to that. Their argument would be NATO became more of a political institution. They reduced weapons in Europe through the CFE Treaty. The US pulled troops out of Germany. And that they were doing all these things and then invited Russia to sign the NATO-Russia Founding Act to try to create a NATO-Russia relationship. So, you know, from a US standpoint, the view is, look, you know, we said we wouldn't undermine your security and nothing we did has undermined your security.

Meanwhile, the Russians are looking at NATO moving closer and closer, taking up all these Warsaw Pact states in 2004. They take the three Baltic countries in 2008, say that Ukraine and Georgia are going to become members of NATO. You know, from a Russian standpoint, it looks very different than it does from Washington. And I just think those perspectives really can't be bridged.

And, Jim, is that...

Jeremi, can I jump in for...

Please, please Josh.

Just half a second, because I think Jim gets at a really important point, and I'm glad he made it, because there's a parallel, which he's alluding to, between how Clinton viewed the world and how the broader US foreign policy establishment, the foreign policy makers of the time viewed the world. You know, Jim described Clinton not wanting to choose between expanding NATO and antagonizing the Russians and convinced himself you could do both. In a similar way, what Jim's getting at is that American decision makers in the 1990s and early aughts convinced themselves that they could negotiate what Russia saw as its own interest. They didn't have to choose between what the US saw as in America's interest and what we could convince the Russians as to their interests. And, you know, that's a fraught situation for generating the types of perspective differences that Jim's alluding to.

Right, right. And it's a common issue in international politics, as the dog is indicating as well, right, that different perspectives are brought. Jim, is this difference of viewpoints and interpretation what we need when we try to understand what happened in Ukraine that ended up, of course, with Russia invading and taking control of Crimea after Ukraine sought to become part of NATO? Is that part of the story?

Well, I think it's part of the story, but, you know, there's no excuse for the fact that, you know, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, annexed part of its territories, fostering civil war in the Donbass and, you know, has refused to really pursue a negotiated solution to that conflict. And, you know, you can understand Russian fears about Western intrusions, but I don't think that, you know, excuses invading another country. But there's no question. I mean, I think this is one of the interesting features of this.

Bill Burns, who's now the CIA director, was ambassador in Moscow in 2007, 2008. His book, The Back Channel, is an amazing book. He has posted on the Carnegie Endowment website, the Back Channel book website, declassified documents, documents he got declassified, including cables that he sent home, you know, in the run-up to the 2008 Bucharest summit, and he, NATO summit, and he writes that, you know, Ukraine and Georgian membership in NATO, this was a red line for people in Moscow. And he says, this isn't just hardliners or Putin, this is people across the political spectrum just feel that this would be very damaging to Russian interests. And, you know, the Russians see themselves as having a privileged sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union. They think they should be able to control the affairs there. They don't want to see these countries, these other countries in Western institutions. They don't really want to even see them as successful democracies.

You know, the United States views these countries as independent countries that, you know, if they want to pursue democracy, if they want to pursue Western orientation, if they want to draw closer to Western institutions, that's their prerogative and they should be able to do it.

So, again, you know, you have fundamentally different perspectives. And, of course, Russia is closer and Russia's interests are, you know, much deeper. And, you know, they've been able to carve out this part of Ukraine to control. But at the same time, they've also antagonized the population of Ukraine, which is now more supportive of NATO and large, of being part of NATO than they've ever been.

So, Josh, how does this lead into the Trump administration's policy towards NATO? Where did NATO find itself in 2017 under Trump administration?

Right. Well, it's a really good question. I think we need to remember that throughout the 1990s and 2000s, NATO really expanded quite dramatically. By the time Trump came into office, actually shortly after Trump came into office, NATO took in its 30th member. Right? So this is now a very large multilateral organization. At the same time, the alliance has kind of taken on any number of tasks, right?

This long-term fear of Russia, at least in the 2010s, was back because of Russian machinations in the Ukraine. You know, Germany was largely contained. No one was really deeply worried about Germany at this point in time. But the alliance has been operating in out of areas missions, conducting operations over Libya, intervening in Bosnia in the 1990s, of course, has the Afghanistan mission.

And there's a concern, which well precedes Mr. Trump, that despite taking on all these new tasks, and despite being the focal point of European security affairs, that the European members of the alliance and Canada have really not been pulling their weight in terms of building military forces that can do the hard security tasks that remain at the core of the alliance's different operations.

But this was a theme in President Obama's administration, with then Secretary of Defense Bob Gates using his last speech as Secretary of Defense, to really criticize the NATO allies.

But of course, Mr. Trump comes into office and makes this a real focal point of his foreign policy, daring, you know, saying that if the allies don't step up, the US may go home. Now, this is actually fairly ham-handed, because even as he's saying this, the US is increasing funding for different NATO initiatives at least early on. And so it becomes a very incoherent message. But Mr. Trump ends up both exacerbating tensions in the alliance, because he's queuing to things the Europeans don't want to hear, no one wants to be told, spend more or else. At the same time, he's sending a very different message of, but you know what, the US is still sticking around because we like being in charge, is essentially Mr. Trump's message.

So Trump is really a force for chaos inside of NATO at this point in time, even as he's oscillating rapidly on the Russia issue, oscillating rapidly on whether the US is leaving Afghanistan. And so the whole thing is just a mess. And historians of the future will have a field day trying to make sense of whether there was any consistency in Mr. Trump's NATO policy.

We will certainly have our work cut out for us, whether it'll be a field day or not, I don't know. But we'll definitely have our work cut out for us, understanding Trump. Jim, that brings us up to the President right into Afghanistan. What has Afghanistan done to the NATO alliance?

Well, I think first we should just note the, you know, remarkable nature of the mission in Afghanistan. You know, after September 11th and the attacks from Al-Qaeda that were formulated from the territory of Afghanistan by Osama bin Laden and his colleagues, you know, the United States made the decision that if the Taliban wouldn't offer up Al-Qaeda to the United States, that we would go to war. And the decision was made not to include, not to do this as a NATO mission, as had been done in 1999 in Kosovo. And in fact, in part, because there was a belief that the Kosovo mission showed, you know, the United States had to go through all its partners for, you know, getting targets approved and so on. And the Bush administration didn't want to be hamstrung by that.

And then the Bush administration, you know, even though the allies had invoked article five and stood with the United States in the aftermath of September 11th, but then the Bush administration goes and invades Iraq in 2003 and gets bogged down in Iraq. And then, oh my gosh, it needs Europe. And it's asks NATO in fact, to come and set up an international security assistance force and do reconstruction and stabilization in Kabul. And so you then have this NATO mission and NATO countries and non-NATO countries, lots of partners. And, you know, it's a pretty extraordinary effort by NATO and non-NATO partners to try to, you know, establish some good governance and security in Afghanistan. And so the NATO allies become quite invested in it.

You know, a lot of times they were made fun of for the caveats that they had on the kind of military operations they would engage in, but they were quite committed to it. And, you know, by this past spring, I mean, they had more troops in Afghanistan than the United States did. And so they were really, they knew that Joe Biden was committed. I mean, Donald Trump had signed a peace deal with the Taliban. They knew Biden was committed to getting out. Biden had wanted the United States to leave in 2009 when he was vice president and he lost that argument. So it was pretty clear he was going to do this. But the way it was done, you know, it was just so troubling. And, you know, allies felt that they weren't consulted and there'd been a lot of pushback on that. People have said, oh, no, they were. And Secretary General was, you know, was consulted and brought allies together for this. But, you know, I think this was done in a way that that the allies really did resent. There wasn't much that they could do about it. I don't know if it'll have any long lasting effects.

I mean, partly it depends on how the Biden administration looks at its European allies and how it thinks about them. And I think the big question there is, does it think about them as allies to work together to solve problems of a general nature, including specific problems related to that region? Or does it view every ally in terms of what it can do for the United States and its strategic competition with China?

And I think that's the danger for the alliance, is that the United States is so focused on the Indo-Pacific and China, the people, you know, that are really dominant in the administration are those who are driving the policy toward the Indo-Pacific. And the allies have sort of become an afterthought. And I think that could really come back to haunt the United States. And I think that could really come back to haunt the United States.

Well, and that really very, very thoughtfully, Jim, takes us into where we always like to close, which is bringing all this history that you and Josh have shared with us to the present and thinking through not how we predict the future, but how we think about possible pathways for the future. Josh, let me turn to you first. You know, what do you think from this history that you know so well, and have shared a bit of with us? What do you think are some lessons going forward? How should we think about the transatlantic alliance going forward? What should it look like? And what are the possibilities as you see them?

Sure. So I'll echo Jim's point, first of all, just to say, look, the US attention has and will continue to shift, barring anything unforeseen, towards the Indo-Pacific region. So Europe in general is going to do what Asia was during the Cold War, the secondary importance later, but not the focal point of American concern. So NATO in that context, is likely to lose important US time and attention is not going to be as devoted to it. And so I expect NATO to hang together in some way.

I can tell a story that the EU really steps up and the European allies really step up and bear more of the weight as the US withdraws or turns elsewhere in the world. I could also tell a story that says NATO without the active managerial role of the United States begins to fray at the seams. I likely suspect it's really going to be more of a slow kind of attrition fraying at the margins. But despite that somewhat negative or cynical answer, I think it's also important to step back for a second, right?

And this is what I always tell myself whenever I come to my net judgment of what the last 75 years in Europe have been. If you had said to an American policymaker in 1949, hey, 75 years from now, you're going to have a Europe that is mostly democratic, where there are no real great power threats, where nuclear weapons have not proliferated everywhere, and most of the countries have settled their outstanding territorial and economic disputes, they would have taken that and run with it. That's a massive slam dunk. So even if NATO falls apart tomorrow, which I don't think it will, the situation in Europe, except for the border regions really, it is unprecedentedly good from the perspective of many European actors and certainly from the United States' perspective.

That's really helpful, Josh. Jim, to come to you, it seems to me that it's a question of path dependence, right? NATO has been part of this very successful set of developments that Josh describes. But what do we know about the role it should play going forward?

Well, it's interesting, you know, when Josh mentions sort of, if you had told US officials in 1949, here's what 2021 would look like, you know, how happy they would have been to hear it. And I think they also would have asked the follow up, which was, so that means the United States didn't have to stay in Europe anymore, right?

Right, right.

I mean, they would have expected that we would have left.

That's right.

So, you know, but there we are. And I think that it's just, what's so fascinating, we started with the focal point of Europe and the Soviet Union, how NATO was formed, what the thinking was at the end of the Cold War. In that period, as Josh said, Europe and Russia were the focal point of US foreign policy. That's what we thought about the most. And that's no longer true.

We're thinking about Europe and Russia today, just as part of our policy toward China. We want Russia, Biden wants stable and predictable with Russia, so that he can focus on China. He's looking at Europe, what can you do for me on China? And I just, you know, NATO is now talking more about China, but it's not really a great fit for the alliance. And I think that, you know, the more that China becomes the focus, the more clear it's going to be that that's not really the, you know, a purpose for NATO. And, you know, we'll certainly see interactions with allies.

We saw the US and UK working with Australia on the submarine deal, of course, to the detriment of France's own pursuit of a deal with Australia. So I think we may well see more of those types of things going forward. But, you know, there's still a big institution there and there are a lot of people with a lot at stake in NATO. So like Josh, I think it'll be around for a while.

So Zachary, I want to come back to you at the end here, because you got us started with your wonderful poem. How do you and your generation of younger people who think about international affairs, think about climate change and topics like that, that have not been traditionally topics for NATO, how do you see an alliance like that fitting into those issues, if at all?

Well, I think at the very least, this history of NATO and maybe the recent events that have made the importance of NATO to American foreign policy more clear, show us at the very least, that there is no option to just bury our heads in the sand, that the that American economy, the American society is so deeply embedded in the world, that we have to interact with the world and we have to have allies. And I think that's so important, because alliances and actually like sticking with deals isn't very exciting, but it's so deeply important.

Very well said. And it's been a theme for our podcast week after week, right, that democracy implies a certain amount of multilateralism.

Exactly.

And NATO has been fundamental to American international multilateralism, as Josh and Jim have made so clear today. And it certainly in some form will probably be part of that future, but it will be in a different form. What I hear Jim and Josh saying is that NATO will continue to exist, but it won't look the same. Institutions have a history as well. They have an arc of change. And I think your generation, Zachary, will play a major role in reforming NATO as we go forward and building other alliances as well.

Jim and Josh, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today. You've given us a bookshelf worth of history in about 40 minutes, which is really extraordinary. So thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks for having us.

And Zachary, thank you for your poem.

Thanks, Zachary. That was amazing.

It was great.

And thank you most of all, or equally as much, thank you to our audience for joining us for this week of This Is Democracy.

This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris Codini. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This Is Democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. See you next time.

But more and more, the US's own attention is going to shift elsewhere, which in turn is going to create an opening for voices in Europe, arguing for a greater European pillar within NATO, or simply some kind of EU-based security apparatus to kind of take the agenda and run with it. We've already seen hints of this with President Macron France's calls for a greater European effort. So we're going to see those exercises really step up. Where that goes, I don't really know.