Annotations for Speakers: Joshua Shifrinson

Hello.

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 J.D. Vance is here. Very good.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jeremi, can I jump in for...

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. 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.

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.

Right, right.

That's right.

Thanks for having us.

It was great.

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.