NATO’s troubles and possible solutions – plus de femmes peut-être?
I’m coming to the end of Peter Apps’ big book, Deterring Armageddon: a biography of NATO, which seems to be a fairly balanced account of the successes and failures of that organisation since its formation in 1949. Of course NATO was a product of, and inevitably led to the heightening of, the ‘cold war’ that more or less still persists today between democratic and democratising countries and the world’s dictatorships. One very unsurprising feature of the book, and the history it explores, is that it’s overwhelmingly dominated by males. A handful of female leaders get a mention of course, such as Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, and Hilary Clinton as US Secretary of State, and Apps does refer to at least one female troop deployment in either Iraq or Afghanistan, but then warfare, and even defence against warfare, is generally (with the emphasis on generals) not-so-secret men’s business.
The organisation’s name has obviously become a teeny problem too. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was an agreed militarily defensive co-operative thingy between nations more or less bordering the north Atlantic – the USA and Canada on one side, western European nations on the other – and it was created in particular to protect against the Bad Guys further east, in Eurasia. This was all very vague, understandably so, and the principal bad guy, post-WWII, was Stalin and the Soviet Union. Of course it would be undiplomatic to be so blunt and black-and-white, so it has generally presented itself as a defensive-protective organisation with a more or less flexible mandate, aiming to promote stability, democracy and peace via defensive alliances. However, since the persistent threat has always been from the east (of western Europe), it’s not surprising that those regions close to the USSR and later Russia, who saw themselves, rightly, as most in need of protection, would want to join the NATO club. And it’s also not particularly surprising that the least threatened nations, those on the other side of the Atlantic, would be less keen to spend money and resources on distant eastern Europe.
Of course there are many other forces at play, such as nuclear arms, expansionist motives (both from a democratisation perspective and that of dictatorial land-and-resource grabbing), and historical squabbles regarding ethnicity, nationhood, religion and so forth. In NATO’s 75-year lifetime, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact have disappeared, as have Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and East and West Germany. Spain, Portugal and Albania have fully democratised, Greece has wobbled, and the nations of the former Yugoslavia, and surrounding regions (Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo) have all gone though experiences barely imaginable here in sunny Australia. But the countries today, and generally throughout NATO’s lifetime, that are most exercised by NATO’s politics and plans, are those on the front line vis-a-vis Putinland – the Baltic States, Finland, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus and Turkiye. Generally not considered North Atlantic states, but all, I would argue, deserving of NATO protection and support, in spite of a couple of them being currently ruled by thugs. Moldova, one of Europe’s poorest nations, and with a female President (Maia Sandu) is particularly vulnerable and divided between pro-Russian and pro-EU factions. It isn’t a member of NATO. On the other hand, Turkiye has been a NATO member since 1952 but its conservative ‘strongman’ President has been unpredictable in dealing with the organisation, though forceful in opposing Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Hungary, under the awful Orban, is another unpredictable problem.
The best thing about NATO is that it’s aggressively defensive (the bonobo way). The most problematic thing is that it’s a combo of different nations with very different histories, very different languages, different economic capacities, and different views regarding threats and opportunities, trying to work as one. It also has to work alongside other common interest organisations such as the EU and the UN, with its peace-keeping forces. Its ultimate aim, if it has one, is to reduce tension by having every nation on the same side, basically the democratic side. In that respect, it seems to me, countries like Afghanistan and Iraq present an even bigger obstacle than Russia, which, once Putin is gone and discredited, is more likely to turn democratic than most Islamic countries. Then again, he could always be replaced by someone even worse, and Russia is more of an existential threat than any Middle Eastern nation.
Of course, NATO would benefit, as would the human world, from far more female involvement at the highest levels (and, needless to say, they’re also more effective at ground level, in the winning of hearts and minds). And I have to say, having now finished Apps’ book, that as we get to the past decade or so of NATO’s life, more female voices come to the fore, as foreign ministers or spokespeople for NATO or associated organisations. But there has, of course, never been a female Secretary General of the organisation. Norway’s Jens Stoltenberg has just ended his ten-year stint in the job and handed over to the former Prime Minister of the Netherlands’ Mark Rutte at the beginning of this month. In a recent interview, Stoltenberg was asked what could have been done differently, especially with respect to the Ukraine-Russia conflict:
He answered that he regrets that NATO allies and NATO itself did not do more to strengthen Ukraine before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began. Potentially, the threshold for Russia to attack would have been higher if Ukraine had been militarily stronger. The USA, Canada and the UK trained Ukrainian soldiers in a training center in Ukraine, but NATO did not. NATO could have given much more training and equipment.
No doubt all this is true, but he made no mention of Ukraine’s long-stated desire to join NATO itself. Deterring Armageddon: a biography of NATO covers the organisation’s history up to around mid-2023, so including the invasion of Ukraine by Putin. Here’s what Apps has to say about the situation more than a decade before:
Following the Georgia conflict, Ukraine’s President Yushchenko said protecting his country’s sovereignty would require stronger defence and better relations with NATO – membership if possible. When alliance defence ministers met in November 2008 in Estonia, the question of whether to speed up Ukrainian admission was top of the agenda. European members remained divided, Germany and France still unquestionably opposed. Bush administration officials suggested both Georgia and Ukraine should join quickly. The Europeans rejected the proposal.
No explanation given. Those countries bordering Russia, especially the Baltic states, were constantly warning other NATO nations about the Putin threat, largely to no avail. I’m no expert on this sort of diplomacy, for want of a better word, but it seems callous in the extreme to have left recently democratic Ukraine without proper support when everyone knows that Russia, more than anything else, is what NATO is all about.
I blame the male psyche… just because it’s my favourite target.
References
Peter Apps, Deterring Armageddon: a biography of NATO, 2024
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