Security Experts Discuss Future of NATO

Thanks to Russia’s war in Ukraine, the question for NATO is no longer if it has a future, but what it should look like. Columbia SIPA’s Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies brought together NATO experts in defense policy and diplomatic history on April 21 to discuss how the newly reinvigorated NATO can avoid past mistakes and strengthen its future position.

The discussion was moderated by Gideon Rose, a senior research scholar at the Saltzman Institute who was the editor of Foreign Affairs until 2021. The panel featured Michael O’Hanlon, director of research in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution; Mary Sarotte, the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Distinguished Professor of Historical Studies at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies; Curtis M. Scaparrotti, the retired U.S. Army general who served as commander of United States European Command and NATO supreme allied commander for Europe; and Ambassador Alexander “Sandy” Vershbow, former deputy secretary general of NATO. The panel was introduced by Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo of SIPA and hosted by Peter Clement, interim director of the Saltzman Institute. 

Russia’s military threat continues to be the most immediate challenge facing NATO. According to Scaparrotti, there is a need for better messaging to home populations in order to shore up domestic support for Ukraine, which is increasingly put under strain for economic reasons. NATO and the United States also need greater specificity in their objectives, which will help with messaging as well as speed up delivery of military support to Ukraine.

“If you set an objective and allow the military and diplomats to determine what needs to take place to reach that objective,” said Scaparrotti, “then your response is in line with that. What we’ve done is in steps by system needed or by presidential decree of drawdown authority.”

“Within warfare, that’s not the way you fight an adversary,” he added. “You have to determine what is needed for an objective and supply those assets.”

European governments have been made more aware of the need to step up defense security in the NATO alliance. Sarotte said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was symptomatic of a “failure of imagination” in the West, reminding European governments in particular of the continent’s long history of great power warfare that has never gone away.  

I don’t think Putin can outlast us, but we can make enough mistakes where he could feel that he’s vindicated and that time is on his side.

— Ambassador Sandy Vershbow

Vershbow said Russia’s war is moving NATO in the “right direction” to prepare for any potential out-of-area conflict with China. But the successful dimension to the alliance depends in part on what NATO considers a strategic defeat of Russia.

“In Europe, there is a tendency on the part of some countries to push the Ukrainians toward premature negotiations, which would only play into [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s hands,” Vershbow said. “I don’t think he can outlast us, but we can make enough mistakes where he could feel that he’s vindicated and that time is on his side.”

Scaparrotti and Vershbow said that one mistake from the United States was that President Biden ruled out the possibility of U.S. boots on the ground in Ukraine as a deterrent.

“We should have moved troops to the Eastern flank of Europe in a deterrent for NATO, but also a clear indication that we were standing with Ukraine,” Scaparrotti said, adding that “we could have employed U.S. forces, that could remain the same, but that didn’t need to be stated publicly,”  

“We made clear we were ruling out any U.S. troops on the ground, even as a deterrent, which would have been legitimate,” Vershbow noted. “Ukraine invited us to put troops in, even as a training mission that did not look like a combat mission. It might have given Russians some pause that we would show up for Ukraine to a greater degree than we did for Afghanistan. But we didn’t do that. The deterrence was inherently inadequate.” 

NATO deterrence is part of a hypothetical postwar security architecture outlined by O’Hanlon. It forms a compromise between the two dominant concepts that O’Hanlon said is dominating conversations of the future, namely giving NATO membership to Ukraine or packing Ukraine with weaponry in a design similar to Israel.

“An Atlantic-Asian security community would essentially oversee a long-term training mission. The training mission is largely a trip wire, but it’s designed to be much more substantial than the small numbers of special forces that we had from 2024 to 2021 on Ukrainian soil,” O’Hanlon said. “It’s too soon to predict if that’s an answer, but we need to have options in the debate about NATO membership for Ukraine.”

Sarotte, as she also does in her recent book, Not One Inch, criticized previous all-or-nothing approaches to NATO expansion in the ’90s, which she said is responsible for leaving Ukraine in a lurch. This development was likely a point of obsession for Putin, who was said to have fixated on reading historical events during the pandemic.  

“He clearly at some level wants to rerun history only this time with Moscow getting what it wants. That includes both the ’90s and 2000s,” Dr. Sarotte said. “He’s gone back and looked at these specific events and is insisting on a do-over.”

O’Hanlon said the new dimensions of today’s warfare include cyber security, nuclear warfare, and the use of drones, which he does not consider game changers. Overall, however, Russia’s war in Ukraine is demanding economic and military capabilities and analysis that have not been so integrated since World War I.

“This is directly relevant to SIPA because the development of intellectual frameworks to understand and structure the responses to the policy challenges of this new world in the 21st century should be and needs to be a first-order problem,” Rose said.

The takeaway for NATO, according to Scaparrotti, is to continue finding a balance with its prime function of defending Europe and taking a more active strategy that recognizes military threats at and beyond its borders.

Watch the complete program: