Hedging their bets? The case for a European pillar in NATO

ABSTRACT

President Donald Trump has adopted a critical position on NATO, raising concerns of an American abandonment of its obligations to Europe’s defence. The severity of Trump’s position is unusual, but some of his concerns are of long-standing and likely to be voiced in some form by his successor in the White House. American criticism and equivocation has led the European allies to engage in various forms of hedging. Some of these strategies are designed to keep the US attached to NATO; others bypass the alliance – cultivating either bilateral links to the US or a strengthening of EU defence cooperation. Hedging, whatever its form, is potentially damaging to alliance effectiveness and cohesion. In that light, NATO’s interests are better served by a strategy which builds upon the NATO-EU relationship and which advertises the benefits of European effort within NATO itself. To that end, we argue in favour of a reformulation of an old but much misunderstood idea – that of NATO’s “European pillar.” Here, existing contributions to European defence provided by the allies through NATO are crucial. Such an arrangement need not, therefore, entail any elaborate institutional engineering, but it does require political and strategic clarity.

KEYWORDS:

• Hedging
• Trump
• NATO
• European
• pillar

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Defender-Europe 2020 was scaled back owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. It had been planned as the largest deployment of US forces to Europe for 25 years.

2. A point made explicitly by French officials. See Rose (2019).

3. Missions specified in Article 42.1 of the Treaty of European Union (as amended by the Treaty of Lisbon).

4. The sorts of mission covered by the reference to “combat forces in crisis management” in Article 43.1, Treaty of European Union.

5. For an inventory of American capabilities absent or under-supplied in European force catalogues, see US Mission to NATO (2016).

6. The MPCC, described in EU documents as “a permanent command and control structure at the military strategic level”, is envisaged as having 60 permanent staff and 94 “augmentees.” By comparison, NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) and Allied Command Transformation (ACT) each employ approximately 1,000 staff.

7. The specific example Wolters gave was mine counter-measures.

8. While Russia and terrorism are the highlights, China is mentioned in NATO’s new (classified) Military Strategy adopted in mid 2019.

9. For illustration of this dynamic at work see the joint press conference of President Trump and Secretary General Stoltenberg, 2 April 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X0G29i1s90

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jens Ringsmose

Jens Ringsmose is Dean of the Faculty of Business and Social Science, University of Southern Denmark. Recent work on NATO and transatlantic relations has been published inWar on the Rocks, European Journal of International Security, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, Survival and Contemporary Security Policy.

Mark Webber

Mark Webber is Professor of International Politics at the University of Birmingham. His most recent published work isWhat's Wrong with NATO and How to Fix It (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021) co-authored with James Sperling and Martin A. Smith. He is currently co-editing with James Sperling The Oxford Handbook on the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (to be published by Oxford University Press in 2022).