NATO at Ankara: meeting the ‘high minimum’

Mark Webber reflects on the key outcomes of last week’s NATO summit in Ankara.

Task proliferation is not a criticism one can any longer level at NATO. The alliance has spent the last two years stripping itself of responsibilities and political missions it once regarded as essential. The issues of climate change or Women, Peace and Security (WPS) still have their adherents within the NATO bureaucracy, but neither figured in the business of last week’s Ankara summit (or, indeed, at last year’s Hague summit). A shared interest among allies in out-of-area missions, meanwhile, evaporated with the frantic withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. NATO’s training mission in Iraq decamped from Baghdad to Naples in March. KFOR still helps keep the peace in Kosovo –but rumours abound that its American contingent will soon be pulled and the mission transferred to EU oversight (much like EUFOR in Bosnia). Even China, a NATO agenda item introduced by the first Trump administration and sustained under Joe Biden, is currently missing in action. It is absent from (the admittedly short) Ankara summit declaration and was mentioned only fleetingly by Secretary General Mark Rutte in his many summit remarks. A concern with ‘the persistent threat of terrorism’ remains, but only out of deference to Turkey, the summit host.

As the summit declaration makes clear, NATO is concentrating on the basics of collective defence – ‘counter[ing] the long-term threat [of] Russia’ and, by extension, offering ‘unwavering support for Ukraine.’ By demonstrating the Europeans (and Canada) can discharge those two tasks, NATO fulfils a third – keeping a sceptical United States constructively engaged in a complex process of NATO ‘Europeanisation.’ The leitmotif here is ‘a stronger Europe in a stronger NATO’ – a process whereby European allies assume more responsibility in the traditionally US-dominated NATO command structure while also shouldering a greater material burden of common defence.

Getting this right is a matter, first, of political art. At Ankara, President Donald Trump was mollified and indulged in equal measure. Allied leaders and the Secretary General took on the chin Trump’s opening press conference salvoes – that the NATO allies had not backed the United States over the war with Iran, that they were still deficient on defence spending and that Greenland should come under American control. On these matters, there was little public pushback, hence little argument. Trump, in the words of John Bew, was held in check by a ‘controlled explosion.’ Further, the American president was the subject of a collective encomium performed by allied prime ministers and presidents. Trump departed Ankara praising the love and unity he had witnessed.
As for the practicalities, here the hard work was carried out well before the summit. America’s preferred model of European security – a ‘NATO 3.0’ in which America’s ‘allies […] step up and assume primary responsibility for the conventional defence of Europe’ – had been flagged by Under Secretary of War for Policy, Elbridge Colby in February. This ‘rightsizing’ of America’s commitment was, on paper at least, completed in short order. NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), General Alexis Grynkewich, declared in early July that the ‘European allies [had] largely filled the gaps left by U.S. reductions to the NATO Force Model.’

This process of substitution still has a long way to run. The gaps filled, currently sit in a force-generation spreadsheet – and some of these commitments represent pledges of future effort not an ability to deliver in the present. Even with ramped up defence spending, industry on both sides of the Atlantic is struggling to keep up with demand. The summit’s Defence Industry Forum – a carefully-staged PR event of announcements and contract-signings – provided, nonetheless, evidence of the scale of ambition. The development of deep-strike capabilities, integrated air and missile defences, air-to-air refuelling, satellite and aerial surveillance, and the safeguarding of critical materials are all intended, in the words of the summit’s Strategy for Industry-NATO Cooperation,  ‘to ensure that the capabilities required for NATOʼs deterrence and defence can be effectively generated, scaled and sustained.’

The timelines for these projects run years into the future. Delivery depends on maintaining high defence budgets (still a test for fiscally challenged governments in France, Italy and the UK). And integrating these new capabilities within NATO’s force and command structures and defence planning process – already complex enough – will have to be done in accordance with an unprecedented premise: the replacement of ‘the US “backbone’” in European deterrence.’

Out of necessity, NATO is gravitating toward a ‘high minimum’ – garnering the forces necessary to achieve its most basic of tasks and ignoring those which are secondary.  For all its seeming simplicity, this will entail something other than moving NATO back, in Colby’s imagining, to version 1.0 of the Cold War.  That NATO was sustained by persistent American leadership (now in doubt), British fortitude and reliability (also in doubt) and German quiescence (a thing of the past). The NATO of the near future will accommodate Germany as the coming European power, partner with Ukraine as Europe’s most formidable fighting force and defence innovator, and cooperate with the European Union as an agent of defence procurement and defence industry integration.

Following the Cold War, it was often argued that NATO required new tasks and new responsibilities to keep it relevant. That argument is rarely heard today.  NATO has been forced back to basics by Russian belligerence and fear of American abandonment. That course is now set for the foreseeable future. It seems unlikely there will be a NATO summit in 2027. With no new political deliverables, one may not be needed.

By Mark Webber, Professor of International Politics, University of Birmingham.