Barry Posen on the Need for NATO

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Show notes:

“Europe Can Defend Itself” (Posen 2020)
Responses and counter-responses to Posen's Survival article
Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy” (2009)

Archival audio:

NATO agrees on measures to counter Russia | DW News (April 5, 2019)
NATO asked to step in amid regional tensions with Russia (CBS, May 21, 2015)
NATO troops in Poland raise US-Russia tensions (Al Jazeera English, January 15, 2017)
The birth of NATO - 4 April 1949 (NATO, May 28, 2015)
Russia-NATO Tensions: Troops prepare for conflict at Polish base (CGTN, February 27, 2019)
Trump scolds NATO member nations (ABC, March 25, 2019)
Did Trump’s prodding for NATO defense spending work? (PBS, July 12, 2018)

Transcript:

February 16, 2021

BARRY POSEN: If you believe that American military resources are inexhaustible and that war is not costly, then who am I to stop you? If, however, you have some concerns about where the next billion dollars comes from, then this would be a place to take a good, hard look at whether some reforms are in order.

***

MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation. My name is Mark Hannah. Today, we're talking about America's commitment to NATO, the seventy-one-year-old security alliance. President Trump constantly criticized this transatlantic alliance, and to many, it might have seemed self-serving. But President Trump's criticism actually coheres with a lot of scholarly and policy concern, and that concern questions the extent to which America should, in fact, be investing in the collective defense of Europe. Some think it's necessary to check Russia's aggression and prevent war on the European continent, while others think it's a relic of the Cold War that needs to be reimagined or potentially even done away with.

To help us make sense of this, we're joined by political scientist Barry Posen of MIT. Barry is one of the foremost scholars in the field of security studies in American grand strategy. I highly recommend his book, which is titled Restraint. To everybody listening, there's been a movement among foreign policy practitioners toward restraint and realism, and Barry kind of the godfather of that movement. He just wrote a piece called “Europe Can Defend Itself,” which appears in the journal Survival, and we're going to be discussing that article today.

Barry, thank you for being here.

POSEN: Good to be with you.

HANNAH: Let's start out by talking about NATO and what it was originally designed to do.

Interlude featuring archival audio

POSEN: Well, a lot depends on your perspective. I tend to start from a fairly narrow perspective that’s associated with a general perspective on international politics called realism, and I'm looking at American national security in the first instance, in terms of external threats. And you start out from the just the basic facts of the case. The United States is inherently a pretty secure country. So the problems abroad that could bother the United States much are not many. Obviously, the United States has to be concerned about other nuclear weapons states because it lives in a world of nuclear weapons states. And while launching nuclear weapons is kind of a crazy thing to do against another nuclear power, it can't be ruled out. So, the United States needs to maintain an ability to retaliate. That's just a sine qua non of having security in a nuclear world.

Beyond that, you have to ask what else matters in the world. And since the end of the Second World War—since before the Second World War—the United States has had a general affect towards Eurasia at large that we would rather not face a continental empire in Eurasia. So, we oppose the Nazis for that reason on one end of the continent. We oppose the Japanese or another end of the continent. In the Cold War, we oppose the Soviet Union because there was a risk of that. The idea would be an empire of the Eurasian landmass could agglomerate a lot of resources and maybe even enough resources to build a military to challenge the United States. Far-fetched, I know, but not entirely crazy. It's a harsh world, and you insure against the worst cases. At those moments when the Americans chose to be active in World War Two and in the containment strategy, there wasn't really anybody else on the continent strong enough to deal with the challenger.

Now, do we still have this interested in preventing an empire in Eurasia? Probably. Is it as powerful as it once was? Maybe not. But that raises the question: what are the threats? Let's say you posit that it is somewhat important, and I accept that. So, there's really only one possibility. The possibility is China, and the possibility of China establishing hegemony throughout Europe the way the Mongols did is pretty unlikely. The Chinese are not that strong, but there is a risk in Asia. Starting several years ago the United States began to understand China might be a problem, began to focus resources on it, and et cetera, et cetera. And you could make the case that in Asia—the way the middle powers of Asia are arranged and their relative power position vis a vis China—you can make the argument that some American power is needed in Asia to ensure China doesn't become overly ambitious. I'm not positing anything about China's malign integrity. I'm just saying it's a great power, and it’s a world with opportunity. We can't be sure how they'll behave, and we'd rather not have them come to dominate Asia. I think that's all very reasonable. And it's a real project to manage a coalition on a scale that you would need in Asia.

HANNAH: Barry, what you're saying is that we live in a world full of threats and that during the Cold War there was indeed the very real threat of dominance in Eurasia that the Soviet Union posed.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: You're saying that in those days, the policy of the United States to counter the Soviet Union was reasonable.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: What about Russia today? Does Russia pose any kind of threat to the United States in the twenty-first century like it did during the Cold War?

POSEN: The answer is no. The Russians are a shadow of what the Soviets were. They're still a big and important military power, but not nearly what the Soviets were. And the Europeans are well recovered from the damage of World War Two. They’re rich countries with high per capita GDPs and produce airplanes, atomic bombs, and tanks. There's at least two major institutions in Europe to organize their activity—NATO, with or without the United States, and the European Union, without the United States and without Britain. But nevertheless, it's heavily institutionalized, allied up, very rich, more populous than Russia, richer than Russia, and spends more on defense than Russia. So, the question is: this interest the United States wants to turn handsprings to be in the forefront of defending—is this interest alive? Is there still a great threat to our interests? I would say there isn't a great threat to our interest. In the extent that there is, the locals can handle it very well.

HANNAH: You recently took on the International Institute for Security Studies, which holds the establishment view of NATO. In their own publication, which showed a lot of hutzpah, you essentially argued that Europe can look after its own interests and look after its own security and that we should reassess our priorities vis a vis NATO. And you made that argument using the IISS’s own methodologies. Can you break down what the Institute for Security Studies’ pro-NATO argument is and how you find that argument flawed?

POSEN: The IISS is a very mainstream organization, and it seldom takes radical positions. This is a mainstream view that came up with a contingency that represents a mainstream view, supports that mainstream view, and I chose to tilt with it. There's basically been a conventional wisdom around for a long time that the Europeans are basically incapable of defending themselves. And their theory is that the only way Russia can be deterred is by a credible threat of an immediate counterattack to take back anything they may have gained in the early stages of a war. So, by doing this, you switch NATO's problem from defense to offense. By arguing that you have to do it early, you basically put a premium on readiness, and you have very little time to prepare. These basic assumptions turn into drivers of your force structure.

Interlude featuring archival audio

POSEN: But it all reflects a political judgment. They chose that on the basis of a political judgment, a judgment about how ferocious the Russians might be and how ferocious NATO would need to be in return to be able to deter—to convince the Russians never to start. I looked at it and said, “Well, this seems to be a hyper-conservative set of political assumptions, which just happens to drive force requirements through the roof.” So, I looked at the problem and said, “Gee, should this contingency really be the governing contingency for force planning?” It seemed to me—my argument was defense is defense. The Russians have a problem if they can't conquer all the rest of Europe. What does it profit the Russians to take off a bite of Poland and a bite of one of the Baltic states if it stimulates the European collective—whether it's conceived of as NATO or the European Union or whatever, which vastly out-resources them and vastly out-populates them—to go into a mobilization mode and decide to have its own hot Cold War, cold hot war, with Russia until Russia disgorges these games.

HANNAH: So, you essentially question their assumption that Europe is weaker than Russia. What is your argument that Europe is indeed capable of defending itself against Russia without the backing of the United States? What are you pointing to?

POSEN: In terms of military input, the Europeans deploy as much or more military personnel as the Russians do. And people say, “Well, the Europeans have military problems everywhere—military problems in the Mediterranean, et cetera, et cetera.” Well, the Russians have military problems everywhere, too. It's not like they're super friendly or happy. It's not like their country is small. So, that doesn't really cut it.

In terms of dollar input, this itself is an art form, and no one should take it too seriously. But if you just look at defense spending and exchange rates, the Europeans spend quite a lot more money than the Russians do in exchange rate. Now, some people say, “Well, you should really convert the spending to purchasing power parity.” This is a kind of arcane economic argument that tends to level out the input estimates of economies of different sizes. But in exchange rates, it's still less than that of the United States. The experts like to disagree about this. So, you can convert Russian GDP to purchasing power parity, and that's what pessimists do. But even after you do that, the Europeans still outspend the Russians on defense. So, PPP only gets you so far.

The next argument is going to be: well, the Europeans are uniquely inefficient relative to the Russians. The Russians are one state. The Europeans are many. They have short production runs… this, that, and the other. They try to chip away at this argument that you're about resources—the Russians. If you're in this argument, you find yourself fighting it on every front, and at some point you just throw up your hands. Right? Basically, my point is: how many arguments are we going to accept to grind down this this input disparity to turn it into a gross inferiority and military power that, in analysis, makes the Europeans—who are the defender, which is usually agreed to be somewhat easier than offense—incapable of looking after themselves? I just find it implausible on the face of it. So, I always like to mobilize the inputs, and I like to chip away of some of the generic arguments people make about why the Europeans somehow are not getting anything out of their inputs.

HANNAH: The European Council on Foreign Relations just came out with a survey showing that the European publics in key European countries that are friendly to the United States largely want to build up their own defenses. They don't trust the United States after, potentially, four years of Trump or given this new geopolitical reality in which we find ourselves. They want to look more to Berlin than Washington as a coordinator of mutual defense. What do you think about the kind of public appetite for commitment to these defense issues?

POSEN: Well, I don't want to rain on anyone's parade here, but I'm a little skeptical of polls about people's willingness to wage war or not. I think they could rally around the flag. The public could be fickle. One of the arguments that's often made—and it's an argument that they make—is you need to have a really, really large force, because unless the Europeans have a large counterattack force and a counterattack immediately, many of the smaller states will lose confidence in the alliance, and something bad will happen. They'll defect or something. And similarly, they'll argue that Europeans from the other side of Europe are not going to defend Poland or the Baltics. You can get into this endless political do-loop, and I guess my way of dealing with that endless political do-loop is simply to say, “Many people in eastern Europe have lived under the Russian boot. I think they know the Russian boot well, and they'd rather not live under it. And I think they will fight.” For many years, Germans had the Soviets on their border. They had nineteen Soviet divisions in East Germany on the West German border, and they know what it's like to live with nineteen Soviet divisions on their border. They're not going to want to replace them with nineteen Russian divisions living on their borders. They have very strong security reasons for fighting in the event of a Russian challenge. I think their reasons are a good deal stronger than ours are.

That said, under present circumstances, because the United States is deeply involved in Europe, it has thousands of soldiers and sailors and airmen still there—soldiers in the line of fire of any initial Russian activities. When Americans start to get shot by Russians under present circumstances, the Americans are probably going to fight. That’s going to be true, too. And that's the way the Europeans want it, right? The Europeans—you can take polls now that say the Europeans would like to be more self-reliant. You can get European publics to say that at this moment, but if you look at the reactions to my piece, which are mostly from Europeans, you'll find that European elites who are important in foreign policy and security are very chary of doing this on their own. They really don't want to do it on their own. They want to keep the Americans there. They have reasons for wanting to keep the Americans there, because if a much richer and equally capable Europe can deter Russia with 92 percent effectiveness, then if you have the Americans in your camp, and you get to 99.5 percent effectiveness, isn't that better? Of course, it's better. If you can get free security from the United States, why wouldn't you get it? They like it. They're not free riders. They are spending on defense. They are cheap riders. They’re trying to control their spending, and they would have to spend a bit more, I think, if we weren't there, because as I also say in the piece—and as everyone who studies European forces more or less agrees—there are lacuna in European forces. Some of those lacuna are already issues. Some of them are force structure issues. They're not spend twice as much issues, but they're issues that, for modest increases in defense spending, could bring themselves up to snuff. I don't think it's a big reach.

HANNAH: What's the practical upshot of this? Should NATO be scrapped? Should we be thinking more about it in terms of cybersecurity? Should we just reimagine a new set of bilateral agreements? What's your conclusion? What's your take away from having done this analysis and also your years of research?

POSEN: Well, I have argued that at minimum, NATO needs radical reform, and perhaps it should be replaced altogether with something else.

HANNAH: What do you think the likelihood of that happening in a Biden Administration is?

POSEN: Replacing it with something else isn't going to happen. Padical reform probably won't happen, but it might start. I say “might.” I'm not assigning a high probability to that. And what would radical reform look like? One could argue that at least the base things NATO has to do—and those are some of the things I analyze in the piece—which is to say, the defense of territory supported by tactical air power are things the Europeans are pretty close to being able to do for themselves. This constant effort to talk about how we're going to send American brigades and divisions to reinforce is kind of an inefficient use of American resources. Europeans could do that kind of work more cheaply that weekend, and they should do it. Even if you want to keep the alliance more or less the way it is, there should be some degree of specialization. The United States should specialize in other things—specialize in naval things, specialize in reconnaissance and intelligence, specialize in trying to provide an extra degree of nuclear deterrence. We should shift the roles. Consistent with shifting the roles, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe—who's always been an American since the dawn of NATO—should no longer be an American. The Supreme Allied Commander Europe should be European.

There are other commands the Americans could have—other ways to slice and dice things. But responsibility for that base defense of European real estate against the Russian attack should be largely in the hands of Europeans. You don't have to end the alliance to do that. You can keep the transatlantic alliance. You can keep much of its impediment, the command structure, and all the rest of it. But you should start changing the responsibilities and where they lie and change some of the commanders as a way of making it clear that this is for real. Europeans will see American resources go other places, because if you believe the Pentagon, there's never enough resources for all these things they want to do. And China looms large, and the United States is focusing on China. So, unless you want to keep asking the American people for extra tens of billions of dollars every year every time you identify a new thing China has done, you've got to start diverting some military resources from other things, and Europe is a place to divert them from.

HANNAH: I want to move our focus a little bit to shift our gaze away from Europe for a second. Afghanistan right now—I was shocked to see some of those commanders and some of the NATO leadership getting out ahead of the Pentagon spokesperson and basically saying, on the heels of President Trump's departure, “You know what? We probably won't be able to stick to a May deadline for withdrawal that the U.S. agreed to with the Taliban.” And I want to ask you—I assume the NATO is coordinating its public comments very carefully with the Biden Administration—is there an extent to which NATO could conceivably be working against American interests or American agreements with, for example, the Taliban?

POSEN: I actually can't figure out what's going on here. I'll confess I haven't tried to read every article written in every paper to try to cross reference things and figure it out. I just remember looking at it and saying, “This is odd. I don't quite get this.” One can make some hypotheses, which is that the Europeans were giving voice to things their American colleagues themselves have said. It's quite clear the American military doesn't want to leave Afghanistan and doesn't believe it can leave Afghanistan, and they whispered in the ears of their native European partners. It would be good for the Biden Administration to hear from you that you don't think leaving is a good idea.

Now, why the Europeans want to stay is a little more mysterious to me. But I can advance one or two hypotheses, and these are not very flattering. So, let's just treat them as hypotheses and not as conclusions.

Europeans have had a lot of problems domestically with flows of refugees from war zones, and I think they fear that an intensification of the war in Afghanistan, which they expect would follow Western withdrawal, would probably produce more refugees knocking on their doors. And for the application of a few thousand European soldiers and a few thousand American soldiers and a few thousand sorties, they may feel like they have enough control over this war to limit that. That's one hypothesis.

The second hypothesis is, even though the Europeans themselves don't much like being in Afghanistan, it has served one purpose. They're fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Americans, showing the Americans the advantage of the alliance and what stalwart folk they are. The irony is the Americans look the other way in terms of their complaints about the lacuna in European forces in Europe to get those few thousand NATO European forces in Afghanistan. There was a time in the Afghan war where there were many more Europeans there, and if you know what happened in the Afghan war, all European armies basically focused all of their attention on producing their modest contribution to the war at the capability you needed to be in a war zone. So, getting one brigade to Afghanistan and keeping it there was the purpose of each European army. The Italian army had a brigade. The Germans had a brigade. The Brits had a brigade. And as long as each country could provide its brigade, the Americans didn't complain very much about all the other things you were doing. They like the look and feel of fighting shoulder-to-shoulder and being able to say to the American people, “Look, we're there with you. We went in together, and we'll go out together.” That kind of thing.

These are both hypotheses. The Europeans themselves may have caught the illness we call the “tyranny of some clause,” which is, once you've been fighting in a war for a long time, you hate to believe you're about ready to write off whatever you fought for. And they may not want to have to explain it at home. If they leave and we leave and Afghanistan goes to hell, there's going to be some recriminations, and they may not want to face those recrimination on the surface.

HANNAH: One person who has echoed these kind of ideas is Donald Trump, who long talked about getting a better deal with NATO.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: He had that kind of nativist streak to his foreign policy, which rubbed allies the wrong way. So, I guess the question I have is: how is your argument distinguished from a kind of Trumpian world view?

POSEN: I don't think there is a Trumpian worldview. I think there is kind of an affect. I wrote an article about this in Foreign Affairs some years ago called “Illiberal Hegemony: The Strategy of the Trump Administration.” He was not an isolationist. I think it's correct to call him a transactionalist. And I think there are some odd things about Trump's transactional diplomacy, which is he actually wanted to make money on every deal. And I'm not suggesting we should want to make money on every deal. I'm just suggesting we have to set some priorities in this country because resources are scarce, in a very different argument.

HANNAH: I guess the final question I have is why this is all so important, not just for foreign policymakers and think tank types, but to ordinary, everyday people. Why should we all care about changing America's commitments to Europe? Why should that be something to work towards when, frankly, our friendship with the European countries goes back so far?

POSEN: International politics isn't about friendship. It's about interests and security. Look, I'm not saying the Cold War in Europe was unreasonable for the United States, although at some point it became unreasonable because at some point we’d achieved our objectives. The question is one of resources and priorities and risk. Those are the questions here. If you believe American resources are inexhaustible and that war is not costly, and if you are willing to assume nuclear risks to defend other countries and are willing to do that regardless of gain, just as a matter of principle that they are our friends or they are liberal democracies, and if you're willing to do that as a favor to them—because these are countries. They could well look after themselves. Then, who am I to stop you? If, however, you have some concerns about where the next billion dollars comes from, concerns about making extravagant promises to allies to use nuclear weapons on their behalf, concerns about the odd way NATO becomes a thing that feeds on itself so that it's always expanding to take on new countries that you then have to defend, Mr. and Mrs. America—if you have some concerns about all that, this would be a place to take a good, hard look at whether some reforms are in order.

At bottom, all these questions are political. Americans should understand that their government constantly asks them for more money to defend all of our friends abroad. Our friends abroad don't constantly ask their people for more money to defend themselves. We spend about three percent of GDP on defense. We don't need to spend that to defend the shores of the United States. We spend it to pursue these interests all over the world. Our allies are spending in Europe are spending about one-and-a-half percent of GDP on defense. These allies are not poor. Any of these American college students who traveled to Europe have noticed the roads are nice. The trains are nice. The streets are often white, and the buildings are often new. Europe is a pretty prosperous and comfortable place. So, the question you should be asking yourself is: do you feel pretty good about reaching into the pocket of the American taxpayer and taking from the American taxpayer some amount of money to go defend Europeans who could well defend themselves so that Europeans can have all of the things—and many things Americans don't have. In some countries, it’s better health care. Sometimes it is better infrastructure. If you feel comfortable with that donation because you have a sense of mission, then who am I to stop you?

HANNAH: You are Barry Posen, esteemed in the world of foreign policy. Barry, thank you very much for being with us today and sharing some of your time with us.

POSEN: Good to be here.

HANNAH: I'm Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. Special thanks go out to our None of the Above team who make this all possible: our producer Caroline Gray, editor Luke Taylor, sound engineer Zubin Hensler, and EGF’s graduate research assistant Adam Pontius. If you enjoyed what you've heard, we appreciate you subscribing to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Do rate and review us, and if there is a topic you want us to cover, shoot us an email at info@egfound.org. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe out there, and catch you next time.

(END.)

More Episodes