Jamie Shea on NATO Then and Now

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

Archival:

USA: KOSOVO CRISIS: BILL CLINTON ON NATO ATTACKS (AP Archive, July 21, 2015)
WORLDWIDE: REACTIONS ON NATO AIRSTRIKES (AP Archive, July 21, 2015)
Serbia marks NATO bombing anniversary - 24 Mar 09 (Al Jazeera English, March 24, 2009)
10 French NATO troops killed in Afghanistan (AFP News Agency, August 20, 2008)
US and NATO Forces Assault Taliban (Voice of America, September 15, 2009)
The Case for War in Libya (ABC News, March 29, 2011)
NATO takes over Libya no-fly zone (Al Jazeera English, March 25, 2011)
NATO defence mins agree to send ships to counter piracy off Somalia (AP Archive, July 21, 2015)
NATO - Counter-piracy operations: Life on board the submarine (NATO, January 20, 2011)
NATO is not planning to send troops to Ukraine: Secretary general (CNBC Television, March 4, 2022)
NATO chief says no plans to send combat troops to Ukraine (TRT World, January 30, 2022)
NATO rules out intervention in Ukraine | DW News (DW News, February 25, 2022)
NATO prepares for dangerous new world - as Russia warns of new Iron Curtain (Channel 4 News, June 30, 2022)

Transcript:

JAMIE SHEA: NATO will be under a bit of pressure in the Strategic Concept to try to talk about the things it wants to talk about immediately—essentially Russia and defense. But it will be mindful of the fact that it can't afford to send that kind of, “We're no longer a global organization. We’re no longer a Swiss Army knife. We're no longer going to deal with all of these other challenges,” message.

MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. I'm your host, Mark Hannah. We start off this week by looking back about thirty years.

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HANNAH: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, launched its first military operation and helped accelerate the end of what has become known as the Bosnian War.

SHEA: It’s strange to remember, Mark, that it wasn't until 1994—well into half the century or most of its existence—that NATO fired its first shot by intervening against the Bosnian Serbs in the war in Bosnia. And that move, if you like, from being a consultative diplomatic organization—albeit with military troops—to becoming a military actor and actually using force, vastly increased public visibility, vastly increased media attention on NATO. And so, NATO suddenly found itself in the crosshairs of having to do serious communications, not just a couple of boring old communiques after ministerial meetings that nobody bothered to read, but actually live press conferences.

HANNAH: That's Jamie Shea. Jamie was the spokesperson for NATO in the 1990s and served as deputy assistant secretary general for emerging security challenges at NATO headquarters in Brussels more recently. In NATO’s more than seventy years of history, it has served a variety of roles. Since the Bosnian war, NATO has participated in several major military interventions in Libya and Afghanistan and numerous counterterrorism and counter-piracy missions. But it wasn't always this active, and back in 1990, NATO found itself suddenly an object of intrigue.

SHEA: NATO suddenly found journalists turning up on its doorstep. For example, during the Kosovo campaign in 1999, literally overnight—I'm not exaggerating—we went from having not one single journalist in our press room to having 400. And they came with tents. They came with caravans. Well, I kid you not. They had they installed mini studios in the NATO car park. You couldn't park your car inside NATO any longer. They had night shifts. They were determined to sort of stick it out throughout the whole campaign 24 hours a day, and they wanted press conferences in the middle of the night because, for example, CNN were feeding Asia, as well as the United States and Europe. And so suddenly, we felt we had to provide the information and the briefings to fill up the immense media space they were giving us. And, of course, the dilemma was if we weren't able to fill up that media space ourselves, the journalists would leave us and go off to Belgrade and be filled up with Milošević and his Serb media space, in which case we would definitely lose the war for the hearts and minds. So, we had no choice but to step it up and to become a serious media organization for the first time, which we frankly weren't really prepared for, because we'd been thinking about conflict and conceptualizing conflict, but we never actually had done it before. And we had to sort of improvise as we went along so that we could basically get into the driving seat in terms of the way in which we were able to put the NATO narrative forward.

HANNAH: Since that first time in the Balkans thirty years ago, when NATO enforced a no-fly zone over Bosnia and Herzegovina and stepped in as an armed force, the alliance has taken on that role more and more. NATO forces have been on the ground in Afghanistan following the attacks of September 11.

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HANNAH: They've implemented a no-fly zone and led military operations in Libya to deter attacks on civilian populations during the uprising against the rule of Muammar Gadhafi.

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HANNAH: And they've led counter-piracy missions off the Horn of Africa.

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HANNAH: But NATO, created at the dawn of the Cold War, had originally been created to do things like deter Soviet expansion and encourage European political integration. The first secretary general of NATO, Lord Ismay, famously stated the purpose of the alliance was, quote, “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Wading into conflicts which included ethnic cleansing and war crimes in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa wasn't exactly what the alliance had been created to do.

SHEA: After the Berlin Wall came down, there was a sense of: Will there still be a NATO? But it was very fleeting because what happened, of course, was all of the newly independent countries of Central and Eastern Europe started to knock on NATO's door and ask for help in reforming their militaries. And so, to some degree, the nonmember states of NATO gave NATO more of a purpose than the member states of NATO, because NATO was then obliged very quickly to invent the Partnership for Peace, to give these countries partnership status, and to start sending its military forces out, not to fight these countries, but to help them to convert to Western equipment, Western standards, procurement methods, and so on. In fact, one of my friends says NATO developed a partnership industry, and I don't think it's an exaggeration. And one reason, of course, afterwards why NATO became involved in the war in the Balkans is because the countries were also partners of NATO, and they didn't have security guarantees. But NATO felt it couldn’t simply turn its back indifferently on partners who were being invaded. So, to some degree, NATO has been a very agile creature, which, like a chameleon, has been able to reprogram itself very quickly to deal with sort of new security issues.

Of course, after the failure of the European Union's economic sanctions and peace mediation, the Balkans War demonstrated there was still a use for NATO military forces—planning, integrated command structures, running air campaigns, things the other organizations, United Nations in particular, were not able to fulfill. So, NATO, I suppose, reflects a world in which, unfortunately, security crises don't bring about a peaceful world, but one ends simply to give way to another. I'm afraid it's a reflection, as I suppose, of the rather chaotic sort of conditions in which we live and are condemned to live.

HANNAH: Today in Ukraine, even though the organization doesn't have a mandate to defend non-NATO nations such as Ukraine, it might seem strange not to see NATO stepping in. In fact, it might feel even a bit backwards. Not only was part of the original NATO mission to deter Russia's expansion, but this war between Ukraine and Russia isn't over the Middle East or in the Balkans. It's on their home turf in Europe. In some sense, this is the kind of war NATO was built to deter.

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HANNAH: Though, some are saying that by staying out of this conflict, NATO is refining or clarifying its purpose in today's security climate. By staying out of Ukraine, NATO is making it clear its promises are limited to countries within the alliance. You see, not long ago, NATO was at a turning point. They were reshaping their strategic concept and realizing not only did the world not necessarily need the organization in the same way it did during the Cold War, but it's also a real challenge to get thirty countries on the same page to do just about anything.

SHEA: Well, I remember a summit NATO had in December of 2019 when it was marking its 70th anniversary. At that time, of course, post-Crimea, we had many allies pointing the finger at Russia, and President Macron turned up and said, “No, it's terrorism. It's the South. It’s Mali. That's where the greatest threat is. And NATO should be doing much more to help us down there.” So, in a way, you're a jack of all trades and maybe master of none. And it's a kind of balancing act to try to give something to everybody so that they feel NATO is relevant to what they are particularly doing. But it's not easy because it means NATO becomes a sort of Swiss army knife with forty different functions as it tries to embrace every kind of security challenge. It looks relevant, at least in the eyes of public opinion, by listing everybody's favorite challenge, but it doesn't necessarily make for an effective alliance, which is then not able to deliver, whether it's Afghanistan or the South or Turkey's requirement for more support in Syria or military commands in the high north. It's not able to deliver effectively any one of those different things.

HANNAH: At the Madrid summit, which took place last week, NATO adopted its new Strategic Concept, stating its renewed commitment to its values, purpose, and tasks, something the alliance does every ten years or so. The summit comes as Russia continues its grinding advance in eastern Ukraine, as global energy prices soar, and as a major grain and hunger crisis looms. The summit was cast as a huge opportunity for NATO to reinvent itself. As part of that reinvention, NATO invited Australia and Japan and New Zealand and even the Republic of Korea to the summit, signaling NATO once again may have a purpose outside of Europe. Sweden and Finland were also in attendance, paving the way for their ascension into the alliance. So, what does redefining the Strategic Concept actually mean, and what does it signal about the future of NATO?

SHEA: First of all, strategic concepts are about reaffirmation, rather like people who recommit their marriage vows. It's not necessary, but because they've done it once, and it's meant to last for life, but they think there's some sort of symbolic purpose or a new lease of energy in life if they, every now and again, repeat their marriage vows to each other. And strategic concept does reassure people by reaffirming the transatlantic link. The Americans recommit to Article Five after the Trump years. The Europeans can never hear that too much. They recommit to solidarity. They recommit to consensus decision-making. As the French like to say, it goes for granted, but it's nice to hear it repeated nonetheless. So, you’ll have to sort of bear with NATO in terms of rereading familiar language you've seen before, which will no doubt be about 50% of the document, but psychologically and internally, for NATO, that psychological therapy has its political role—the idea of consultations and transparency to each other and so on.

Now, the new stuff and the more difficult stuff—well, I think, first of all—will be how to describe Russia, because, we’ve lived since the end of the Cold War, basically, with a consensus that we defend against Russia, but it's a country that we can influence. It's open for dialog. There are problems, but they're balanced by common interests. And that approach isn't obviously going to work for the time being. But there will be, obviously, a debate between countries that want to immediately do away with the NATO-Russia Founding Act and the NATO-Russia Council: “We can't talk to those guys. Forget it. Waste of time.” So, we'll want to keep those mechanisms in place hoping a democratic Russia may come back to them one day. So, how bleak and black, how categorical, is the description of Russia going to be?

HANNAH: Indeed, the language pertaining to Russia in this year's Strategic Concept is harsher than it was in 2012, the last time a Strategic Concept was written. The document identified the Russian Federation as the main culprit in significantly altering Europe's security environment, and it went so far as to claim the Euro-Atlantic area is not at peace, a significant departure from ten years ago.

SHEA: That also leads to the second question, Mark. Does NATO beyond Ukraine have a long-term containment strategy for Russia to prevent it doing us harm, to prevent it doing another invasion, reducing dependencies. The EU has started a lot of work obviously with the energy issue, reducing dependencies on oil and gas. So, the question is: What can NATO do as part of a neo-containment strategy vis-à-vis Russia?

One thing I'm looking for in a strategic concept is whether NATO will set up some kind of technology regime to try to prevent Russia getting electronic components for the modernization of its weaponry post-Ukraine, something which NATO did quite a lot of during the Cold War. The next element is China. NATO is moving towards an embrace of China, particularly if you look at the language of the communiqué NATO allies released last year, a lot on China. And there was a sense that China is not Russia. It's problematic, but we can have a dialog. We have areas of common interest. We should exploit those. And we should sort of see to what extent China is influencing us in Europe and how we can play a greater role in the Indo-Pacific. Now that NATO has this big focus on Russia, and now that China has allied itself much closer with Russia in the conflict, does China still matter? Is it going to be dropped, or is it going to be seen as a kind of Tweedledum Tweedledee relationship where it's basically a reflection of Russia in everything but name. So, I think that's another sort of interesting debate. Will NATO sort of backtrack a little bit on China in the wake of what's happened?

HANNAH: If China does matter to the alliance, it's because, as the Strategic Concept outlined, China's coercive policies and global ambitions could be seen as a direct challenge to NATO's shared democratic values. But is focusing on China a departure from NATO's intended purpose of protecting security on the continent? Or does including China in the strategic concept make sense as NATO reimagines its role for the coming decade?

SHEA: There are sort of two big geopolitical thrusts. One is a kind of back-to-the-future thrust of, obviously, Eastern Europe, Ukraine, deterrence, defense, warfighting capability, the sort of things NATO had to do during the Cold War and where clearly it's a long way yet from having a verified warfighting capability of being able not simply to take on the Russian army, but to win and to win quickly at the minimum price. A lot of work has to be done there. But the other thrust, of course, is to look at Biden's narrative of an alliance of democracies against authoritarianism, where the issues in Asia—if you strip away the geography of aggression, of bullying, in terms of economic coercion, in terms of using hybrid tactics, using economic instruments, more and more rapid military modernization, particularly in the nuclear area, it's a similar agenda.

So, NATO is also sort of suggesting that somehow it wants to not just deal with Russia in Europe, but become part of this new global architecture of the democracies standing up to the authoritarians, which means Americans will get Europeans more involved in Asia-Pacific affairs in exchange for Australians and Japanese becoming more involved in Europe, a kind of crossover effect where NATO could be the hub. But of course, it's difficult to run these two big geostrategic operations at the same time, right? Two hearts beating inside one organism. And so, I think this is going to be an interesting thing to watch if the alliance is really able—as your former president, Lyndon Johnson, would have said—to walk and chew gum at the same time here.

HANNAH: With all of these great ideas and goals for how to reimagine NATO and deter Russia, is the alliance—which has grown steadily and now said to include Finland and Sweden—really capable of carrying through with these lofty goals? After all, the purpose of the Madrid summit was to put forward a strategic concept which defines what NATO should do, not necessarily what it can do. So, I asked Jamie about NATO's potential constraints.

SHEA: The strategic concept has to sort of pull everything into the long term. What is the long term of defense and deterrence? Well, it means defense budgets and modernization. It means more transatlantic burden-sharing. It means more preparedness, and so on. So, I think, you NATO will map out its requirements to achieve that defense and deterrence. As I've said, it requires a longer-term strategy beyond Ukraine for containing Russia and dealing with Russia. So, the overlap now with the EU means the EU is going to play a greater role than we expected in trying to stabilize NATO's neighborhood—Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova. And so, clearly the strategic concept has to map out a common strategy to do that, particularly using the EU's resources, just like the EU, with its aspirations to be more of a defense organization can help NATO with some of its funding for defense capabilities to fill some of its gaps as well. So, you've got to map out something in that direction. I think, as I said, with the Asia-Pacific, you're going to want to send a signal that NATO is still going to have the wherewithal to speak to the Asian-Pacific partners in a kind of common approach of the democracies to deal with the authoritarians.

The other thing, as I've said, is that NATO has set out dealing with a lot of new issues in recent years, like space and climate change, which are popular, of course—particularly climate change with a younger audience. That really resonates. The secretary general, I might add, Stoltenberg said NATO should become the foremost organization in the world for dealing with security and climate change, which was quite ambitious. So, having mapped out this big agenda, rather like the Grand Old Duke of York, you can't march your army to the top of the hill and then march them all the way down again simply because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So, I think NATO will be under a bit of pressure in the Strategic Concept to try to talk about the things it wants to talk about immediately—essentially Russia and defense and spending and burden-sharing. But it will be mindful of the fact that it can't afford to send that kind of, “We're no longer a global organization. We’re no longer a Swiss Army knife. We're no longer going to deal with all of these other challenges,” message, because if it did so, as I said, it would lose important constituencies, particularly the young, that have come closer to NATO in recent years precisely because it thinks NATO is dealing with some of these subnational challenges, whether it be climate change or whether it be pandemics or information security.

HANNAH: But getting down to it, I wanted to know from Jamie whether or not he thought conceding to some of Russia's demands would embolden Russia to keep moving westward into, say, Finland or Georgia. That is, if some narrow countries decided they needed to reach a diplomatic settlement in order to avert an energy crisis, would Russia feel it has free rein over other countries in Europe?

SHEA: Well, the answer is we don't know, obviously, because we can't read Putin's mind. But from a security point of view, you deal with two concepts: Is it unthinkable, or is it thinkable? And of course, before February 24, we would have said unthinkable. Now we say thinkable, with different degrees of probability. But you have to prepare for anything which is thinkable, and we are now in the realm of the thinkable. So, yes, you have to plan on that kind of basis.

The other point I wanted to make is that in the globalized world, of course, what we're seeing is that military aggression produces effects well beyond the military realm. Military aggression now produces a world hunger crisis. It produces a world inflation crisis. It produces a world energy crisis. It produces a supply chain crisis. And the problem is as the crisis goes on—and I think you're seeing this at the moment—Western politicians sort of lose focus on the immediate cause, which is the fighting in Ukraine and bringing it to an end and getting the sanctions lifted, and spend more and more of their time dealing with the second-order effects, because, of course, if they're on the domestic front—like inflation, like rising fuel prices at the moment, gas bills, and all of this—they resonate, just like they're under tremendous pressure to get the blockade in the Black Sea lifted so that we can get more grain onto markets and prevent famine. It's simply that conflicts interact with these other factors. Because of the world energy crisis, we're going back to burning coal. Germany's going back to burning coal. So is the UK. We're going back to drilling for oil. We're negotiating with the Saudis at the moment for a higher ceiling of OPEC in terms of alternative oil. Fossil fuels are back big time. So, this war is going to take us back ten years, as John Kerry has been pointing out, in terms of being able to deal with climate change, thereby storing up more security headaches for the future.

HANNAH: A diplomatic settlement might not be around the corner, but the ascension of Finland and Sweden to NATO certainly is, which was all but confirmed at the Madrid summit last week when Turkey dropped its opposition to the two countries joining the alliance. And while some are certainly concerned that NATO enlargement will antagonize Russia even further, Jamie, being the optimist he is, believes it is the exact approach the West needs.

SHEA: Finland and Sweden do bring serious military capability into NATO, particularly the Finns. They've got five armored brigades. They've got a reserve force of about 250, which many NATO allies would dream of having. They always stayed in the territorial defense business even after the Cold War, because their doctrine was one of armed neutrality. And of course, they have a history with the Soviet Union, with Russia, as we all know, and they kept their heavy equipment. Unlike the Dutch and others, they didn't sell off their tanks to other countries in Latin America or the Middle East. They do have a long border. They’re now fencing it—I wouldn't say militarizing it, but fencing it—because they do see NATO membership would bring more tension with Russia. But they, particularly with Sweden, with two armored brigades, are in a position where they can largely defend themselves at the moment. So, the good news for NATO is they bring serious military capability into the alliance. But unlike—with all the respect I have for them—the Albanians, the North Macedonians, and the Montenegrins, who joined NATO recently, they don't need a lot of NATO add-ons or a lot of NATO supplement in order to have a robust collective defense. Indeed, they're likely to adopt the Norwegian posture, which is to welcome NATO troops for exercises and prepositioning of equipment, but not want permanent NATO troops or bases on their territory in peacetime, which would give NATO an added excuse, if you like, not to have to spend a lot of money defending them.

So, from a military side, after a lot of political enlargements of NATO, this is a more serious military enlargement of NATO. If you really are having to defend against a more threatening Russia, it's massively better to have Finland and Sweden in NATO, because then if you look at the map of the Baltic Sea, defense of Estonia, defense of Poland, NATO control of the Baltic Sea, and bottling the Russians into Saint Petersburg become so much easier. Think of the strategic importance, for example, of Gotland, the Swedish island in the middle of the Baltic, which really does control access in and out of Saint Petersburg. So, if you are going to be involved in a boxing game with Russia anyway, getting somebody to give you two bigger pairs of boxing gloves can't do you any harm.

HANNAH: Both President Biden and NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg have made it perfectly clear NATO troops will not be deployed to Ukraine. But it's hard to argue that NATO countries and member nations are not intimately involved in this war. Poland has been crucial for shipping weapons through its border to Kyiv. The United States and European nations have sent billions of dollars in both lethal and humanitarian aid to assist the war effort, and the assistance after the release of the NATO Strategic Concept last week will surely continue. As NATO looks to expand, and the war rages on in Ukraine, it is difficult to predict whether the alliance can or should find a purpose beyond its origins. We should pay close attention to whether NATO has the ability to reinvent itself in the ways it has sketched out in this strategic concept and whether the alliance really has the ability to serve its original function and deter further Russian aggression.

I'm Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. Special thanks to our None of the Above team who make all of this possible. Our producer is Caroline Gray. Our associate producer and editor is Sarah Leeson. And research and archival support was given by Lucas Robinson and Sam Gardner-Bird. If you enjoyed what you've heard, we appreciate you subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Do rate and review us, and if there's a topic you want us to cover, send us an email at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe out there. Catch you next time.

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