NATO is at a crossroads as its leaders gather for a symbol-filled summit Friday in Warsaw, with even top officials acknowledging the alliance’s struggles to maintain relevance on the world stage in the face of intractable threats, including the Afghanistan War, the battle against the Islamic State group and Russia’s aggression in Eastern Europe.
The summit will be “a defining moment for our security,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday.
Members are pressed to spend more on defense and stand up to an increasingly aggressive Moscow while preparing to deal with a new U.S. president and increased tensions among some of the major powers in Europe, he said.
“The world is a more dangerous place than just a few years ago, [and] NATO is responding with speed and with determination” to confront those threats, Mr. Stoltenberg told reporters during a press conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda.
Over the past several years, the Cold War-era military alliance has faced perhaps the most palpable crisis of confidence since its creation shortly after World War II.
Despite playing a large role in military interventions in Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere, the alliance’s bedrock strategy of collective defense has been undercut by internal bickering over member countries’ contributions to that strategy.
NATO members also face the threat of a fracturing Europe, instigated by the landmark vote in the United Kingdom last month to leave the European Union, just as Moscow was putting unrelenting military pressure on alliance members in the Baltics and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
That’s not to mention the fact that presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has sparked his own debate by openly questioning the bipartisan establishment consensus on the value of NATO to American security and whether U.S. allies are paying their fair share.
“Despite all of its good work since its last summit in 2014, [NATO] will continue to face a number of compounding security challenges that will require more debates, innovation and investment,” Julianne Smith, former deputy national security adviser and senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for a New American Security, told Congress on Thursday.
“The alliance is about to demonstrate that it is anything but obsolete,” she said during testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The alliance is also under increasing pressure to play a larger role in the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, while continuing to follow Washington’s lead in extending its military mission in Afghanistan.
This perfect storm of regional and global threats has engendered a certain tone of urgency among NATO members ahead of the Warsaw summit, the last that President Obama will attend.
“There hasn’t been another inflection point like this for the alliance since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989 to 1991,” Douglas E. Lute, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, told reporters Wednesday. “So this is a bit of a historic point.”
Russia, Afghanistan and beyond
U.S. and NATO leaders are expected to spend much of their time on the growing threat of Russian forces along the alliance’s eastern borders. Those discussions will focus specifically on the organization’s decision to bolster its ground forces in the Baltics to counter Moscow’s efforts. The Kremlin has denounced the reinforcement as a provocation.
Even the site of the summit is suggestive. Host Warsaw once gave its name to the alliance of East European Warsaw Pact nations dominated by the old Soviet Union. Poland has been one of the loudest voices in the alliance calling for a tougher response to Moscow’s recent moves.
NATO’s new response force for Eastern Europe, consisting of air and ground assets combined with special forces units, is ready to be deployed if needed, alliance officials said.
They also plan to put the final touches on a proposed expanded force that would consist of four battalions, or 4,000 troops, designed as a backup to the response team along the borders with Ukraine, Belarus and Finland, Mr. Lute said.
The battalions, one each from the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Germany, will provide a “modest and responsible” reactionary force if Russia poses a tangible threat to any NATO members along the country’s western border, Mr. Lute said.
The NATO reaction force would be in addition to the 4,200-member U.S. Army armored brigade that Pentagon officials plan to deploy separately to the region in February, the Pentagon announced in May.
The moves put fresh military assets behind a rising war of words between Russia and the West, amid steadily rising tensions along Russia’s western border with U.S. allies including Georgia, Ukraine and the Baltic States.
Those tensions were dramatized in late April when Russian fighter jets repeatedly buzzed a U.S. destroyer patrolling in the Baltic. An angry Pentagon denounced the flyby.
Russia ratcheted up tensions in May by announcing its own buildup in the Baltics. Russian defense officials unveiled a plan to deploy three more Army divisions — or 30,000 troops — tasked with defending Russia’s interests in Eastern Europe.
The move was a direct response to NATO’s plans to deploy thousands of troops into the Baltic region and rotate troops and materiel through the region on a regular basis, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said at the time.
Aside from the Russian threat, Washington and Brussels will hammer out the details on how the alliance will continue its military mission in Afghanistan.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah will attend the Warsaw summit to coordinate Kabul’s efforts with the country’s national security forces to support the extended U.S. and NATO mission there, Mr. Lute said.
On Wednesday, Mr. Obama announced that 8,900 of the 9,800 U.S. troops in Afghanistan would remain in the country until the end of his term. The White House initially planned to have the number of American troops in the country down to 5,500 by the end of this year, with all U.S. forces out of the country by 2017.
But a blistering three-month assessment of the mission by Gen. John Nicholson, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, prompted the White House to reconsider the pace of troop withdrawals.
In June, White House officials gave its tacit approval for U.S. commanders in Afghanistan to conduct offensive airstrikes against the Taliban and other insurgent groups and to let American troops restart joint ground operations with Afghan forces.
The move, combined with the delay in troop withdrawals, effectively restarts the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan, which officially ended in December 2014.
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