This is how an off-course NATO can find its way back

While no one disputes NATO's historic significance, the defence alliance has lost much of its strength, prestige and relevance in recent decades. With security policy expert Robert C. Castel, Magyar Nemzet explores the reasons behind this spectacular decline and the way forward for NATO.

NATO-csúcs Litvániában Fotó: Miniszterelnöki Sajtóiroda/Fischer Zoltán

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) has in fact become a victim of its own success, and with that the defence alliance underwent the most devastating thing that can happen in any organisation. By succeeding in solving the the problem it was entrusted with, it has undermined its own raison d'etre," security expert Robert C. Castel explained in response to a question from Magyar Nemzet.

While no one disputes NATO's historic importance, the alliance has lost much of its strength, prestige and relevance in recent decades. There are several reasons behind this. For one, the more peaceful stretch of this period has led the governments of member states to gradually downsize their militaries, in the belief that there is no need to develop and produce weapons on a mass scale, but only just enough to meet the minimum requirements. To be precise, even that was not being met by member countries. The principle that at least two percent of a country's GDP should be spent on defence is binding on all in NATO. 

One of the basic principles of the policy is that the hierarchy of values ​​can be ascertained by viewing the budgets disbursed for the implementation of the values. A value that is allotted two percent carries an importance of exactly two percent in the political markets. It is completely irrelevant what politicians and commentators say about existential threats and values. Two percent is exactly two percent,

the security policy expert told us. As far as military force development is concerned, Castel said three different levels need to be examined: first, what public opinion says, because if voters don't support it, it doesn't matter what a government wants. Secondly, it must be taken into account that communication and action on the part of decision-makers are two separate issues;

In today's world, many people believe that communication is reality itself. To them, I recommend trying to stop a tank or shoot down a ballistic missile with a combative and uncompromising tweet. On the part of the decision-makers, their action manifests in whether the weapons plant receives a ten-year order.

Thirdly, it is also important to look at which countries have the infrastructure capabilities. "Where raw materials and energy are available and the necessary industrial facilities are established, then the process of rearmament can be relatively rapid. Where this is still not or is no longer the case, rearmament will take much longer. To illustrate with an example: it is easier to convert a bus factory into a combat vehicles manufacturing plant than it is a Netflix studio or the offices of a brokerage firm. The same is true for demographics. A nation with only one child in every family will be blessed with a very low inclination to fight. By contrast, nations with a family model with many children will have a much more positive situation," he explained, responding to the long rearmament period in many member states.

Except that the war in Ukraine came as suddenly as a bolt of lightening out of the blue, at least very few people thought it would actually break out. We often hear that the war in Ukraine is an existential crisis for the West.

It seems that the finance ministers of NATO states did not hear about this, because only four of the 31 states upped their military budgets to above the magic two percent after the Russian invasion: Finland, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary. The numbers speak for themselves. The US military budget for 2023 remained below the budget for the last year of peace. The situation is similar in Norway and Portugal. The British sabre-rattling is accompanied by the consistent reduction of the military budget over the past three years. The same is true for Turkey. Among the other member states, Belgium, Italy and Croatia were the ones that instead of increasing, have rather reduced their military budgets from 2022 to 2023. In July 2023, in the second year of the crisis that posed a lethal threat to our values ​​and way of life, only eleven NATO states rose above two percent. That's how existential the existential is,

– said Robert C. Castel. He said NATO's future depended on a constant threat hovering in the background that posed a similar threat to all members of the Alliance. „The Soviet threat met that criterion. Is the current Russian threat, or perhaps a future Chinese threat, on a similar scale? I am not sure,” he added. „The ceiling is a level of threat that implies that if one state intervenes on the side of another, it means the destruction of the intervener”. There can be no federal interest that would override the principle of self-preservation, and in such a case, whoever can save himself will try to leave 'the party', he said.
 

The NATO-Ukraine Council's meeting on the second day of the NATO Vilnius Summit, 12 July 2023. MTI/EPA/Filip Singer.
 

But would the United States, for example, risk its own security for an allied country? This is a classic question in the science of international relations. The question is usually phrased as follows: „How far can states be trusted to honor their treaty obligations in wartime?”. Castel recalled that research widely referred to as the LLM study (Leeds, Long and Mitchell) in the early 2000s found that states honor their treaty obligations in wartime 74.5 per cent of the cases. In 2018, two researchers, Berkemeier and Fuhrman, revisited the issue and looked at the extent to which allies keep their word in wartime, up to the present day.

During the period 1944-2003, only 23% of the obligations were fulfilled by the signatories of the treaties during wartime. A further cause for pessimism is that if we break this 23% down, we find that states are much more likely to honor their offensive or neutral treaties, and that defense treaties are the ones most often violated in wartime

the security advisor explained.

„As for the famous pledge of Article Five, that each member would come to the assistance of any other if under attack, it is wiser not to read it if you have a sensitive or idealistic disposition,” writes British conservative author Peter Hitchens, who has seen quite a lot of things around NATO in his decades-long career. According to the opinion piece by the columnist of the British paper Mail on Sunday, this point in the NATO treaty contains a major escape route.

A very cunning British diplomat once explained to me that the US Senate would never have ratified the NATO Treaty if it had been a genuine obligation. And that is why it isn’t one. The clause says that each signatory »will assist the party or parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force« (emphasis added). The member state remains free to choose whether to deem force necessary, or to use force at all. Action not including force is clearly implied as a possible response. Hence the constant Cold War doubt, especially among Germans, that a US president would sacrifice Chicago or Los Angeles for Frankfurt or Munich, when it came to it. The Europe-based cruise missiles in the 1980s were all about making a shaky nuclear commitment look more credible

– the renowned author writes.

Robert C. Castel illustrated this with a concrete example. "Many people may interpret the spirit of the treaty much more broadly, but the text of the treaty is only binding up to that point. In the case of an attack on Poland, for example, it is possible that Portugal would only see fit to send ribbons and whip sticks to help the ally under attack," he told us. He noted that NATO's deterrence – at least the specific and localized deterrence in Eastern Europe – collapsed with the Russian attack. At the same time, we also see that Russia is unable to deter member states from providing ever greater levels of military assistance to Ukraine.

Cover photo: Prime Minister Viktor Orban (7th from the right, middle row),  NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg (6th from the left), Lithuanian Head of State Gitanas Nauseda and US President Joe Biden (both by Stoltenberg) (Photo: MTI/Prime Minister's Press Office/Zoltan Fischer).