Why NATO Endures

"Wallace Thies also died recently, which was a great loss. He wrote this and another book on burden sharing, Friendly Rivals , and both are fantastic. This one is good on all manner of levels. It has a memorable title, and although it’s aimed at an academic audience it’s very well written and accessible. I really like this book, and it has been very influential in the way I regard NATO. His key argument is that a lot of scholarship simply gets NATO wrong, because it assumes that NATO is always in crisis, and that that crisis is worse than anything that has gone before, and therefore NATO’s days are numbered. There’s a great sentence here: “Henry Kissinger owns the distinction of pronouncing the Atlantic alliance in serious trouble in all six decades of its existence. So it’s a critique of what he calls the ‘NATO in crisis literature’; he shows it’s wrongheaded. He provides examples of how particular episodes have been seen as a moment of crisis, but NATO survived. Of course, NATO has faced crisis, and is often deeply divided. NATO will deal with a crisis like Bosnia or Kosovo or Libya or Ukraine . But just because NATO is dealing with a crisis, and to some degree may be divided over the crisis, you shouldn’t then leap to the assumption that that means the organisation is suffering some sort of fatal endpoint to its existence. Thies argues that NATO, even when divided, has this ability to self-repair. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . That’s because—but pretty much all—its membership has been for a long time democratic. So, the allies in their relationships with one another, are open to debate, are capable of arguing about one thing really quite bitterly but still cooperating on another. The allies basically elevate to the international level what goes on at the domestic level. In domestic politics, we argue all the time. But it doesn’t mean the government or the state is about to collapse. It’s just the nature of democratic politics, and the way in which democratic states engage with one another. It may seem obvious, but the way it’s discussed is very, very convincing. I think there are lessons here, more broadly, because the world always seems to be coming to an end, whether due to COVID, or the climate crisis, or the rise of China, or the migration crisis of 2015, or 9/11. But I’m a bit of a skeptic about that. I think international organisations are actually quite good at accommodating and dealing with problems. Thies applies that to the particular case of NATO. It was published in 2009 and here we are 13 years later and NATO is not just still with us but is in rude health dealing with the Ukraine problem. So it’s a very insightful book. That’s a good question. The standard view is that an alliance is formed for a particular purpose, and when the purpose is satisfied the alliance disintegrates. That is, by and large, correct. So, the wartime alliance in World War Two came to an end in 1945. It was inconceivable that the Soviet Union, United States, United Kingdom and France would stay together beyond that. Alliances do generally end when their purpose is satisfied. And because of that general tendency, people think that NATO is bound to follow. But NATO’s particular features, as I’ve explained, make it endure beyond the original purpose of deterring the Soviet Union."