Next month NATO members meet in Lisbon to agree on a new Strategic Concept. Acronym Institute Director Rebecca Johnson argues that if we treated nuclear weapons as the previous century’s problem to be disposed of, instead of fetishizing them as instruments of high strategic value, we would stand a far better chance of maintaining global security. This article was originally published in OpenDemocracy - view the orginal here.

In 1949, NATO was constructed as a military alliance under the American nuclear umbrella. The joke that it was to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down was uncomfortably close to the truth.  This nuclear bloc became one half of an aggressive arms race that divided Europe, nearly annihilated the world on several occasions, distorted the politics and economies of many of its members and beggared the Soviet Union. The last, at least, precipitated the end of the Cold War. Now, 20 years after the Warsaw Pact collapsed and Germany reunified, what is NATO for? 

Leaders of the 27 NATO members will come together in Lisbon 19-21 November to agree on a new Strategic Concept.  This should reflect the fundamentally different conditions in the 21st century world.  The signs, however, suggest that for the sake of putting on a unified public face, NATO will yet again fail to address both its role and purpose in international security developments and the contradictions stemming from its structure and relations with the United States and European Union.

NATO’s Danish Secretary-General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has just issued two classified documents, which are now circulating among member states. The first will be the basis for a short public communiqué that is intended to set the principles for NATO’s future policy, while the second is a much longer operational document which “sets out in detail how NATO would react and assign units and forces to respond to a range of attacks”.  The detailed operational scenarios played out in this latter document will remain secret, but for NATO governments these will divert attention from the empty platitudes likely to be trotted out in the communiqué.

When the West appeared to emerge victorious from the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact dissolved.  NATO should have dissolved too, but was instead enlarged to accommodate some but not all of the Warsaw Pact’s members. That decision has resulted in an unresolved identity crisis and a squandering of opportunities to construct more appropriate ways and means to support European and international security. Article V, the Musketeers’ Commitment at the heart of NATO (all for one and one for all), took NATO countries into Afghanistan after the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Notwithstanding political spin, after a decade of fighting, killing and dying, that war has been lost in every significant aspect, while Al Qaeda has regrouped elsewhere, including Pakistan and Yemen.  For the best part of a decade, NATO has been papering over a series of widening cracks, with diminishing coherence. 

The divisions over Afghanistan were exacerbated by the US-UK war on Iraq, which was not a NATO war as such because of the opposition of a number of prominent members, including France and Germany, who considered it illegal and unnecessary.  Two other internal contradictions have divided NATO since the Cold War ended. The Europeans resent the perennial American complaints that they are not sufficiently ‘sharing the burden’ of defending Europe, while the US-led demand for military ‘interoperability’ has poured money into its defence industries, which marketed most of the arms and technologies necessary to bring European military forces into operational synch with the superior US equipment.  The other, which is the subject of this article, is what to do about nuclear weapons in Europe.