Why NATO endures: debunking the NATO-in-crisis claims

Abstract

Over the last sixty years, NATO has endured numerous internal and external challenges and has constantly striven to reform itself in order to be a stronger and more unified alliance. Three particular moments of crisis: the 1966 French withdrawal from NATO’s military structure, the end of the Cold War between 1989 and 1991, and the debate over the 2003 invasion of Iraq, have demonstrated NATO’s resilience to adversity and internal strife. In all three instances, the Transatlantic Alliance was able to transform moments of crisis and uncertainty into opportunities for developing and strengthening the internal structure of and the purpose of the Alliance. NATO’s evolution and particularly its endurance have long been a topic of debate amongst international relations scholars.

This project aims to establish how NATO has endured for sixty years through various internal and external crises. Furthermore, this project seeks to address and critically assess the theoretical explanations and debates that have been offered concerning NATO’s endurance. Throughout NATO’s history, skeptics, particularly within the neorealist camp, have predicted the Alliance’s demise. Using the three case studies mentioned above, this paper examines the factors that led NATO pessimists to predict its dissolution and assesses why these predictions were wrong. Did the NATO-in-crisis commentators overlook key factors that explain the Alliance’s endurance, or did they over-exaggerate the negative effects of each crisis on NATO and prematurely announce its death? This project determines that the key to NATO’s sixty-year existence lies in the Alliance’s responses to moments of crisis and that NATO skeptics overlooked the factors that explain NATO’s resilience, including the ability of institutions to mitigate the conflictive effects of anarchy and the tendency of states with similar interests and shared norms to prefer a system of cooperation and consultation.