Is it a no-go for NATO? | Reid Smith

This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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By definition, NATO is an alliance based on shared values. The founding charter’s preamble proclaims a treaty of states “determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage, and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law”. Ideally, this unity of purpose serves as the plaster that binds “efforts for collective defence” and the “preservation of peace and security”.

This ordering principle, present at its creation, has remained a popular refrain throughout the alliance’s evolution. Of late, former President Biden served as its most zealous evangelist, regularly praising NATO as the key bulwark in a Manichean struggle between democracy and autocracy. In the former president’s telling, an alliance that was once regimented to deter Soviet aggression in Western Europe had matured into something grander.

In a highly publicised speech delivered in Warsaw one month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Biden explained that “the battle for democracy could not conclude and did not conclude with the end of the Cold War”. To the contrary, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world “emerged anew in the great battle for freedom: a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force”. America’s “sacred obligation” to her NATO allies would serve as the bedrock upon which the “full force of our collective power” rests.

President Trump will offer a study in contrast. Whereas recent occupants of the Resolute desk have discussed NATO as a values-based alliance — expressing familiar exhortations to democracy, freedom, and the rule of law — Trump has repeatedly stressed the financial burdens imposed on the US by its weaker allies. He has also questioned the tangible benefits of the alliance for the United States.

“Europe is in for a tiny fraction of the money that we’re in. We have a thing called the ocean in between us, right?” he pondered frankly at a recent press conference at Mar-A-Lago. “Why are we in for billions and billions of dollars more than Europe?”

Of course, those stated principles were always more aspirational than authentic. From its signing, the democratic values that supposedly braced the security collective were mostly bunk. Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar’s Estado Novo in Portugal might be catalogued as corporatist or clerical-fascist but nobody confused it with a democracy. Turkey and Greece, who entered the alliance at the 1952 Lisbon meeting, routinely wobbled from democratic governance to military dictatorship. The stark irony of the alliance expanding to include two undemocratic countries — their accession minted in the capital of a third — went unremarked upon.

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The “values” rhetoric reached its climax in the aftermath of the Cold War with the alliance victorious but suddenly locked in a novel existential crisis. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, depriving NATO of its primary adversary, member states found themselves searching for a collective purpose. Originally designed to counter communism (politically) and provide collective defence against the USSR (militarily), NATO struggled to adapt to this new geopolitical landscape.

The ensuing debate hinged on NATO’s relevance as a stabilising force after the Soviet collapse. In a 1989 speech delivered in Mainz, President George H.W. Bush introduced the concept of “Europe Whole and Free” and thus universally bound by liberal democracy. Reflecting on the providence bestowed upon member states, he remarked, “This inheritance is possible because 40 years ago the nations of the West joined in that noble, common cause called NATO. And first, there was the vision, the concept of free peoples in North America and Europe working to protect their values.”

From his vantage point at the Rome Summit in 1991, Secretary-General Manfred Wörner observed, “We need a new picture of NATO, not as a military alliance confronting the Soviet Union, but as a military alliance confronting instability and uncertainty; and as a political alliance gaining in importance for establishing and carrying out this new European and world order.”

This vision was not without its detractors. The presidential candidate Pat Buchanan argued the alliance had outlived its original purpose after the Soviet Union’s collapse and that the United States should reconsider its military commitments in Europe. In A Republic, Not an Empire, Buchanan pronounced, “The US should withdraw all its ground troops from Europe and amend the NATO treaty so that involvement in future European wars is an option, not a certainty.”

Criticism was not confined to the harangues of the cable news set. François Mitterrand departed from conventional logic, explaining to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that he was “personally in favour of gradually dismantling the military blocs”.

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This debate over NATO’s purpose after the Cold War was never fully settled, but the declamatory commitment to shared values gained momentum with the alliance’s eastward lurch. NATO ploughed through a crumpled Iron Curtain, absorbing former Soviet Bloc countries in its wake. Officials validated enlargement as a means of fortifying liberal governance in Europe.

This logic has been tested as NATO has frequently tolerated democratic backsliding within its own ranks. Lately, these tensions have come into sharp relief, raising uncomfortable questions about whether NATO can credibly present itself as a coalition of democracies when some member states accuse others of authoritarianism.

More recently, the European Parliament issued a statement that Hungary can “no longer be considered a full democracy”, expounding that governance in Budapest had “deteriorated such that Hungary has become an ‘electoral autocracy’”. Less remarked upon are the behaviours of newer members — including rampant corruption, organised crime, and political turmoil across Eastern Europe and the Balkans — which belie NATO’s double standard on democratic governance.

At least in the United States, none of this matters. The pitch for defending democracy has already fallen on deaf ears. In a recent survey examining Americans’ top foreign policy concerns, the promotion of global democracy ranked last. Of course, the corresponding report concedes “democracy promotion has typically been at the bottom of Americans’ list of foreign policy priorities, even dating back to George W. Bush and Barack Obama’s administrations”.

More alarmingly for friends of the transatlantic alliance, such emergent scepticism may weaken the values-based case for NATO. This past summer, as the alliance celebrated its diamond jubilee, only 43 per cent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents rate the treaty organisation favourably — a sharp decline from 55 per cent after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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What explains this negative shift? One might hypothesise that conservatives differ sharply with the alliance’s current raison d’être: namely, aiding Ukraine against Russia. Republicans are unmoved by Democratic talking points — which emerged most fervently from the Biden White House — that the battle for Ukraine and US support for the NATO alliance exists at the frontier of freedom. This divergence has undoubtedly shaped attitudes about the broader transatlantic alliance and Europe’s share of burdens. They also undoubtedly take cues from President Trump.

Meanwhile, a cultural disconnect has developed whereby secular and progressive institutional elites in Brussels scold American conservatives about deeply held cultural priorities. For instance, strongly worded statements from several NATO governments — including France, Germany and the United Kingdom — after the landmark Dobbs ruling (which overturned the US Supreme Court’s earlier Roe v. Wade ruling) obliquely challenged the ritual insistence upon, and strategic necessity of, a collective ethos.

Responding to this affront, Elbridge Colby — the prominent American defence strategist and, more recently, President Trump’s selectee for the influential undersecretary of defense policy slot — remarked: “The very strong statements from several NATO governments on yesterday’s Court decision on abortion are truly striking. I’m not sure they fully appreciate the implication, as they implicitly but profoundly cut against the trope that these alliances are based on shared values.” This matter is a prime example of the NATO bureaucracy’s alignment with and promotion of bien-pensant elite European values clashing with the priorities of the Republican policymakers, elected officials and the constituent base.

American conservatives increasingly prioritise a more narrowly tailored national security posture. After 30 years of mostly failed expeditionary missions that have taken the alliance from the Balkans to Afghanistan and Libya, they are sharpening their focus on the home front. The appetite for prolonged foreign entanglements has evaporated, replaced by a demand for policies that address domestic vulnerabilities and threats to national sovereignty. For many on the right, curbing national debt and inflation, securing the southern border, and countering fentanyl trafficking are more pressing imperatives than underwriting the defence of wealthy and capable security clients.

Substantively, for Republicans, there are legitimate reasons to prioritise issues like the debt, which the IMF recently warned poses “significant risks” to the international economy; our border, where, according to the RAND Corporation, the volume of migrants arriving without prior authorisation is record-breaking; or, deaths from fentanyl, which now surpass combat death from America’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam combined.

Such concerns are not unfounded, and they won’t be shouted down. They also matter more to many Americans than demarcation in the Donbas or political applause lines about the defence of some distant democracy.

If the treaty organisation reflects neither the cultural tenets nor security priorities of these Americans, this presents real problems for the future of NATO as a putatively “values-based” alliance. Should the alliance want to celebrate its centenary, real reassembly, around real interests, will be required.