The geopolitical ripple effects of the US exit from NATO

In the March/April issue of the global edition of the Foreign Policy, Andrew Bacevich, professor of international relations at Boston University, argued the unthinkable: the retreat of the US from NATO. His article “Let Europe be Europe-Why the US must withdraw from NATO” could easily become the Manifesto or the flag ship of a new intellectual trend in the U.S. foreign policy community: the retrenchment school. Its core message is: come home

Dr. Bacevich’s argument that the United States should begin to downscale its security role in Europe in order to push the Europeans toward greater collective self-help is part of a larger intellectual trend toward strategic retrenchment that is gradually gaining traction in some circles in the U.S. foreign policy community. Similar views have been expressed about the U.S. role in Asia. This “tough love” philosophy has sprung up because of the growing awareness in the United States that the world is moving into more complex geopolitical waters. The goal of the retrenchers (finding intelligent, even unorthodox, ways to cope with systemic change) is noble, but their ideas are flawed. The prospect of devolving global security responsibilities to the regional level may seem seductive on a philosophical or emotional level to Americans suddenly absorbed with the advent of multipolarity. But it is a form of radical experimentation, and experimentation should be examined with greater scrutiny in geopolitics than in philosophy.

At the root of Bacevich’s argument is the assumption that it is the U.S. security presence itself that is acting as the main impediment to the European responsibility in the world; that, by sheltering Europe from the rough-and-tumble arena of geopolitics, America has removed the impulse for its allies to mature strategically; and that pulling the U.S. security presence would solve this problem by clearing the way for structural forces (a revisionist Russia, terrorism, whatever the Europeans find scary) to take their natural course and force the Europeans to accept deeper level of strategic intentionality, coherence and unity than they currently display.

Who knows, maybe he is right. Maybe a U.S. withdrawal from NATO would spur Europe to develop an army, provide for their own defense and take geopolitics seriously. If this happened, it would indeed probably have a salutary effect on the international system. But far more likely, our backing out of NATO would not bring the Europeans together. The problem is that Bacevich’s argument overlooks the possibility that European disunity is itself rooted in structure – that the very external forces he believes will unite Europe in an America-less NATO would in fact plunge them into deeper disunity, incentivizing greater Russian predation on Europe’s periphery. A NATO without America would be a NATO in which the Alliance’s most exposed members, Poland and the Baltic States, would immediately seek serious guarantees from the Alliance’s largest insulated members, particularly Germany. And this is not something Germany is likely to provide.

An Alliance with a more vulnerable shoulder is an Alliance that, contrary to Bacevich’s logic, would present Russia with stronger, not weaker, incentives for revisionism. This might not lead to a war, but at a minimum it would mean a heightened regional security dilemma that regional powers would seek to address by whatever means were at their disposal – increased regional self-help, defense spending, more skittish regional foreign policies, etc. – leading to heightened East-West friction and perennial crisis. This would make for a less stable Central and Eastern Europe and, potentially, a reactivated strategic frontier along NATO’s formerly-quiescent Eastern rim.

In other words, there would be costs. The question is whether those costs are greater than the costs that Bacevich and others describe as existing under the present NATO status quo – political ennui, lack of military focus, American taxpayer money, etc.
I think the answer to that question is “yes”: The costs of leaving NATO would be higher for the United States than the costs of continuing with the status quo. The answer would be “no” if the region in question – Central and Eastern Europe – were of negligible interest to the United States. But this is perhaps one of the most strategically-vital pieces of real estate on the globe – the flashpoint of all three of the Twentieth Century’s great global conflicts. Only when it is unambiguously in the Western ambit can Europe and the United States possess the secure global base from which to collectively sortie into broader global geopolitics and deal with the “rise of the rest.” Were this region to fall into renewed instability because of a U.S. withdrawal from NATO, the United States would, within a few years’ time, face a compelling need to re-intervene – only this time it would do so on terms less favorable to itself than if it had maintained its original position in NATO to begin with.

So in the end, Bacevich’s argument can be rejected on grounds of strategic cost-effectiveness. And this leaves aside many other reasons rooted in the instrumental value of NATO: That the soldiers of its European members continue, despite their warts, to take bullets that would otherwise be aimed at Americans; that Article V, for all its apparent hollowness, does continue to hold the line against Russian revisionism; that withdrawing from the global geopolitical line here could create a costly geopolitical ripple effects in other pivotal global regions.

This last point is perhaps the most critical, as it undermines the whole purpose of what the “tough love” school is trying to achieve by experimenting with retrenchment: managing the transition to a more multipolar international system. Already, in just a few months’ time, the Obama Administration has called into question sixty years’ worth of U.S. regional commitments and foreign-policy operating principles. This has arguably emboldened would-be U.S. global rivals like China into taking a more aggressive geopolitical course than they otherwise would be countenancing. Walking away from NATO now would be the final straw, accelerating the destabilization of various strategically-vital hinge points around the globe. Perhaps these things would have eventually come anyways, regardless of what the United States does. But we should seek to manage them on our own terms – not on an artificial timetable. If we are exiting unipolarity, the timing and nature of the “dismount” is everything. Why unnecessarily provoke geopolitical change on terms unfavorable to us through bad timing and a desire for experimentation?

Even if United States does eventually decide that it is time to rethink our sixty-year strategy of providing a forward deployed presence and viable security guarantees in Europe and Asia in favor of genuine Offshore Balancing (which I do not support), it should do so in a way that leaves stability rather than instability in its wake, lest we reawaken old security faultlines best left dormant, enter multipolarity on unfavorable terms and potentially pay the price in Europe yet again for a bill that was three times paid in the last century. Then we would be right back to where we started sixty years ago, only with a worse hand and having to pay a higher cost than if we had never backed away from an institution which, though deeply flawed, is providing a service to the American Republic and far better than the alternative that would likely come in its place.
Sorry, Dr. Bacevich, it is not time for retrenchment.

Wess Mitchell is president of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), a public policy reasearch institute dedicated to the study of Central Europe.