Check out the second commentary in this series here.

NATO heads of state and government will be meeting in The Hague from 24-25 June 2025. If this goes badly, it could be the most negatively consequential summit in the alliance’s history. Conversely, success will not be measured by strategic breakthroughs but rather by the extent to which NATO remains cohesive, coherent and credible once the leaders have gone home.

The risks are glaringly obvious. The United States is impatient with European underspending on defence. For the Europeans, upholding Ukrainian sovereignty and independence is crucial to deterring a revanchist Russia. For the US, a deal over Ukraine would offer an opportunity to detach Russia from China and North Korea. The Europeans worry about their own security, the Canadians fret about their freedom, and the US prioritises the containment of Beijing’s ambitions.

However, history teaches that NATO combines strength and flexibility in ways that can accommodate such divergences. That prompts a recommendation that The Hague summit keep it simple by limiting the scope for controversy and settling for a short communique that:

• raises the minimum level of defence spending, as a proportion of each Ally’s GDP, in response to the increasing threat from Russia,
• recognises that, by pulling their weight, the Europeans will enable the US to switch some of its forces to other theatres for non-NATO purposes,
• preserves the credibility of collective defence by acknowledging the USA’s continuing leadership role in NATO and the resultant leverage upon Russia.

NATO works because it understands political realities. Channelling the nineteenth-century British statesman Lord Palmerston, Henry Kissinger once said, “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.” NATO emerged from the confluence of the national interests of Euro-Atlantic democracies.

Within a year of VE Day, it was evident that the Soviet Union was consolidating its grip on an eastern Europe that it had liberated from Nazi control in the final stages of World War Two. The US judged it to be in its interests to counter the USSR’s ideological, political, military, and economic expansionism, a shift advocated masterfully in George Kennan’s famous ‘long telegram’. The inescapable conclusion, in Washington, was that Europe was central to that strategy.

By 1946, the United Kingdom and France had realised that they simply did not have the military capacity to deter the Soviet Union from taking aggressive, westward-facing actions. Western European interests required collective defence arrangements, formalised by the signing, in March 1948, of the Treaty of Brussels by Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg and the subsequent formation of the Western Union Defence Organisation.

Three months later, the US was leading the Berlin airlift and offering Marshall Aid, demonstrating the Eurocentric shift in American strategic priorities. In parallel, negotiations had begun in Washington about linking the revival of the US military presence in Europe to the nascent collective defence capability of the Western Union. Interests on both sides of the Atlantic had coincided, making possible the signature by the USA, Canada and ten European democracies of the North Atlantic Treaty on 4 April 1949.

In considering how NATO serves its current interests, the inheritors of that Treaty would do well to go back to basics and consider what the document says and doesn’t say.

• Article 3 commits Allies to maintaining and developing their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack. That capacity is neither specified nor quantified, reserving Allies’ right to adopt their own defence policies. But there is a Treaty obligation to invest in defence, and big spenders, like the USA, can justifiably remind others of this.
• Article 5 affirms that an armed attack on one or more Allies is an attack on all, obliging each Ally to assist. However, each Ally can decide what action it deems necessary to provide that assistance. The use of armed force is identified as an option, but there is no automaticity regarding its employment. The principle of national discretion in discharging Treaty obligations is preserved. Deterrence is delivered through ambiguity rather than prescriptive responses.
• There is no definition of the nature or scale of an armed attack and no identification of potentially hostile nations or non-state actors. That allows the Alliance to decide whether a particular aggressive act reaches the Article 5 threshold. The only time Article 5 has been invoked was when 9/11 saw the US under armed attack from an unexpected quarter. The US remains a potential target for mega-terrorism or attacks in space or cyberspace and might well need the support of Allies once again. Article 5 is not just about the Americans defending Europe.
• Article 10 allows the admission to NATO of European democracies that share Alliance values, can accept the obligations of Alliance membership, and can contribute to common security. Encouraging specific aspirants to apply requires a political judgement by the Alliance. But the Treaty keeps the door open.

Yes, the USSR loomed large in the calculus of the Treaty’s drafters. However, the intent was an approach to collective defence that could soar above shifting interstate rivalries and ideological divisions. The result was a Treaty that has stood the test of time and continues to benefit each of its signatories. It allows Allies, meeting as the North Atlantic Council (NAC), to make political decisions about the Alliance’s defence arrangements and reactions to a threat or actual attack. NATO’s defence planning processes and military command structure translate such decisions into action. These mechanisms are unique, which is why NATO is the most effective politico-military alliance on the planet.

However, that effectiveness demands a consensus around the NAC table on the trade-off between Articles 3 and 5. Allies cannot duck responsibility for assigning to NATO the capabilities required to implement the Supreme Allied Commander’s regional defence plans. Without that commitment, NATO deterrence will ring hollow. Making that commitment demands political and societal willpower within individual nations. For NATO leaders, the challenge is to catalyse that sentiment.

NATO’s effectiveness cannot be gauged solely in military terms. The Alliance’s concept of cooperative security involves the development of partnerships with non-NATO nations and certain international organisations. The signing, in 1997, of the NATO-Russia Founding Act (NRFA) was an attempt to draw the Russian Federation into this cooperative security framework. It delivered some benefits, including Russian facilitation of NATO resupply in northern Afghanistan, but the Act was ‘frozen’ after Russia seized Crimea in 2014.

The NRFA had its origins in a relatively benign era of post-Cold War transition, and it is hard to envisage its resuscitation in its current form. However, something similar might need to be invented to manage the political and security adjustments required by any Ukraine peace deal. Beyond that, NATO must consider ‘managed co-existence’ with Russia. This will be covered in a follow-up Commentary by the same authors.

The European Leadership Network itself as an institution holds no formal policy positions. The opinions articulated above represent the views of the authors rather than the European Leadership Network or its members. The ELN aims to encourage debates that will help develop Europe’s capacity to address the pressing foreign, defence, and security policy challenges of our time, to further its charitable purposes.

Image credit: Wikimedia commons / Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken