The following conversation has been edited for clarity. You can listen to the conversation here.
Rick Landgraf: With me today is Seth Johnston. Seth is a US Army officer and the author of How NATO Adapts: Strategy and Organization in the Atlantic Alliance Since 1950 . This book was the most requested title at NATO Headquarters Library when it was published in 2017 and also placed on the must-read list at the NATO Headquarters Library in Brussels.
Seth is a veteran of NATO operations in Europe and Afghanistan, where he commanded a NATO task force. He has also held faculty appointments at a variety of universities including Georgetown, West Point, Harvard, and Heidelberg University in Germany. Seth is an active duty US Army officer, so all of the opinions and statements are his own and do not reflect the official position of the US Army, Department of Defense, or US government. Seth, welcome to the show.
Seth Johnston: Thanks a lot, Rick. It's great to be with you.
RL: Seth, I first want to ask you about NATO and what is NATO? Specifically, what distinguishes NATO from other international institutions?
SJ: Well, thanks a lot, Rick. And I'm so glad that you're offering this podcast. NATO is definitely in the news a lot. It's the 75th anniversary of the alliance. There's going to be this summit of the 32 heads of state and government in Washington D.C. this summer. But because the alliance has been around for so many decades, there's a lot of history there.
The origins of how the United States got involved, how the European allies got involved, deserves a little bit of refreshing, so I'm glad we're doing this. What is NATO is actually a more complex question than you might think, because when people talk about NATO, they often talk about different aspects of this very important security institution. NATO really, I think, is five things. NATO is a treaty alliance—based on the North Atlantic Treaty or the Washington Treaty signed in 1949—but secondly, NATO has also become, since its very early days, an international organization. It's got a sprawling international bureaucracy in Europe and North America. It has a variety of specialized technical agencies, and it has a unique multinational peacetime military structure that is very unusual for international organizations.
Third, NATO is an instrument of international military cooperation. That's true of that peacetime military structure. But it's also true of the fact that NATO is often, and has been in the last 30 years or so, the institution through which a lot of coalition military activity has occurred. For example, the coalition’s operations in Afghanistan for so many years were done in a NATO context, even though some of the contributing countries or participating countries in those operations weren't actually members of the alliance.
So NATO is an alliance. It's an international organization. It's an instrument for international military cooperation. Also, people often talk about NATO as a Western alliance or an alliance that epitomizes or underpins a system of values. That attitude can be seen in the way that the allies describe the purpose of the alliance itself in the treaty. The treaty says that the allies are coming together to safeguard the freedom, common heritage, and civilization of their people, founded on, and then they enumerate the values that are most important. They say that this civilization is founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law.
And finally, the fifth definition is that NATO can be seen as a transatlantic bargain. The US commits to remaining involved in European security affairs after the two terrible wars of the 20th century. And in return, the European allies agree to organize themselves and participate in the collective defense of the alliance against external threats. But also, the Europeans organize themselves to preserve internal stability and to mitigate the latent tensions among the alliance members themselves. So that's a lot. No wonder everyone talks about how important NATO is.
Not only has it been around for a long time, but it's also at least these five things: a treaty-based alliance that's been around for 75 years, an international organization, an instrument of international military cooperation, a community of values, and an important pillar of the transatlantic bargain that has persisted since the end of World War II.
RL: I want to ask you about your book a little bit, and for NATO nerds like myself and you, I noticed that your book, the subtitle of your book, Strategy and Organization in the Atlantic Alliance Since 1950 , is a year later than when NATO was created in 1949. What happened in NATO during that year from ‘49 to ‘50 and how did it evolve as an alliance and into an organization?
SJ: That's a great question, Rick. Believe it or not, no one has ever asked me that question. Even though we've been talking a lot about anniversaries and people know that the Washington Treaty (the NATO Treaty) has been around since 1949, no one has ever remarked on the fact that the book starts in 1950. I love this question. And you're absolutely right that there is a reason why I chose 1950, and that is because all of those five definitions of what NATO is were not really present during the very first year of the alliance in 1949. After 1949, there was just the treaty. But in 1950, that's when the North Atlantic Treaty got its organization. That's when the “O” in NATO got put in. And what happened is a remarkable story. There was a view—think back to 1949—that in the post-World War II era, in the nuclear weapons era (by that time, the Cold War was on, but both the United States and the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons) the aftermath of the most destructive conflict of all time, in the post-World War II era, in the nuclear era, a war between nuclear arms superpowers was unthinkable. But in 1950, a conventional war broke out between Soviet-backed clients in North Korea and the United States and United Nations-backed forces in South Korea. And it didn't take very long at all for Europeans to look around and especially to look at a divided Europe and a divided Germany and say that, well, if if war if a conventional war in the post-World War II and nuclear era is possible in a divided Korea, it's possible in a divided Europe and in particular Germany.
Therefore, if the North Atlantic Treaty allies are serious about collective defense, then they can't wait for the war to actually break out. They need to undertake some of the organization to prepare for that defense, even in peacetime. So that's why very rapidly after 1950, the O got put in NATO. The international organization of the Alliance was established.
RL: A lot has been made about NATO's founding rationale to quote Lord Ismay, NATO's first Secretary General. NATO's purpose was “to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.” Can you break down this rationale for us? What does this mean?
SJ: Yeah, this is another really good one, Rick. And you're right that, NATO nerds, people like you and me, see this as, as a little bit of a cliché. First Secretary General Lord Ismay described NATO's founding rationale “to keep the Americans in, the Russian out, and the German down.” In fact, I've looked long and hard for this, I do not think that that statement has ever been really reliably sourced to Lord Ismay. But even though there is no record of it that anybody can find, at least that I know of, this phrase keeps getting used because in many ways it is just the best description of the three main purposes that NATO was established to fulfill. But also, in many ways, these purposes remain relevant today. “Keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”
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