NATO is the largest and most powerful alliance in the history of mankind, and soon it will
get even bigger, as
Sweden and Finland are about to obtain full NATO membership.
All that remains is an affirmative vote from Hungary and Turkey, though they will need
both of those because NATO requires unanimous support.
In theory, though, as soon as the process is complete, Sweden and Finland will enjoy
the benefits of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.
That’s the vaunted “collective security” provision that would make a Russian attack
on them an attack on all NATO members, who would then come to the defense their northern
friends.
Unfortunately, life is not that simple.
You may have heard this a dozen times before on this channel, but international treaties
do not have the benefit of third-party enforcement mechanisms.
If Putin decided to attack Finland post-NATO membership and the United States did nothing,
the U.N. won’t send blue helmets to the White House to arrest President Biden or any
other future president.
If the entire point of an alliance is to shift the expected outcome of a war in your favor,
then all of that is meaningless if no one will actually follow through when push comes
to shove.
And yet it appears that Sweden and Finland are not worried about NATO abandonment,
even as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has put renewed focus on security.
So why not?
It turns out NATO has some neat tricks to mitigate abandonment fears that all alliances
potentially suffer from.
This ensure that the collective security dance party never ends.
So let’s talk about them.
To that, we first need to get a better grasp of the difficulty of the problem.
In the words of German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, alliance agreements
are merely scraps of paper.
Just ask Austria-Hungary.
Oh, wait, you can’t.
As a part of the Triple Alliance, Italy was supposed to assist Germany in a war against
France.
When World War I started, Italy … did the opposite and attacked Austria-Hungary, Germany’s
primary ally.
Failing to follow through on your obligations is known as “alliance abandonment”, and
it is somewhat common.
Alliance partners follow through on their commitments only 75% of the time,
and that number has been steadily dropping more recently, in large part due to the number
of countries per alliance growing.
There are also lighter forms of this problem.
Greece and Serbia provide an example, also from World War I.
Before the conflict, Greece had pledged to defend Serbia from an attack.
When Austria-Hungary did just that, Greece indeed helped.
But it wasn’t in 1914.
Greece waited a year before taking any meaningful action.
Perhaps the most famous example came from the following World War.
Both the United Kingdom and France had an alliance to protect Poland from a Nazi attack.
Technically, they did this.
But it took eight months, and Germany was the one instigating the next conflict with
France.
That era is now known as the Phoney War or better yet the Sitzkrieg.
Not much of a lightning war when everyone is just sitting around.
From the perspective of 1914 Serbia and 1939 Poland, the fact that they were not actually
abandoned is just a technicality.
These abandonment concerns can also cause otherwise attractive alliances to fail to
form.
Prior to World War II, The United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union could not agree
on an alliance because Stalin did not believe the west would help him,
and the west did not believe that Stalin would help out smaller Eastern European countries.
The result was that the Soviet Union turned around and signed a pact with Nazi Germany,
which Hitler violated after just ten months.
I detect a running theme here…
Nevertheless, NATO has learned from the problems of yesteryear to develop a robust alliance
system that its members trust.
The first and simplest solution is to physically move weapons and personnel into potential
hotspots.
If Russia were to invade an area where NATO tanks, troops, and materiel are present, they
may have no choice but to fight back.
It is hard to be abandoned if your ally is already there.
The most extreme version of this is with US foreign nuclear weapons deployments, which
were really big during the Cold War.
In Europe alone, nine countries participated in this program: Belgium, Denmark, Greece,
Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Turkey, West Germany, and the United Kingdom.
Even today, five of these countries still participate in “nuclear sharing”, in which
the U.S. will mount nuclear weapons on the host countries’ planes in the event of war.
And following the invasion of Ukraine, Poland floated the idea that it should join that
program.
These foreign deployments put the United States and its allies in a use it or lose it situation—
the same problem we have previously discussed that might arise if Russia were to deploy
its tactical nuclear weapons.
Back with NATO, allies’ concerns of abandonment decrease because the credibility of the United
States increases.
After Sweden and Finland are confirmed, there will undoubtedly be a foreign military expansion
into those countries, with conventional weapons and at least some minimal manpower.
Whether that extends to nuclear weapons is another story.
For Sweden, this is unlikely.
In 2017, it helped create the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Think of this as a stricter form of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
It completely bans nuclear weapons for the participants.
Although Sweden has not yet signed the prohibition, it did vote in favor of creating the institution
more broadly.
Finland, in contrast, did not even participate in the treaty’s creation.
This was the same stance that every contemporary NATO member took.
Nuclear deployments are therefore more likely there.
Of course, deploying nuclear weapons in a country that shares a border with Russia would
not make Putin very happy.
Even if Finland would be receptive to a nuclear deployment, it is unclear whether the US would
want to deal with the corresponding headaches.
Smaller deployments may also be useful through a mechanism known as trip wires,
which we have talked about before in a narrower context.
Tripwires were a major part of the US‘s Berlin strategy during the Cold War.
West Berlin was completely surrounded by East Germany, and eventually sealed in by a wall.
In short, NATO feared that it was outmatched and would be unable to hold the city in the
event of a Soviet attack.
Nevertheless, US soldiers were stationed in the city so that the Soviet Union would have
to kill them to capture it.
The deaths of so many Americans would force the United States to respond militarily.
Abandonment simply would not be a politically acceptable option to the American public.
The Soviet Union knew this would happen and were therefore deterred from initiating an
attack to begin with.
The United States still operates like this in a couple of places today.
Tripwires are why the United States stationed troops at the Korean Demilitarized Zone,
and it is part of why the U.S. still has a contingent of troops in South Korea today.
Meanwhile, it also explains the U.S.‘s first move as the crisis in Ukraine was forming.
Rather than mobilize a full fighting force,
the U.S. responded by sending just 3000 soldiers to Romania and Poland.
Obviously, there were plenty of Romanian and Polish troops already there.
What is puzzling here is that 3000 troops are not enough to materially affect the balance
of forces in the area when Russia was deploying 200,000 soldiers at the time.
The United Kingdom did something similar, moving 850 troops to Estonia.
Again, not enough to make a meaningful difference.
But framed as a tripwire like Berlin once was, these cases begin to make sense.
If Russia were to have run over Ukraine—this is a quaint idea now but remember, we have
to think about this like it is February 2022—
going any further would require killing Americans.
That sets off the tripwire and would make Russia think twice before moving beyond the
former Soviet borders.
Because it’s on the east-west border, Finland will likely want some forward deployments
once it enters NATO, and the major powers have a vested interest in providing those.
The third strategy is to increase military integration.
NATO is not just the combined military force of its member states.
It is an enormous bureaucracy in its own right, with its Brussels headquarters employing 4000
people alone.
You could write an entire dissertation just on the various subdivisions that make up the
organization.
At a basic level, the incentive to invest in a joint command is obvious: it coordinates
thirty—
soon to be thirty-two—militaries,
making them collectively more powerful and lowering the price tag of an intervention.
Now that the organization itself is empowered, each constituent member is more likely to
follow through because they get more bang for their buck.
But the benefits
can go further than that—countries have an incentive to overinvest to create commitments
that opposing countries would otherwise correctly conclude are not credible.
That means investing so much that should a war occur, the powerful country would wish
in retrospect that it avoided the alliance relationship entirely.
To see how that could work, imagine that the United States did not pre-invest or only made
a weak effort to do so.
The opposing country can see that decision and decides whether to attack.
If you think about how the U.S. might respond to an attack,
resisting may be unattractive precisely because of the lack of earlier investment.
Anticipating that, the opposing state has free rein to attack.
Now imagine that the United States did overinvest.
Think about the opponent’s incentives now.
How would the United States respond?
The combined costs of resistance and a large pre-investment may be gigantic, but the pre-investment
is a sunk cost.
The U.S. can only optimize for the present, and resistance is better than the alternative
given how much firepower it has available.
But notice that the credible threat to intervene—and the damage the U.S. would do—might cause
the opponent to prefer to not attack the protégé in the first place.
As such, the U.S. never actually suffers the cost of resistance that used to be here.
It’s just on the hook for the investment.
And it may therefore prefer the investment to deter the opponent from attacking like
it would over here, despite the sizable cost.
The fourth strategy is economic interdependence.
Trade has been a major part of the global economy since even the development of even
the most basic forms of transportation.
It also incentivizes states to follow through on their alliance commitments, from the south
to the north.
In its most basic form, trade makes both parties wealthier, allowing them to specialize in
what they are comparatively better at producing.
If one alliance partner is attacked and the war will disrupt the trade relationship, then
the other alliance partner is an implicit victim as well.
In turn, the second partner may wish to intervene out of its own economic self-interest.
This type of economic connection is built into many alliance treaties.
The Franco-Polish alliance instructs the partners to
“endeavor to develop their economic interests.”
Hinting at its importance, this was placed above the actual alliance provision.
It is the same story for NATO.
Article 2 of the North Atlantic Treaty states that members “will encourage economic collaboration
between any or all of them.”
That’s three whole articles above the vaunted Article 5 provision that an attack on one
is an attack against all.
The manifestation of this for NATO is largely the European Union.
What is now a sprawling international governance institution has more modest origins as the
European Coal and Steel Community.
What is fast becoming lost to history was one of the most important Cold War era trade
blocs.
The final strategy is long-term reciprocation.
Imagine one member state becomes embroiled in a conflict that another member state has
no interest in.
The short-term temptation is to refuse to honor any alliance commitments, saving those
other countries’ soldiers and treasure in the process.
The same is true in reverse, of course.
Both sides find themselves in something resembling a prisoner’s dilemma, a classic cooperation
conundrum.
Fortunately, a vast literature explains how long-term interactions can override the short-term
incentives to behave selfishly.
In short, each side follows through on its commitments because failure to do so will
leave them isolated thereafter.
Securing the alliance benefits for decades to come is worth the small cost of participating
today in an undesired war.
NATO goes a step further with this by promoting weapons specialization.
Canada, for example, can focus on icebreakers, while the Netherlands can focus on minesweepers.
The total amount of military power created is more than what they could do on their own.
But they need to stay together to actually exercise it.
This again reduces the short-term temptation to ignore the partner’s needs—the sun
need not set on the relationship.
The only downside here is that reciprocation only works when the stakes are small.
If the conflict in question was, say, a climactic battle against Russia, the reluctant partner
might decide to sit things out.
The long-term benefits of reciprocation only matter if the state is still alive to enjoy
them.
And those are five ways that NATO ensures that its alliance partners follow through
on their treaty commitments.
Have any others in mind?
Let me know in the comments.
If you want to know more about the invasion of Ukraine, you will love my book on specifically
on the causes of it.
Check below for more information on that.
And if you enjoyed this video, please like, share, and subscribe.
A lot of you already have done the last of those—
we were at 100,000 just a few months ago, and now we are pushing 300,000.
Help us get to the full million and a gold play button by doing your part.
And, if you do, I will see you next time.
Take care.