As NATO prepares to celebrate its 75th anniversary next year, the bloc’s original architects would have been stunned by its broad membership and growing agenda today. In helping design the new alliance for the purpose of containing the Soviet Union in Europe after World War II, the U.S. diplomat George Kennan argued that NATO should take its name literally and include only North Atlantic countries—excluding Mediterranean states such as Greece, Italy, and Turkey. His rationale was that only countries on the Atlantic seaboard could be effectively supplied by ship in the event of war with the Soviets, whereas including others would remove all limits to the bloc’s commitments and be unworkable. To ensure that Article 5 of its founding treaty—the collective defense clause—was ironclad, NATO kept a laser-sharp focus on military preparedness for much of its history.
Today, NATO has 31 members (though when Sweden joins, it will be 32) and more than 30 partner countries across the world. Its agenda has expanded to issues beyond territorial defense, such as cybersecurity and counterterrorism. Last year, the bloc established the Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic, a 1-billion-euro (about $1.1-billion) fund for emerging and disruptive technologies.
Yet as the toolbox of statecraft has expanded in response to security challenges, NATO has retained a narrow focus on military objectives. And even in this area, it has been constrained in delivering on its goals. Defense ministers, for example, can make commitments at NATO meetings, but finance ministers may not find the required resources at home. For European countries, dual membership in NATO and the European Union has diffused responsibility and led to significant underinvestment in military preparedness. Too many European leaders still hope that Washington or Brussels will take care of it.
With the return of war to Europe and the Middle East, as well as great-power competition to the world, NATO’s vision and scope need to be broader. The alliance faces not only Russian aggression, but also the challenge from China and other autocratic, revisionist actors seeking to upend the global order. Security today involves a comprehensive toolbox, including economic sanctions and industrial policy, and needs to bring the relevant actors into the fold.
Consider the current state of play. Last month, 31 foreign ministers met at NATO headquarters in Brussels to discuss a range of security issues, from Russia’s war against Ukraine to the long-term challenge of China. Yet the only major decision achieved at the two-day gathering was a brief three-paragraph statement on Ukraine that echoed previously agreed-on language. The Israel-Hamas war and its effects across the Middle East, which was top of mind for many of the participants, was barely addressed at all, even though many European NATO members will be directly affected.
The allies’ ambition should therefore be to make NATO the premier forum not only for trans-Atlantic military cooperation, but also for better coordination among the world’s democracies. Europe and the United States should leverage NATO to buttress international order alongside their Indo-Pacific partners. To that end, the institution should globalize its agenda and find ways to work more closely with its partners outside the Euro-Atlantic region.
Currently, too many issues that are central to the security of NATO allies are dispersed across multiple forums, contact groups, and bilateral channels. NATO is charged with collective security for Europe and North America. The EU also has a mutual defense clause for its members and has moved forward on defense cooperation and funding. Both blocs have intensified their security outreach to countries in the Indo-Pacific. That, in turn, overlaps with the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—comprising Australia, India, Japan, and the United States—as well as the Australia-United Kingdom-United States pact. Also involved is the G-7, which has evolved from a talking shop to a forum where the leading democracies deliberate on economic sanctions and technology policy. The U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council has a similar remit—but neither it nor the G-7 can make binding decisions. All this overlap produces confusion and lack of focus, restricting the ability of NATO members to develop an effective strategy, let alone make efficient decisions in times of conflict.
To remove these political detours and bureaucratic obstacles, it would make sense for many of these discussions and decisions to take place in a single forum—or at least, for the various strings to come together in one place. And that would be NATO, which has the strongest record on addressing collective security. Issues to be integrated with military defense would include economic sanctions, export controls, industrial policy, technology policy, foreign investment screening, outbound investment controls, secure supply chains, and trade measures.
For a start, there should not just be regular meetings of NATO defense and foreign ministers. Ministers responsible for finance, trade, commerce, and technology should convene within NATO as well. All these areas are vital for national security.
In addition to globalizing its agenda, NATO should also expand the participants in these discussions to include Indo-Pacific partners, such as Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea. Leaders of these four countries attended NATO’s annual summits in 2022 and 2023, but instead of cooperating on an ad hoc basis, it would be better to establish standing open invitations to NATO summits and ministerial meetings.
The bloc could also establish a council of NATO members and Indo-Pacific states—akin to the NATO-Ukraine Council—where those partners could convene meetings and be on equal footing with the NATO allies. Over time, additional partners could also be invited.
These changes require a shift in mindset within NATO. The bloc is rightly regarded by many as the most successful military alliance in history, but it could also be the most effective international institution for foreign-policy coordination and implementation. However, its primary focus on the Article 5 collective defense guarantee has developed into inherent institutional caution and constraint.
Yet not all security challenges trigger Article 5—and even then, the defense clause does not set off an automatic response. Article 5 states only that if armed attack occurs against a NATO member, each ally commits to assist the attacked country with “such action as it deems necessary.”
On the one hand, NATO’s focus on Article 5 has made the alliance an undisputed success, with every square inch of territory backed by the full weight of the alliance, which includes potential nuclear retaliation. In all of NATO’s long history, the bloc invoked Article 5 only once: after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. On the other hand, the emphasis on Article 5 has also constrained the bloc’s potential for more nimble political action.
NATO would benefit from greater strategic flexibility to address security policy issues. A useful historical analogy is the shift in U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, when Washington moved from the doctrine of massive retaliation to so-called flexible response. In the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration defined its deterrence and containment policy in terms of overwhelming response to any encroachment by the Soviet Union or the communist bloc. But this outsized commitment made foreign policy too rigid and limited: After all, not every nail around the world required a nuclear hammer. Thus, the Kennedy administration devised a more agile approach, including military and nonmilitary options for a particular crisis in proportion to the specific situation.
NATO already has the institutional mechanism for a broader approach to security. Article 4, for example, provides for political consultations whenever a member considers its “territorial integrity, political independence or security” threatened. This is both a broader remit and a lower threshold, allowing security threats short of a military attack to be addressed. It would be the institutional basis for the alliance to incorporate key tools of security policy, such as economic sanctions and export controls.
NATO also has a basis for addressing issues such as industrial and technology policy as means to develop defense and security capabilities. Under Article 3, allies have committed to “maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack” through “self-help and mutual aid.” NATO should facilitate better coordination on defense investment and ensure that the allies maintain a long-term technological competitive edge over their adversaries.
A broader and more global NATO would help overcome the hobbled, overly complex decision-making processes among the Euro-Atlantic allies and their partners in the Indo-Pacific. That said, there should be no illusion that an institutional setup alone can escape the primacy of politics.
Organizations such as NATO are what their members make of them. Blaming them for failure or inaction is like blaming Madison Square Garden when the New York Knicks play badly, as the late U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke once quipped.
But a simplified and better-designed institutional setup would go a long way in facilitating sounder, more efficient decision-making during unavoidably turbulent times.