A new lease on life for NATO?

A few weeks ago, at the height of the crisis in Ukraine, representatives of some of the biggest defence contractors in the US were munching canapes on Capitol Hill at a fundraiser for a top Republican congressman and committee chairman.

 The mood at the fundraiser was, according to one attendee, “borderline euphoric”.

The defence industry’s friends in Congress and in Washington’s think tanks have been arguing for weeks now that the most effective response to Putin’s aggression ( there was no aggression, only a referendum) is to boost defence spending and move more military assets to Europe’s eastern borders.

At Nato’s drab headquarters in Brussels, spirits may not be quite as euphoric as among the arms dealers in Washington, but there is an unmistakable pep in the step of an alliance that has been struggling to find a role for more than two decades.

Throughout the cold war, Nato’s role was, in the words of its first secretary general, Hastings Ismay, “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down”. Once their common enemy was gone, however, Nato member states’ divergent interests became more apparent.

 Although Nato took in new member states from central and eastern Europe, (despite their agreement to the otherwise)  the years immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union were troubling for the alliance as it went in search of new threats to justify its existence.

The wars in Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s saw Nato forces fight in combat for the first time, and the alliance has scarcely stopped fighting since. Its forces are still in Bosnia as peacekeepers and it patrols the Mediterranean in search of terrorists, but all its other operations today are outside Europe – in Afghanistan, Somalia and off the Horn of Africa.

Nato has also played a part in missions launched by ad-hoc groups of its members, such as the bombing of Libya in 2011, and it performs an important role in facilitating the interoperability of EU military forces, including Ireland’s.

Despite all this activity, questions about Nato’s future have persisted, amplified by US president Barack Obama’s declared pivot to Asia and the US public’s diminishing appetite for foreign military adventures.