Abstract
When the founders of NATO gathered in Washington in 1949, few could have anticipated that the alliance’s first invocation of its Article 5 guarantee would have been triggered by an attack on US territory. It was thus a hugely symbolic moment when, on 12 September 2001, NATO invoked Article 5 in response to the 11 September (9/11) attacks on New York and Washington, America’s allies coming to the aid of a nation experiencing a sense of shock and vulnerability perhaps only equalled by the attack on Pearl Harbor some 60 years earlier. The events of 9/11 had ramifications that reverberated far and wide, not least because of the way Washington responded to the attacks, launching two major wars in the greater Middle East whose consequences are still playing out today; Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq continue to find themselves plagued by violence, instability and an uncertain future, while the United States and many of its NATO allies are emerging from a decade of conflict economically drained and war-weary. As the introduction to this volume suggests, 9/11 was in many ways a transformative event for NATO. In particular, it brought into sharp focus America’s relationship with the alliance, magnifying existing fault lines and cleavages and casting them in a new and more urgent light.
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Notes
See M. J. Williams, The Good War: NATO and the Liberal Conscience in Afghanistan (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011);
Sten Rynning, NATO in Afghanistan: The Liberal Disconnect (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012);
G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011).
See Philip H Gordon, ‘NATO After September 11’, Survival, Vol. 43 (4), 2001, pp. 89–106;
Ellen Hallams, The US and NATO Since 9/11: The Transatlantic Relationship Renewed (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010);
Tom Lansford, All for One: Terrorism, NATO and the US (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2002).
Harlan Cleveland, NATO: The Transatlantic Bargain (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 5.
In 1985 this figure stood at 6 per cent for the United States, compared to 4.5 per cent for the United Kingdom, 3.8 per cent for France, 3.0 per cent for Germany, 2.3 per cent for Italy, and 2.1 per cent for Spain. See Malcolm Chalmers, ‘The Atlantic Burden-sharing Debate–Widening or Fragmenting?’, International Affairs, Vol. 77 (3), 2001, p. 574.
Karl W. Deutsch, Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 5.
John A. Hall, ‘Passions within Reasons’, in Jeffrey Anderson, G. John Ikenberry and Thomas Risse (eds), The End of the West: Crisis and Chang in the Atlantic Order (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008), p. 241.
Karl-Heinz Kamp and Kurt Volker, ‘Toward a New Transatlantic Bargain’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1 February 2012, p. 5.
For more on this ‘institutional logic’ argument see G. John Ikenberry, ‘Institutions, Strategic Restraint and the Persistence of American Postwar Order’, International Security, Vol.23(3), Winter 1998–1999, pp. 43–78.
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See, for example, John J. Mearsheimer, ‘The False Promise of International Institutions’, International Security, Vol. 19(3), 1994–1995, pp. 5–49;
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Kenneth N. Waltz, ‘Structural Realism After the Cold War’, International Security, Vol.25(1), Summer 2000, pp. 5–41.
For a detailed account of the formulation of strategy on Afghanistan, see Tim Bird and Alex Marshall, Afghanistan: How the West Lost Its Way (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2011).
Christopher Coker, ‘Between Iraq and a Hard Place: Multinational Cooperation, Afghanistan and Strategic Culture’, RUSI Journal, Vol. 151 (5), October 2006, p. 17.
See, for example, Thomas Fuller, ‘France, Germany and Belgium Trigger One of the Biggest Crises in Alliance History: 3 Block NATO aid for Turks on Iraq’, International Herald Tribune, 11 February 2003;
Philip H. Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro, Allies At War: America, Europe and the Crisis Over Iraq (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004);
Charles Kupchan, ‘The Last Days of the Atlantic Alliance’, Financial Times, 18 November 2002;
Bronwen Maddox, ‘Security Problems in Afghanistan are Taking NATO to the Brink of Failure’, The Times, 25 June 2004;
Stephen E. Meyer, ‘Carcass of Dead Policies: The Irrelevance of NATO’, Parameters, 2003–2004, pp. 83–97;
Elizabeth E. Pond, Friendly Fire: The Near-Death of the Transatlantic Alliance (Pittsburgh: European Union Studies Association, 2004).
Timo Noetzel and Benjamin Schreer, ‘Does a Multi-Tier NATO Matter? The Atlantic Alliance and the Process of Strategic Change’, International Affairs, Vol. 85 (2), 2009, p. 215.
Wallace Thies, Why NATO Endures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 21.
James Sperling and Mark Webber, ‘NATO: From Kosovo to Kabul’, International Affairs, Vol. 85 (3), 2009, p. 503.
For a robust critique of US militarism, see Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Ellen Hallams and Benjamin Schreer, ‘Towards a “Post-American” Alliance? NATO Burden-sharing After Libya’, International Affairs, Vol.88(2), 2012, pp. 313–327; p. 321.
Stanley Sloan, Permanent Alliance? NATO and the Transatlantic Bargain from Truman to Obama (New York: Continuum Books, 2010), p. 4.
Bastian Giegerich, ‘NATO’s Smart Defence: Who’s Buying?’, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, Vol.54(3), June-July 2012, pp. 69–77.
See Sten Rynning, NATO in Afghanistan: The Liberal Disconnect (Stanford: Stanford University Press, California, 2012), p. 18.
Jeremy Shapiro and Nick Witney, Towards a Post-American Europe: A Power Audit of US-EU Relations (Cambridge: European Council on Foreign Relations, 2009), p. 14.
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© 2013 Ellen Hallams
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Hallams, E. (2013). Between Hope and Realism: The United States, NATO and a Transatlantic Bargain for the 21st Century. In: Hallams, E., Ratti, L., Zyla, B. (eds) NATO beyond 9/11. New Security Challenges. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230391222_11
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