The NATO summit to be held in Brussels next July 11-12 promises to be as tense as the recent G7 in Canada. Different stage, similar script. Will the roles be the same as those assumed in Charlevoix and immortalized by the now famous photo of Donald Trump against everyone? One of the US President's recent tweets fuels this scenario: “The US contributes almost the entire cost of NATO – protecting many of the nations that fleece us commercially (it only contributes a fraction of the cost – and laughing at it! ), the European Union has generated a surplus of 151 billion dollars – it should pay much more for military protection!”
The American President thus adds further meat to the fire in view of the meeting of the Atlantic Council, adding to the already delicate issues related to the security of the Western bloc, the recent trade tensions. But war is but the continuation of politics by other means. The imminent NATO meeting is already filled with points of divergence and tensions among its members: the very nature of the Alliance is at stake. The 28 countries that make up the organization (22 of which are also part of the EU) still seem to share the basic idea of the alliance, but the interests within it are increasingly at odds, and among these many are more than one question: is NATO an obsolete alliance? Should the alliance be readapted to the new needs of our times?
The main points of divergence between the members
Since 2016, for the first time in many years, European countries' spending on NATO has started to grow again in response to the worrying increase in tensions that surround its borders, both eastern and southern. The end of the Cold War had caused a lowering of the guard of the old continent, so as to decrease military expenditure. On this issue, the new administration in Washington seems to be intransigent: either Europe contributes to the expenses or this alliance can no longer go on.
If the questions concerning the budget mostly see the two US-EU blocs opposing each other on strategic priorities, each group of countries, within Europe itself, pulls grist to its own mill. The states of Eastern Europe (Baltic countries and Poland in particular), increasingly alarmed by the behavior of the Russian neighbour, want to keep their attention on this flank. These see in the shoring up of the southern flank, through the Sea Guardian operation, a distraction from the real potentially hot front, the eastern one. Furthermore, the creation and development of an autonomous European defense strategy, strongly supported by Paris, would result in the end of American protection, much to the concern of Eastern European chancelleries. This slow process of shifting military priorities therefore signals the beginning of the abandonment of the logic of the cold war, the quintessence of the organization.
While on the one hand the Baltics are in some way reassured through the reinforcement of the four battalions stationed in the region, on the other Brussels aims more at a purely diplomatic approach with the Russian giant, or even dialogue, as it has always sought, to example, by the Italian governments. With the hope of Rome to reopen even the burning issue of sanctions.
The real challenge for NATO in the coming years will therefore be its structural reform, aimed at recalibrating priorities and readjusting the alliance to the new asymmetrical challenges of the XNUMXst century (cyber security, terrorism, the instability of entire areas such as MENA - Middle East and North Africa – and Sahel). It is not difficult to imagine how such a readjustment will be politically complicated to carry out, with the risk of leading to a showdown within the organization.
Ahead of the summit
However, precisely to avoid such a scenario and a new contentious G7, the general secretary Jens Stoltenberg will try to focus attention on the potential points of convergence with the stars and stripes majority shareholder, with the aim of playing in advance, dampening the instances from the beginning. The themes it will focus on are, in fact, reaching expenditures to 2%, the modernization of equipment, support for an EU initiative to facilitate "military mobility" by eliminating administrative barriers and improving infrastructure to help NATO to supply the eastern front faster in the event of a crisis and the opening of a branch in the Middle East which coordinates counter-terrorism activities and the training of local troops (Iraqi and Afghan in particular).
A program that will hardly meet the enthusiasm of Western European countries. The secretary's intention seems rather to return to the old schemes of the Alliance, avoiding to face head on the question of its structural reform, a more delicate issue on which he could skip the bench. In today's multipolar and globalized world, the most powerful military alliance in the world therefore seems unable to afford to show signs of internal division in the face of new emerging powers and new threats of a non-state nature. Naturally therefore ask yourself the question: is NATO an obsolete alliance or is it still the cornerstone of Western security in a multipolar world? Recently the American president himself affirmed that NATO is not an antiquated alliance, retracting the declarations made during the electoral campaign. A question, the one on the usefulness of the Atlantic alliance in the 70st century, which many have asked themselves, not least the anti-system parties in Italy, which, once they came into government, reaffirmed their absolute loyalty to the Atlantic alliance , in line with the Italian foreign policy of the last XNUMX years.
We will see if the Brussels summit will help us, if not to answer this complicated question, at least to understand in which direction the alliance is going and what the intentions of its member countries are.
