The Ukraine war is causing far-reaching security policy changes in Europe. It’s about a kind of reincarnation of NATO, which was founded in 1949. Denting the political dents in the military alliance was a major concern of US President Joe Biden even before he took office. His predecessor had complained that the alliance might be obsolete. Donald Trump shocked the security experts, but his idea of withdrawing from the leadership role, especially as a guarantor of “security”, was well received by the US public. The experienced transatlantic Biden, supported by Vladimir Putin, has now achieved and exceeded his goal. According to the President, NATO is completely united in the war in Ukraine. The pictures are too terrible, the worries about the unpredictable Putin too great. The confessions of guilt, especially from NATO skeptics, are too loud, saying they did not expect this war.
Since taking office, Biden has been looking for the right words to calm transatlanticists who have been upset by four years of Trump. “America is back. The transatlantic alliance is back,” he announced via video at the Munich Security Conference in February 2021. However, it was not just about European security. From Team Biden’s point of view, the desire for cohesion was also underpinned by the need for transatlantic backing in order to address what he saw as a more important issue – competition with China. Biden won concessions by waiving sanctions over the summer on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the “Kremlin political project” condemned by the US State Department to make Western Europe dependent. When the country left Afghanistan in August after 20 years of war, allies complained about the US government’s unilateral actions.
Scholz understood
That is past. In his State of the Union address at the beginning of March, Biden said the NATO partners had cooperated closely in planning against Russia. The Reuters agency quoted a senior European diplomat as saying that Biden’s actions were “exemplary”. And the Washington Post wrote that Biden had deliberately let European politicians go first. The war in Ukraine should not look like a conflict between the US and Russia.
It was May 1998 when the US Senate voted 80 to 19 for the admission of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to NATO and the eastward enlargement began. The alliance brought security to the West for half a century, said then Democratic Senator Biden, “and this is the beginning of another 50 years of peace.” The USA has seen itself as a representative of freedom and power since the 20th century. They currently maintain military bases in over 80 nations around the world. That’s a lot at a time when the United States has slipped from a post-Cold War unipolar world into a multipolar one.
In the case of NATO, the US government is interested in changes that result in the continued militarization of the European allies, a concept that the Social Democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz anticipated with his huge armaments project. Ivo Daalder, once US ambassador to NATO, noted in the specialist magazine Foreign Affairs under the heading “The return of containment” how such a turnaround should look like. NATO must reconsider its forward stance and deploy troops of tens of thousands, not just a few thousand, on its eastern border.
As recently as mid-February, a strategy paper on the website of the transatlantic lobby Atlantic Council stated that a “rare non-partisan agreement” had grown in Washington on foreign policy that for the USA “China, not Russia, was the main threat to national security”. Biden has a chance to trigger a new “transatlantic trade”. European nations should take “more responsibility for their own security”, so more must go into European hands. The United States remained as the last guarantor of security in an emergency. Scholz picked this up when he spoke of a fundamental reorientation of German foreign policy.