Some ideas to reform the organization.

Column by Francesco Grillo published on the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero e Il Gazzettino del Nordest 

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Today, 73 years ago, one of the oldest international organisations, created after the Second World War to guarantee a global order, was founded.

Despite its weaknesses and its “brain death” after the withdrawal from Afghanistan (as President Macron said in November 2019), NATO seems to be witnessing a new era of its existence where everyone wants to join the organization. 

Surely, nowadays the storytelling evolves very rapidly, stealing space to strategy. Nevertheless, a serious reasoning about what are the right tools to rule a dangerous world makes unavoidable to find an answer to five questions from which a reform of one of the strongest military alliances may start.

How could the European Union and the United States share the tasks and the areas of influence? Is the idea of a “field of action” limited to the North Atlantic (USA, Europe, and Canada) still valid? Is the idea of keeping the “collective response” as the unique juridic commitment still valid? Could the Atlantic Council non-binding consensus mechanism be enough to a more integrated organization in the sharing of data whose control will determine the outcome of the war and in defence devices? Can the threat of mutual nuclear destruction continue to be the reason to protect its allies? To what extent NATO can keep representing the presidium of (liberal) democracy seen that its strategic bastions are Poland, Hungary, and Turkey?

Several “urban legends” cover NATO with an ideological blanket of smoke. But few people know that the agreement has its origin in a treaty that France and the UK signed in Dunkirk, the beach where the English army escaped from the Third Reich. The US joined this European project long after because they didn’t want to worry Russia, an ally during the war. Furthermore, few people remember that NATO remained lifeless as well as cumbersome till the end of the Cold war: its first operations were in Bosnia, three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

These informal mechanisms for reaching a consensus on decisive issues have ensured to NATO the needed flexibility to survive its rival (Warsaw Pact) and even to grow: just a few months ago North Macedonia joined NATO becoming its 30th member. Today, the alliance represents more than the half of worldwide military expense (even though 2/3 of it its from the US).

Nevertheless, there is the need for transforming a crisis into a reform.

It is a lecture of powerful technological phenomenon that, more than geopolitics, give a first answer to five questions.

1. In NATO’s future, the Pacific area will be more present, and Asia will have a more incisive role. It will be essential to strengthen the capacity of defending peace in the MENA region (from Syria to Libya and Yemen). In this area, the European Union will to grow will be tested.

2. The article 5 of the NATO treaty, the one about mutual defence, will continue to be the pillar of the alliance, but it will be necessary to better define what can be considered as an attack and, prevention must have a more relevant role, and so the monitoring that technologies makes more invasive.

3. The army of the future will have less soldiers (on this front Italy, as shown in the graph below, must reconsider its system more than everyone else) and much more drones which are not airplanes, but tanks, ships and even robots aimed at making the entire war digital (“cyber”). In the event of a crisis, the capacity of mobilise citizens will be increasingly important and skill sharing moments that involve both civilians and soldiers will be more frequent.

4. Over the last decade, a larger alliance has been anticipated by partnerships and dialogues that have involved almost everyone, including China and Russia. It is fair to keep insisting on a common approach with non-member states, but it would be an unbearable hypocrisy to keep asking them to adopt the same political system. As for other international organizations, it will be necessary – pragmatically- to imagine different levels of cooperation among countries that have different levels of stable sharing of specific values.

5. Finally, the nuclear deterrents represent an obsolete logic: the events we are currently witnessing, that are leading us to an accident that the Cold war succeed to avoid, tell us that a complex world. Beyond the fake storytelling and the rubbles of Mariupol, it will be essential to find a project able to guarantee stability.

It is a moral imperative towards a generation, our children, that do not want to live at the edge of the abyss of which we have a confuse perception.