American leadership of the Atlantic alliance post-Kosovo

Abstract

Although American leadership of NATO had been a constant over the entire postwar period, after the Soviet threat evaporated in the 1990s Americans began a process of reassessing the necessity and desirability of this leadership as well as the American return on its investment in NATO. Europeans, in turn, enjoyed a policy emancipation allowing them to follow the U.S. lead, resist (or reject) it when American policies violated European interests or, as a precautionary measure in the event of American abandonment, acquire strategic autonomy within the European Union. The persistence and credibility of American leadership of NATO after Kosovo, as well as episodic European challenges within and outside NATO, cannot be understood without reference to the structural and institutional factors preventing the American abdication of its leadership role within NATO or the European ability to reject it unconditionally. I find that material conditions for American leadership remain unimpaired, but the credibility of American leadership as it pertains to the confidence the allies have in U.S. willingness to fulfill its Article 5 commitment has suffered potentially irreversible damage. Yet it is institutional factors, particularly the institutional stickiness bonding the American foreign policy elite to a NATO-centric security system and the positive externalities attending institutional negentropy, that have played an outsized role in maintaining NATO’s cohesion and legitimacy. They have also raised the cost of substituting European strategic autonomy for American leadership or the abandonment of it. The Europeans have sought a precautionary defense autonomy to cope with non–Article 5 threats of peripheral interest to the United States but they have remained willing to follow the American lead on matters touching collective defense and deterrence in Europe. Future American grand strategy, currently undergoing vigorous debate inside and outside government, will have a fundamental impact on NATO’s centrality to U.S. foreign policy calculations as well as the desirability or necessity of U.S. leadership, independent of a European desire for or acquisition of strategic autonomy. The choice of strategy poses the greatest threat to NATO’s long-term cohesion, American willingness to remain entangled in European affairs, and American leadership in Europe.