As NATO Looks East, Will It Stumble in the South? The Case of Protection of Civilians Policy

Abstract

For more than a decade beginning in the early 2000s, NATO’s main area of concern was crisis management in Afghanistan via the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). With the closing of the ISAF mission and in parallel with Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, both in 2014, NATO returned to a preoccupation with European security and collective defense. The focus of this article will be on how NATO’s “return to realism” affected one of the main lessons coming out of the Afghan mission, namely the need to define and institutionalize a PoC (Protection of Civilians) policy. At the 2014 Wales summit, when NATO enhanced its regional deterrence with a renewed NATO Response Force, NATO also committed to developing a PoC policy. Some two years later, at the Warsaw summit, NATO further enhanced its regional deterrence with a so-called Enhanced Forward Presence posture and then also signed off on its newly developed PoC policy. PoC policy is eminently a lesson of crisis management operations, and so the question is how NATO nations framed this lesson and propelled it forward at a moment when their main concern was collective defence. To answer this question and thus evaluate the depth and implications of the “return to realism” for crisis management policy, this article traces the making of NATO’s PoC policy 2014–2016 and identifies implications.