Warning!!! This is a very long substack. Feel free to exit now, although I hope you’ll bear with me a little longer.
It’s a copy of an article I wrote for the latest edition of the NATO StratCom Centre of Excellence’s Journal published last month. As a review essay, it both reviews two books written on NATO’s 75th, but goes much further to outline many of my own thoughts on NATO and where it stands in today’s ‘Sea of Troubles’. With NATO’s Summit starting today then it seems a reasonable time to pass it on.
Bottom line: NATO is a unique creation and as such literally irreplaceable. Historical circumstance created it, and those circumstances will not be repeated. As such NATO’s leaders need to rise to the challenge and that challenge is massive.
If time is pressing, maybe park this piece for now and get to it a little later, but understanding NATO’s unique history should help us realise the pressing need to ensure both its survival and its continuing evolution as the world changes around us.
The two books I was reviewing were:
Deterring Armageddon: A Biography of NATO. The ‘Astonishingly Fine History’ of the World’s Most Successful Military Alliance. Peter Apps. Wildfire, 2024.
NATO: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance. Sten Rynning. Yale University Press, 2024.
It is a curious feature that for an organisation billed as the most powerful in the world there have actually not been that many books on it. Plenty on the Cold War, of course, but NATO has tended to have a walk-on role compared with the major powers. It may be the fact that NATO has succeeded—there has been no major war in Europe involving a NATO member since 1945—has played its part. What did not happen—rather like the dog that didn’t bark in the night—is not obviously the stuff of drama.
That said, given NATO’s recent history, Afghanistan, the Balkans, and so on, it offers plenty of meat, and now, as NATO celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary, we have Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, destabilising Europe and with global implications. Yet, given the context, there has been comparatively little attention—imagine what the EU would have received.
And history matters for, as followers of narrative know, we are all trying to go from an old story to a new story, and so must understand that old story. To quote the great historian E.H. Carr, ‘History is an unending dialogue between the present and the past.’ Putin and his acolytes certainly understand this, with the emphasis they are placing on reframing Russia and the Soviet Union’s history to suit the current aggression against Ukraine and Russia’s supposed place in the world. Key to that is the Kremlin’s characterisation of NATO as some form of existential threat, based on an imaginative and self-interested interpretation of events since World War II.
It is therefore a pity and a loss that NATO’s seventy-fifth has received less focus than it needed, not just from academic interest, but to help interpret what is happening now and chart a future. As the saying goes, history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes, and any analysis of NATO’s seventy-five years reveals recurring rhythms that should both hearten and warn.
At least we have two new books on the Alliance’s history, and we are fortunate both are well researched and informative. Peter Apps’s Deterring Armageddon: A Biography of NATO and Sten Rynning’s NATO: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance have big boots to fill to take on the mantle of Stanley Sloan, whose NATO histories have set the benchmark, along with those of the late Lawrence S. Kaplan. They both do a good job.
The two authors would count as critical friends of the Alliance and have produced interesting and readable histories. In many respects they have different styles and approaches, while ultimately coming to similar conclusions.
Apps, a Reuters correspondent,[1] has produced a pacey narrative that provides a comprehensive historical overview of NATO and its activities on the ground. Conversely, Rynning’s book is more of a political history, authoritatively laying out the debates and discussions within the corridors of power. Indeed, Rynning states the book focuses on the ‘pol’ of ‘pol/mil’, not the ‘mil’, so the military side of the NATO equation is very much secondary.
One thing that immediately stands out from Rynning’s book is the excellent introduction, in which his ‘Why is NATO important’, ‘What is NATO’, and ‘How to think about NATO’ are excellent encapsulations of the nature of the Alliance and what makes it so special.
Both authors look at the past very much in the context of a worrying present—Apps more obviously so, with his book opening on ‘The Shock of Ukraine’. They thus bring us up to date, Apps especially so. The risk in writing about the past with such urgent hindsight is that it can too easily fail to accept how the world looked to those making decisions at the time. When it comes to NATO, it would be very easy to overlook how radical, how revolutionary, the Alliance was, and to take its achievement, the fact it was even created, for granted.
Both recognise this and work hard to avoid hindsight and to capture the drama of those early days, and Apps in particular describes it well. It was a time for and of strong personalities, with big visions, and Western Europe and North America were fortunate in a whole gallery of them coming together at the right time. The durability of NATO tends to give an impression of inevitability, but the reality, as the authors make clear, was anything but, and the future of Europe was very much in play.
The recently liberated nations of Western Europe were traumatised, exhausted, and poverty-stricken. Politics and political parties were in transition, and the well-organised Soviet-directed communist parties had real prospects for power. Even the never-occupied victor, Britain, was impoverished and worn out, its Great Power status irretrievably diminished.
Meanwhile, the United States, incomparably more powerful and vigorous, had still paid enough of a price for many to feel that it had done enough, and it was time to get on with their lives and for Europe to get its own act together.
So, that the cards would fall the way they did was not inevitable. Isolationism had been strong in the US before the Second World War and been strengthened by the end of the First World War. George Washington’s warning in his 1796 Farewell Address that ‘it is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world’, then pithily summarised by Thomas Jefferson as avoiding ‘entangling alliances’, had been an enduring staple of US foreign policy.
That the US changed and adopted a very permanent alliance in NATO was in part due to recognising that, now it was a superpower, there was no choice but to go global. But the shape of that entanglement was its choice and could have been much more bilateral and temporary.
It is a reminder that what is happening today in the US is not completely untethered from its past. Trump’s rambles and rants are peculiarly his own, but he and his cohorts are still tapping into a strain of American thinking, however perverse its characterisation.
In that sense, how the cards fell is not just a dramatic story in its own right, but valuable for understanding today and instructive for our future. NATO’s creation was not inevitable, and we should not assume its survival is either. It was made by harnessing and directing the power of the tide, not just going with the flow. As both Apps and Rynning describe, was a fragile plant requiring constant care and attention. It still does.
In that sense our admiration for NATO’s founding fathers should encompass recognising this mix of innovation, imagination, vision, determination, and political acumen—a challenging combination of qualities.
For a historian and believer in individualism, there is little more disheartening than the advocates of historical determinism, largely the followers of Marxism and communism, who argue that events in history are determined by various prior forces and, therefore, essentially inevitable. It is surely one of the inherent failings of communism that its bedrock theories reject the role of individuals and human agency. Ultimately is there anything more misery-making than the idea that you have no control?
The creation of NATO is testimony to the fact what we can make a difference. The smoke-filled (and they were, then!) rooms, corridor conversations, summits, telegrams, and phone calls may not seem the stuff of inspiration, but I would suggest they are—just when it mattered, there assembled a cast of characters who were not heroes in the conventional sense but who rose to the challenge of creating something remarkable that ensured the security and freedom of a continent and democracy.
When it comes to individuals in the initial drive to create NATO what also comes over well is the role of key advisors and officials. While Britain’s Bevin, the US’s Acheson and Vandenberg, Canada’s Pearson, and so on get their deserved plaudits, and were the public face of creating NATO, the influence and initiatives of key officials get equally well-deserved recognition here.
In particular the State Department’s John Hickerson and Theodore Achilles were driving forces for recognising the need for something like NATO, formulating the proposal, and then managing the process, adapting and steering it along what was often a very rocky road.
It is a reminder of the critical role that many civil servants, whether national or NATO’s international staff, have played in the Alliance, and it is perhaps a weakness in the books that after those early days there is little focus on some of their successors. Within NATO itself they have provided the institutional memory, advice, and guidance to the passing gallery of politicians who have run NATO over the decades.
I do not consider the staffers’ influence has been improper—they advise, not decide—but the standard of that advice has been considerable, and indeed some, perhaps most, of the initiatives that have steered NATO have come from below, not above.
For instance, those interested in StratCom will know the drive to incorporate it into NATO was initiated by mid-level staffers—the demand signal did not come from above until much later in its evolution. Ultimately, of course, the leadership had to support and approve it, but would it have ever got to that point without the staff who put it on the leadership’s radar and made it a worthwhile goal to take up their time?
This clearly cannot compare with the role of the civil servants who were present at the dawn of NATO, but it is indicative of the importance of that coterie of international civil servants whose belief in the Alliance and its core purpose has been total and dedicated. This is a still relatively uncharted part of the NATO history, but it is good to see the role of Achilles, Hickerson, and other staffers get some of the attention it deserves.
Of course, all of those early innovators had the benefit of a clarity in the international situation that is lacking in today’s complex security environment. By the late 1940s the threat from the Soviet Union was clear to anyone not wearing blinkers or very rose-tinted spectacles. As a traumatised, prostrate Europe tried to rebuild itself and even the unoccupied winners, especially Britain, rushed to demobilise, Stalin maintained much of his army and very obviously exerted a baleful and deepening control over the areas he occupied.
So, the threat was clear enough, made even more so by its very physical nature. Tanks on your border are obvious; today’s more malevolent influence through information confrontation, political warfare, rather less so. Much of the recent questioning about NATO and its purpose has been centred on both recognising and defining a more inchoate threat, and therefore on the need to respond and NATO’s role as a political/military instrument with its focus on hard military power.
Back in the 1940s the Soviets by their actions made it easier—the 1948 coup in Czechoslovakia, and most importantly the blockade of Berlin the same year that led to the Berlin Airlift. It is a feature of the Cold War and its aftermath that at various points when the value of NATO might have been questioned, then the Soviet Union, and now Russia, reminded us. Whether it is Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Georgia, or now Ukraine, the malign actions of the Soviet Union/Russia not only show why NATO exists but also should frame the continuing discussion about the NATO/Russia relationship.
Indeed, these actions remind us of how so many of the core fundamentals have not changed, as well as the one that certainly has. NATO’s first secretary general, Lord Ismay, is said to have pithily summed up its role, saying, ‘The purpose of the NATO alliance is to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.’
Keeping the Russians out is dealt with at length, but, perhaps understandably given these are NATO histories, the Russian side of the equation is skated over. However understandable though, not taking into account the equivalent debate within Russia and its actions is a bit like talking about just one team in a football match.
That the Russians did not like NATO is obvious enough, but the level of their concern, whether they really saw it as a threat or just an obstacle to their ambitions, is less clear. We know what they said, but experience should have taught us that in the Russian system what is said is often performative rather than truthful—intended to achieve an effect in pursuit of an objective. Therefore, what they declare cannot automatically be taken at face value, as the truth or otherwise is so often irrelevant to the purpose of the statement. As with the boy who cried wolf, whether to take them seriously or not is something of an art form.
This matters, as we spent most of the Cold War pretty much guessing what the Soviets were up to. Then, as Apps’s book title puts it, the stakes were quite literally about ‘Deterring Armageddon’, and now after a brief interregnum the shutters have come down again, and understanding the Kremlin is once more closed off to normal discourse or analysis.
That issue— working out what are the Soviets/Russians really up to—is a thread running through, and complicating, much of NATO’s decision-making. One common element has often been the desire of nations to believe what they say, put the best gloss on it, and accordingly downplay any threat.
This is of course often convenient because it avoids uncomfortable issues like levels of defence spending. Beyond that, for some, relations with Russia were additionally overlaid by the desire not to ‘provoke’ it. This was especially so for Germany, haunted by the spectre of history and its war guilt.
Within NATO’s corridors it has always been taken as read that in any debate on Russia the Germans would be the handbrake and the most cautious about doing anything the Russians might not like. The Russians have of course played on this.
While keeping the Russians out is very much NATO’s continuing core mission, the story of Germany within NATO is now very different, with keeping the Germans down consigned to history. The issue now has usually been to get Germany to do more. It is a value of history books to challenge certainties and attitudes that come from forgetting that where we are is often very different from where we were. For NATO’s founders and leaderships in the early decades, the military threat of Russia was newer and less obvious than the threat of Germany.
Only unified into a single country in 1871, Germany had then precipitated two world wars. Little wonder that ensuring it did not rise once more was the initial priority. It is a remarkable testimony to that era’s leadership, scarred by the war, that within a few years they recognised the need to bring Germany into NATO, and that there was a new generation of German political leaders who had the vision and strength to drive such fundamental change.
If keeping the Germans down is yesterday’s problem, then keeping the Americans in remains the eternal issue, and highlights many of the recurring themes of NATO’s history.
As mentioned above, the constancy of America’s support over the last seventy-five years should not be taken for granted for the next seventy-five, as historically its foreign policy instincts have been to avoid entanglement. Nevertheless, the country’s direction of travel has so far been driven by an enlightened self-interest that links it to an Atlanticist mindset within its foreign policy elite.
Without America actually turning its back on Europe, that prioritisation is shifting. As with the isolationist thread, there has always been a Pacific thread as well. Just as isolationism was a real factor to be overcome in the US supporting Britain in 1940, then that Pacific instinct was still in play in 1941 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. However, Hitler solved FDR’s potential problem of declaring war on Germany by declaring war on the US first. Even after that there was a debate about Japan first or Germany first for the US’s main military effort.
What Trump has done has starkly reveal potential and actual fault lines, as well as much worsen them. But, if we ignore the verbiage, he reflects a point of frustration shared by far more NATO-friendly presidents, which is Europe not fairly sharing the burden of defence.
This is well detailed in both histories. For instance, Apps quotes Kennedy asking, ‘Why should we have in Europe supplies adequate to fight for 90 days when the European forces around our troops have only enough supplies to fight for two or three?’ Indeed. And of course this resonates strongly now, as the fighting in Ukraine reminds us that major war burns up munitions at an astounding rate.
Such frustration was reflected also by Nixon and Kissinger in the 1970s, and in the 1980s NATO-critical friends like Senator Sam Nunn, justifying a motion to scale back US forces in Europe, described it as ‘not a petition for divorce [but] a petition for the Alliance to carry out its vows’.
Trump’s demand for Europe to ‘pay its dues’ may reflect a basic misunderstanding that NATO nations’ spending pledges are not some form of membership fee, but that does not change the fact that until recently the bulk of NATO nations were happy to live in some kind of self-deluding dreamland where defence could be had on the cheap, the US would continue to carry a disproportionate share of the load, and they could kid themselves that Putin’s Russia was not the major problem that common sense told us it was becoming.
The cost of credible defence has always been intrinsically linked to perceptions of threat. Much of the complex debate and sometimes arcane disputes within NATO, while superficially about a variety of issues, has usually boiled down to this.
This includes nuclear weapons. While couched in moral terms, and undoubtedly they are the ultimate deterrent, NATO’s attachment to them was in large part because we needed them more as we would not pay the cost of a conventional deterrent against the massive Soviet army.
Much of this can be encapsulated in the dual-track decision of the eighties on deploying intermediate range nuclear forces, which is extensively covered in both books in the descriptions of the anguished internal debate which nearly split the Alliance. What they both highlight is the desire of the Europeans to see the Pershing and Cruise missiles deployed as a ground-based counter to the Russian SS-21s. They feared that without them on European soil there would be a de-linkage on the ladder of escalation to US strategic nukes, which would thereby threaten the credibility of NATO’s nuclear umbrella and deterrent.
I remember as a young journalist having fiery debates with workmates, some of whom spent their weekends at the Greenham Common protests. They were morally outraged at the notion of nuclear weapons but also against spending money on conventional weapons, completing the argument with the comfortable and dubious rationalisation that the Soviet Union was not a threat.
However, what also marked much of the emotion around the public debate was the strong strain of anti-Americanism in the public protests, with Ronald Reagan as a favourite hate figure. With some notable exceptions, European leaders did their best to keep their heads down—they may have wanted nuclear weapons, but they were uncomfortable about saying so. It is an irony that the leaders of an Alliance based on deterrence, which inherently includes nuclear weapons, preferred not to talk about them, and still do not like to do so—the uncomfortable fact that dare not speak its name.
This unwillingness has often played into the hands of the Russians, who sometimes seem unable to stop talking about these weapons—fully aware of the scare factor this arouses. We are seeing this now in Ukraine, as Russia attempts to suppress Western backing for Ukraine by giving dark warnings of nuclear war if the support continues. The pulling of emotional triggers is so much easier when NATO’s nations have been so shy of talking about the issue in a rational way, and are thus less able to call this out for the bluff it is.
The political warfare that the Soviet Union and now Russia has continually mounted against NATO is, I would suggest, one of the significant omissions in both of the histories under discussion. Until the end of the Cold War it was a shadow war, and a war of perceptions. The Soviets sought to undermine the Alliance by targeting both governments and electorates, and how NATO was viewed by their populations has framed much of the internal debate.
NATO as an institution was well aware of this, and created the NATO Information Service in 1950. Its history and relationship with Psychological Operations and intelligence deserve attention, as well as in its later guises, most recently the Public Diplomacy Division. This is not special pleading by a communicator but highlighting that NATO’s power, and so an essential component in its success, has lain in its ability to communicate its credibility and capability.
Never was that communication, both as an institution and by members, more necessary than once the Berlin Wall had come down. Having helped ‘win’ the Cold War, what was it for? This has broken down into two streams of activity: enlargement and expanding its mission. An organisation intended for ‘Deterring Armageddon’ ended up finally using its military power with a much less defined role as peacekeeper and counter-insurgent.
Both Apps and Rynning cast a sceptical eye on much of the expanded missions, and, given the distinctly mixed outcomes, that is understandable, especially with regard to ISAF and Afghanistan. It is important in this context to remember the tenor of the times. Mistakenly or not, Russia was out of the equation, and the mood was ‘out of area, or out of business’. September 11 also changed the equation when it came to defining threat. This was a new world. Then Secretary General George Robertson perhaps gets less than his due for grasping that nettle and leading the way on the declaration of Article 5.
While nations took their peace dividend—and kept taking it—NATO became an easy option for dealing with the post-Cold War problems. ISAF was a prime example. It is easy to look back and see it as a mistake, but the reality was that NATO had little choice in getting involved. I was there, and after the first three ISAF rotations no nation could or would step up. It was NATO or nothing—there would have been no ISAF at all. I think this reality is not given enough account. There was also the factor that there was no consensus to get NATO involved in Iraq, so this was something we could do.
The initial NATO-led ISAF was slated to be Kabul only, but it was Germany that wanted a NATO flag in its area in the north, and so it went on. What the nations wanted was what they got as the area of operations expanded. What did not happen was either providing the forces needed (that peace dividend) or a recognition of Afghanistan’s descent into a full-blown counter-insurgency.
As someone who did three tours based in Kabul it was frankly infuriating to have nations pretending this was a peacekeeping mission when it was quite clearly a counter-insurgency. The result was we did not up our game early on when it might have made the difference. The outcome, NATO’s failure, cannot be disputed, but I am sceptical as to how much we should point the finger at the institution rather than the nations.
Similar factors also played their part in other NATO engagements. Libya in particular was a case of the Alliance being backed into the mission. Libya also reveals the limitations of Rynning’s book, which emphasises the political while largely sidestepping the military. The UK and French actions and US equivocation meant the NATO military campaign basically had to be improvised from a standing start, with combat already under way. This is a less than ideal way to run a war.
The war’s aftermath, with all the attendant consequences, was also NATO’s nations responsibility, not NATO’s. I believe it was driven by a desire not to repeat the experience of ISAF. Having got our hands caught in the mangle there, we were determined to take a more hands-off approach, which of course has sadly not turned out too well either.
The picture in the Balkans is much more mixed. It is hard to argue that peace and stability in the Balkans is not a core security interest for Europe. It nevertheless took NATO a while to reorientate itself to using its military institutions to play their part. In so doing they have brought peace and a fair degree of stability to the former Yugoslavia. The continuing fragility in the region shows the limits of military power on its own, but the region is an awful lot better than it would otherwise be.
In this context, it is a real omission on the part of Sten Rynning to entirely ignore NATO’s mission in what is now North Macedonia. Not only is it the bookend on the cycle of Balkan conflicts, having learned the lesson of what went before, but it was also massively successful, preventing a major civil war and setting in place the pathway to that country’s eventual membership of the Alliance.
As mentioned above, the other core aspect of NATO’s post-Cold War identity has been enlargement. Not only has it changed NATO’s identity, but it has raised questions about its purpose and whether this played a part in Putin and Russia’s descent into their current darkness.
This boils down to whether NATO enlargement was ‘provocative’ to a new Russia that would otherwise be living in peace and harmony. I think much of the debate here about the discussions within NATO is interesting, but we are also in danger of dancing on the head of a pin over the details.
Russia’s neighbours would say you need to go back beyond the diplomacy around the end of the Warsaw Pact and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and look at how it previously acted. Given that history, why on earth should we assume the good faith of the Russians and that they will set aside their previous grand strategy of dominating their neighbours? Putin himself has acknowledged as much, having stated in his famous Munich speech of 2007 that Russia was not going to change a thousand years of foreign policy tradition.
I would also suggest that the debate around what the then US secretary of state James Baker might or might not have said to Gorbachev is far less relevant than Putin and Co would like us to think. His supposed statement that NATO’s jurisdiction would move ‘not one inch’ was not just ambiguous about whether he meant East Germany or more widely, but was never written down, proven, or signed off; nor did he have the authority to say anything like that on behalf of the US, let alone NATO.
Yet Putin claims this was some kind of binding contract, building a narrative of betrayal and broken promises on it, while analysts have spent huge effort dissecting it. What nonsense. Does anyone imagine what the Russians would have said if the situation had been reversed? They would have laughed in our face, demanded the proof, said where is the contract, and then moved on. After all, with their invasion of Ukraine they are breaching several agreements and formal commitments they have signed. What is happening in Ukraine is not a consequence of NATO enlargement but of Russia reverting to type.
The debate and decision-making around enlargement and the nature of the engagement in Afghanistan and elsewhere reflect a routine fact of NATO’s existence—the number of times the key nations, especially of course the US, ignore NATO in critical decisions. For an institution sometimes credited with almost mythical powers, it is the core reality.
In all of these events and throughout its history, the critical factor is that NATO is an intergovernmental body, not a supranational body like the EU. It has no armies, it has a very small civil service and budget, and it decides everything by consensus. This is its strength and its weakness. Decisions, once made, stick, but getting there is often painful. NATO’s history shows that the alliance has produced enormous synergy through combined will and capability, but in the end it cannot rise above that collective will.
But really this should be no surprise—what other body can commit its members to war, to defend other nations, and perhaps lead to Armageddon? And now after the long interregnum of relative European security the spectre that drove NATO’s formation is back. The issue is how to respond, and the answer is far from clear.
America’s Atlanticist era is at the least diminished, and under Donald Trump could be extinguished to be replaced by isolationist nativism. Beyond Europe the rise of China is now an acknowledged threat, but what to do about it is both undecided and disputed. Technology has now put sophisticated, accurate, and cheap weaponry within the reach of minor powers and terrorists. We are also now in the information era, where the tools of persuasion and disinformation have the means to polarise society and disrupt unified decision-making.
What is NATO’s role? Could/should its ships be in the South China Sea to help defend the maritime chokepoints essential to Europe? How should it build on its burgeoning relationship with like-minded allies such as Australia and Japan? How should the Alliance, as political/military body, balance the two?
Apps prefers to avoid strong conclusions, but Rynning argues for what he calls ‘classic NATO’, saying ‘its future must resemble its past’. He makes a good case, but the world has changed so much that the definition of deterrence and defence will need a degree of flexibility. In the new security environment how do we best defend and deter? Tanks on the border was so much simpler!
What is clear, though, is that one area of change is Europe stepping up to the plate to reduce its dependence on the US. The shock of Ukraine has seen steps in that direction, but surely they are still far too slow. The course of that war has also re-emphasised some classic lessons, such as the need for the ability to ramp up arms production and build up stocks. The brutal fact is that NATO’s peace dividend more resembled a fire sale, and our inability to resupply Ukraine tells its own story.
The scales should also have fallen from our eyes about Russia: proper deterrence, not another version of detente or some new reset, is every bit as valid now as it was in 1949. Nations also going it alone is impractical: there is no alternative to multinational defence achieved through burden-sharing, common standards, training, and interoperability. One of the less-recognised benefits of NATO is that, even when the NATO flag is not flying, it is NATO common standards that allow coalitions of the willing to work effectively together.
The brief time when Great Power rivalry was dimmed by a so-called Rules-Based International Order (RBIO), where small nations could do as they wished, is over. Great Power rivalries have been seemingly ever-present in our history, whereas the rules-based era started with the UN charter of 1945 and, in Europe at least, had its brief flowering with the end of the Cold War. In his history of the Peloponnesian War, the historian Thucydides said in the Melian Dialogue that ‘right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’. NATO nations by banding together made even the weaker equals in power. NATO histories and the narratives within them remind us of these enduring truths.
For Strategic Communicators, then, there is a vital role here. We are in a battle of narratives where our adversaries are using information confrontation, disinformation, and alternative narratives to promote a different vision of our future. This clash is happening here and now, and it is in our field of endeavour. It is up to us to help demonstrate NATO’s continuing relevance, the hard choices that lie ahead, but also the inspiration that should drive us.
It is a common saying in the foreign policy community that if we did not have NATO then we would have to invent it. I take the point, but the more sober reality is that if we did not already have NATO then it would now be impossible to reinvent it. Given the way the world currently looks, that should scare us all. We should all be very relieved that a fortunate combination of people and circumstances created something that was far from inevitable but has been indispensable. The lesson is surely that we must ensure that we do what needs to be done to secure its future.
[1] I am a former colleague of Peter Apps, having worked with him when I was a British Army reservist, and have been interviewed for his book.