Fourth, and of everyday practical utility, NATO is the framework in which standards and norms are developed to enable the technical and procedural interoperability of Western forces at all levels of military activity, including those of a significant number of non-NATO partners. Without such interoperability, coalitions of the willing such as ISAF in Afghanistan would have been substantially more difficult to assemble and run. Full NATO membership is not a prerequisite for participation in this field, but it is the existence of NATO’s integrated command structure which makes it possible to produce this public good on a large scale and at all levels. Finland is already deeply engaged in a multifaceted policy conducive to interoperability, directly with and indeed within NATO (e.g. ISAF in Afghanistan) and with NATO members, or indirectly via cooperation with Sweden, itself an evidently bündnisfähig country. Indeed, there is a widespread sense in NATO that Finland is close to the limit that it can reach without being a full member.
In practice, the pace-setter of the production of standards will tend to be the Alliance’s most powerful member, the US, with some 70% of NATO’s overall defence spending. However, in a multilateral setting such as NATO, the US cannot purely and simply impose its technical and operational norms, in contrast to what tends to occur when the US operates a hub-and-spokes system[1] as with its allies in Asia-Pacific (South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand…): they and other non-NATO partners, which have been engaged in a long-standing direct defence-industrial relationship with the US, can end up being cramped into American-first choices.
WHAT NATO IS NOT. As the previous lines suggest, NATO essentially owes its depth and credibility to full US engagement in every facet of its activities, but it is not a mere extension of US power. It is a rare anomaly in the history of international affairs: a largely sui generis multilateral defence alliance.
This is in keeping with its historical origin. The Washington Treaty was the consequence not of American pressure but of the British and French quest for security reassurance once Stalin’s USSR had decided to treat the Marshall Plan as a strategic challenge, with the creation of the Kominform in late 1947. The establishment of NATO as a military structure was the product of the overall Western fear of a new World War after the invasion of South Korea. The Western Europeans’ attempt to create a “European army” (The
- ↑ A hub-and-spokes system refers to the US as a ‘hub’ with no apparent connections between the ‘spokes’, i.e. with the countries with which it has a bilateral alliance, which enhances the dominant role played by the US.
