European Defence Community) as an integral part of NATO under SACEUR failed not because of non-existent US rejection, but because France refused to ratify the corresponding treaty in 1954.
In the post-Cold War era, strong British and French pressure was required to help convince the Clinton administration to accept the forceful intervention of NATO in Bosnia after the Srebrenica massacre. NATO’s war in Kosovo was the result of a joint US and Western European initiative. It was the Europeans not the Americans who took the lead in invoking Article 5 for the first time and in America’s favour after the attacks of 11 September 2001: the US preference was to use its Florida-based Central Command (CENTCOM) as the vehicle for the overthrow of the Taliban. ISAF became a NATO operation only 20 months after its creation in Afghanistan. US pressure did not succeed in securing NATO political endorsement of the planned invasion of Iraq, nor did it convince Turkey to allow the passage of US troops through its territory to Iraq. In the Libyan air campaign of 2011, France and the UK, not the US, were the prime movers once the operations had been handed over to NATO.
These and other examples tend to demonstrate that NATO is not a US “tool”; it often provides a vehicle to influence the US and it constrains rather than enhances US unilateralist inclinations.
US influence, as opposed to direct pressure, can and does have effects on national choices within NATO: during the years of NATO counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan, the Baltic States ratcheted back on their territorial defence to make way for expeditionary forces. Their border guards, initially built on the Finnish model, and with Finnish help, were turned into a police force. But this in itself does not make NATO America’s tool. It is also worth noting that forces from the Baltic States gained valuable combat experience in Afghanistan: this is arguably facilitating the re-building of a credible territorial defence in Estonia, for instance.
Sweden’s decision to dismantle its territorial defence a few years ago was taken independently of NATO.
Nor is NATO a war machine that can be activated as a result of pressures from within the organisation. With the exception of assets such as those described above (air defence, logistics…), NATO does not “own” its own troops. The NRF, in which Finland is a participant, is composed of troops belonging to the member states. Even the VJTF, which will ‘belong’ to
