All the Elements of National Power

Since the end of the Cold War, the question "Whither NATO-and why?" has come up regularly, especially in the United States. This is not an idle question nor one that can simply be dismissed. If anything, it is remarkable that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization still exists a quarter-century after the key reason for its creation-the widely shared perception of a political, strategic, and military threat from the Soviet Union-ceased to exist. To be sure, there is now renewed challenge from the Soviet Union's principal successor state, the Russian Federation. From the beginning of the 1990s, however, until the Russian seizure of Crimea in 2014, a span of nearly 25 years, the argument could have been made that there was no need for continuing the Western alliance that did so much to contain Soviet power and the Warsaw Pact and that played a significant role in the dissolution of both. Many people did argue just this point, both in the United States and elsewhere, but they were never in the majority (or at least they never prevailed in public and parliamentary debate). The reasons for NATO's continued existence are important to understand, including to provide a basis for considering its future and, more precisely, the tasks it should be asked to perform and its very character as an alliance of sovereign states spanning the two sides of the Atlantic.1Power in Europe: Until the End of the Cold WarNATO has been only one of the many instruments and political-security efforts designed to deal with problems of power in Europe. The modern history of this subject can be said to have begun with the end of the Napoleonic wars, when the Congress of Vienna fashioned a set of understandings that, based on the overarching concept of the balance of power, largely kept the peace on the continent until 1914, when it fell with a crash that led to the most cataclysmic war (to that time) in European history. The collapse that led to the Great War had many causes, but perhaps none so important-and certainly none so consequential for the aftermath-as the problem of German power. This had emerged with full force upon the completion of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's project to forge a more or less united Germany, with the final phase in the period between 1867 and 1871. From that time until 1945 (with a hiatus from 1918 until the late 1930s, or the "phony peace"), dealing with the "German problem" was central to forging arrangements that could bring some reasonable predictability and a method of preventing a radical imbalance of power (and hence the risk of a major European war). These efforts, too, failed and cataclysmically so. After the Second World War, one of the central problems on the continent was how to deal with the future of German power.One key objective, shared by all the nations of Europe and extending into the time of the division of Europe between East and West, was to keep Germany from again being a principal source of instability and potential conflict in Europe-in other words, to "keep Germany down," in the oft-quoted phrase attributed to Lord Ismay, NATO's First Secretary General.2 Furthermore, once the lines of division in Europe solidified, with Germany divided between the American, British, and French occupation zones on one side and the Soviet zone (later becoming the separate nations of West Germany and East Germany) on the other, there was tacit East-West agreement to keep the country divided-one of the few things on which all could agree.But concern about growing German power from 1867 onward was not the only problem plaguing Europe. Beginning in the mid-1940s, there was awareness of Soviet power in the heart of the continent-awareness that had been building for some time, certainly from the solidification of Bolshevik control in Russia and the formal creation of the Soviet Union in 1924-that embraced the old Russian empire at close to its furthest historical dimensions. The Second World War and the defeat of Nazi Germany-and especially the central role of Soviet forces in bringing about that defeat-brought Soviet military power and then progressively developing communist control to the middle of Germany, as well as north and south along a line that stretched, as Winston Churchill put it, "[f]rom Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic[. …