PETER APPS: Questions over how long US leadership in Nato will last

London — When it comes to discussions around who the next secretary-general of Nato should be, one country almost invariably pulls the strings.

“What usually happens is you get agreement first,” said one diplomat at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels. “Then you have a meeting, and the US ambassador says: ‘this person would be good. And everyone agrees’.”

In the run-up to next week’s Nato summit of national leaders in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, the US has once again been front and centre. Late last month, secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg made his way to Washington to see US President Joe Biden, before this week receiving unanimous alliance agreement to extend his term of office until October next year.

After four years of Donald Trump left some on both sides of the Atlantic questioning the future of the alliance, the 16 months since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have seen a dramatic reassertion of US leadership, commitment and interest in Europe.

But behind-the-scenes at the alliance, there are questions over how long that will last.

“What we are seeing now may be the last classic transatlantic US administration,” said another diplomat at Nato, pointing to Washington’s mounting preoccupation with confronting China in the Pacific and perhaps mounting Trump-style US isolationism.

That might represent a major challenge. While the US makes up around 54% of Nato’s economic output, it makes up 70% of defence expenditure — though that expenditure also includes other regions, including Asia and the Middle East.

Both following Putin’s February 2022 invasion and the earlier 2014 annexation of Crimea, the US was the first major allied nation to reinforce nervous countries in Eastern Europe, as well as by far the single biggest backer of Ukraine itself when it comes to weapons and intelligence.

Over the last two decades, Washington has also occupied a valuable piece of ideological middle ground within the alliance: less hawkish on the Kremlin than Eastern and Central European states, but also less prone to rapprochement and unrestricted trade in France, Germany or some other Western European members. This has sometimes helped it act as a broker of consensus.

On Ukraine, however, the US has, if anything, been holding other members back — one reason US-made F-16s are unlikely to make it into battle this fighting season.

The US also remains more sceptical than either France or Central and Eastern European members on bringing Ukraine into the alliance as a full and formal member, much to the frustration of the Kyiv government.

For all that, there remains a near-taboo on criticising the US among many alliance members, nervous that if it were to pull back its European members might lack not just military strength but also diplomatic and logistical cohesion to be able to effectively defend themselves.

‘Double-hatted’ backbone

Ever since US General Dwight D. Eisenhower was appointed Nato’s first Supreme Allied Commander Europe at the end of 1951, the US has been the basic framework nation around which almost all Nato military planning has been built.

Both the Supreme Commander and several other crucial roles, including leading Nato air and ground forces as well as those within the Mediterranean are held by “double-hatted” US officers who also lead the Pentagon’s commands covering those areas.

Since the early 2020s, the US has also staffed two of the most essential assistant secretary-general roles — those for intelligence and operations — thereby giving thesecretary-general (who by convention has always been from Europe) steers from more classified US insights than might otherwise be available.

Within the North Atlantic Council that governs Nato activity, the US also has a long-running reputation for providing critical briefings on important matters, while also steering the alliance to adopt similar military and other standards to the Pentagon that allow readier co-ordination and action in time of crisis.

For all that, however, there has been a concern since the very beginning among other Nato members that the US might “fail to turn up” in time of crisis, or take a cold-blooded decision to abandon Europe to its fate.

As French leader Charles de Gaulle once put it, a future US president might prove more reluctant than expected to sacrifice New York to defend Paris or Bonn.

Multiple US presidents, meanwhile, from Eisenhower through Kennedy to Nixon and most recently and outspokenly Donald Trump, have complained repeatedly that Europe has not pulled its weight when it comes defending its own continent, leaving the US to take the strain.

Time for Europe? 

Ever since the 1970s, however, that has been offset with another US worry — that European nations might push too far ahead in building their own structures, leading to a permanent reduction of US influence and a Europe more friendly towards an assertive Russia, perhaps even neutral.

That has led to particularly mixed feelings towards the EU , whose own military structures are considerably less evolved than those of Nato.

Indeed, much of alliance history has consisted of its most powerful nations attempting to persuade each other to do more. In the 1950s, German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer attempted to persuade Eisenhower that the Nato secretary-general should also be American, thereby putting the alliance much more wholeheartedly under US leadership.

Now, in contrast, the Biden administration is rumoured to be keen on current European Commissionpresident Ursula von der Leyen to take over when Stoltenberg stands down next year after a decade in the role. US officials say no decision has yet been made.

Officials say France and Germany are also keen that the next secretary-general comes with strong EU links, with Brexit effectively killing the candidacy of British defence secretary Ben Wallace, whose full-throated support for arming Ukraine more heavily is also said to have cost him some support in Washington.

That may reflect a permanent loss of status within Nato for Britain, the only nation so far to have provided three secretary-generals as well as every deputy supreme commander.

For all that, however, the US is still seen as indispensable. As Nato prepares for a potentially humiliating failure to admit Sweden at the Vilnius summit next week due to repeated Turkish objections, Biden this week invited Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson to Washington.

Even without joining Nato, Sweden has mutual defence guarantees from the rest of the EU under the Lisbon Treaty — but it is the promise of US support in any war that really counts.

Even US-European relations, however, are increasingly dominated by Washington’s rivalry with China. Last month, the Netherlands became the latest European nation to impose export controls on microchips that might go to China, prompting a Chinese embargo on several rare earth minerals vital for electronics and energy generation.

* Peter Apps is a Reuters columnist writing on defence and security issues. He joined Reuters in 2003, reporting from Southern Africa and Sri Lanka and on global defence issues. He has been a columnist since 2016. He is also the founder of a think-tank, the Project for Study of the 21st Century, and, since 2016, has been a Labour Party activist and British Army reservist.