NATO leaders are in Washington this week for a historic summit as the alliance celebrates its 75-year anniversary.
What will define the next 75 years of the Western alliance? We asked 30 RAND researchers about the major challenges facing NATO today—and what opportunities NATO could seize to help secure its future. Here's what our experts said.
Challenge to overcome
“For 75 years, NATO has deterred conventional and nuclear attack, so its adversaries have resorted to unconventional means. NATO must ensure these sub-military forms of warfare do not undermine unity as it maintains focus on nuclear and conventional attacks.”
Opportunity to seize
“As WWII faded from memory, people dismissed NATO’s 'negative' benefit of deterring attack. With war in Europe today, NATO can demonstrate its 'positive' benefits of providing peace and improving economic security by investing in defense and technology.”
Challenge to overcome
“Vital NATO interests are at stake in a potential China-Taiwan conflict, yet NATO doesn't have a strategy, policy, posture, or plan for what to do if such a contingency arises.”
Opportunity to seize
“NATO should move away from the two-percent-of-GDP measure to a more meaningful approach to measuring real burden-sharing.”
Challenge to overcome
“Beyond sustaining the defense investment surge, the biggest land mine for NATO is the future of European politics—the potential for extremist parties and rising ideological cleavages to shake the alliance's unity and political foundations.”
Opportunity to seize
“The revolution in drones, AI, and related technologies offers the potential to revolutionize how NATO defends its most threatened members—if the institution can coalesce on innovative ideas and investments.”
Challenge to overcome
“If NATO is to effectively prepare for the return of great-power competition, it will need a greater sense of unity to promote decisive action. This will require a robust set of tools to reinforce political cohesion, consultations, and policy coordination.”
Opportunity to seize
“The renewed focus on warfighting transformation provides an opportunity to both strengthen deterrence and defense posture in the Euro-Atlantic area and enable greater burden-sharing.”
Challenge to overcome
“NATO needs to expand its transatlantic perspective as the Ukraine war takes on an increasingly global nature with China, North Korea, and Iran playing pivotal roles.”
Opportunity to seize
“NATO has demonstrated unity and now has an opportunity to ensure its readiness for future challenges.”
Challenge to overcome
“How NATO integrates emerging technologies, including AI, space, and UAVs, in its military architecture will determine its future warfighting edge and its successful transformation. Getting it right at scale, at speed, and in time will be critical.”
Opportunity to seize
“As the Euro-Atlantic and Asia-Pacific theaters become increasingly linked, NATO has a unique opportunity for cooperation with South Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, especially on issues such as emerging technologies, resilience, and cyber.”
Challenge to overcome
“Arguably, despite Russia's continued revanchism, the greatest challenge to NATO today comes from within the alliance—particularly rising populism and publics that continue to question the value of the alliances—rather than from adversaries abroad.”
Opportunity to seize
“If European countries rearm and spend two percent of their GDP on defense, it could change not only many American perceptions of the value of NATO but also change European security—if not global security—for the better.”
Challenge to overcome
“Even before Russia achieves its reconstitution aims, a partially reconstituted Russian military will pose a significant threat—and potentially a more unpredictable threat—to NATO interests. This will complicate NATO planning in the coming years.”
Opportunity to seize
“While cooperation among Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea threatens global security, countering this coalition is an opportunity for NATO to demonstrate leadership and its continued relevance in ensuring the stability of the international order.”
Challenge to overcome
“After major combat operations end, Ukraine will likely need a stable Western force presence to back up any Western security guarantees. Frontline NATO members, including Poland, Romania, and the Baltics, have such a presence.”
Opportunity to seize
“NATO can best bolster European security by working closely with the EU. Ukraine has benefitted from combined EU and NATO efforts to marshal support. Unlike NATO, the EU can do this in the defense, economic, and sanctions realms.”
Challenge to overcome
“U.S. domestic politics.”
Opportunity to seize
“The alliance will have to improve cohesion among NATO states in their aim to help Ukraine win the war.”
Challenge to overcome
“Deciding NATO membership for Ukraine might spur a contentious debate that harms cohesion. Ukraine's accession could increase the risk of war if—after a settlement is reached in the current war—Russia attacks Ukraine again. However, Ukraine would benefit NATO with its experienced military and greater ability to defend against Russia and other threats.”
Opportunity to seize
“There is reenergized interest in improving the Western alliance's defense industrial bases. Greater coordination and investment would strengthen NATO's ability to deter threats and support partners and allies.”
Challenge to overcome
“The alliance can meaningfully integrate gender perspectives to all NATO operations, moving beyond the 'add women and stir' approach to Women, Peace, and Security.”
Opportunity to seize
“NATO has expanded to include Sweden, which has a wealth of knowledge and experience in considering gender in operations.”
Challenge to overcome
“NATO has responded adeptly to the crisis-response challenge of Russia's war on Ukraine. But confronting the long-term challenge of dealing with Russia after the war ends will be a much more complex endeavor for a consensus-based organization.”
Opportunity to seize
“NATO has an opportunity to bring more uniformity to procurement since there will be much more purchasing following allies' massive donations to Ukraine from their existing stocks.”
Challenge to overcome
“Russia is reportedly using banned chemical weapons to attack Ukraine and has threatened the use of nuclear weapons against NATO nations if they intervene to help. Russia is also conducting a disinformation campaign regarding its biological weapons program.”
Opportunity to seize
“NATO nations have developed a new concept to detect and respond to disease outbreaks. If implemented, this concept could help Europe—and perhaps countries around the world—prevent outbreaks from becoming epidemics.”
Challenge to overcome
“NATO has yet to find a way to have the EU participate formally in its strategy-setting. There are informal consultations, but the Western alliance needs to integrate military, political, and economic instruments of power.”
Opportunity to seize
“NATO is taking over the U.S. role of coordinating allied arms supply support to Ukraine. If it works well, this could be a new area of expertise and could foster standardization.”
Challenge to overcome
“Resource constraints and differing assessments of potential Russian aggression against NATO are slowing the strengthening of member military capabilities, defense industry, and resilience that is required to realize allied strategy and prepare for possible war.”
Opportunity to seize
“Deepening NATO's partnerships with Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea on terrorism, cyber, space, maritime issues, energy security, new technologies, and defense can bolster mutual security and the global international order.”
Challenge to overcome
“NATO needs to be able to counter Russia's ability to achieve some measure of 'sea denial'—curtailing NATO nations' ability to use the sea for civilian and military purposes—in the Baltic Sea and elsewhere.”
Opportunity to seize
“The impact of Sweden and Finland joining NATO is tremendous. These nations bring formidable capabilities and excellent geographic advantages to the alliance.”
Challenge to overcome
“As the U.S. focuses more efforts on the China challenge, NATO will need to decide what kind of a role it will take in the Indo-Pacific, and European allies will need to assess what a credible European pillar of NATO looks like.”
Opportunity to seize
“In light of the war in Ukraine and the EU's new defense industrial strategy, the time is ripe for European allies to build a robust and collaborative defense industrial base that is both resilient and flexible for a 21st-century security environment.”
Challenge to overcome
“The combined size of NATO militaries is dwarfed by the size of the commercial markets for vehicles, aircraft, and ships. As the civilian transport world embraces energy transition, NATO militaries may have limited ability to shape these markets.”
Opportunity to seize
“As allies chart their path through the energy transition, NATO has a number of levers to shape interoperability in operational energy. These include concepts and doctrine, standards, exercises, and facilitating information exchange.”
Challenge to overcome
“Technologies such as AI hold huge potential for NATO. But there is a risk that a consensus-based alliance of 32 nations falls behind more agile competitors in the race to innovate, or that divergent approaches to technology erode NATO interoperability.”
Opportunity to seize
“There is much more that NATO could be doing in partnership with the EU to bolster the resilience and preparedness of societies, economies, and critical infrastructure. This is essential in an age of growing state threats, climate change, and tech disruption.”
Challenge to overcome
“NATO continues to play a vital role in European security in the face of an aggressive Russia, but it faces varying recognition of this threat from some members.”
Opportunity to seize
“The summit presents a key opportunity to build on NATO's nascent space policy and structure at an inflection point for NATO and space power.”
Challenge to overcome
“Some allies have moved away from the original April 1949 NATO tenets of liberal democracy and cohesive support for each other—and toward autocracy and support for the Global South. The result is fractured decisionmaking.”
Opportunity to seize
“Multinational security cooperation for NATO allies and partner nations is key. This approach provides supported states with options and allows them to more easily make decisions in their interests.”
Challenge to overcome
“China is supporting and modernizing the Russian military-industrial complex. A Russian war industry backed by China’s capacity and production will challenge a whole-of-alliance approach to materially supporting Ukraine in the long run.”
Opportunity to seize
“Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine has spawned two new NATO member states and created the most cohesion the alliance has had in a very long time. The opportunity for greater integration, standardization, and unity within NATO continues to grow.”
Challenge to overcome
“I'll be watching to see how NATO addresses intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance challenges—not just on its eastern front, but also over the vast expanses of the Arctic. Russian missiles, bombers, and subs can already range the continental United States via the Arctic. This will soon be true for China's systems, too.”
Opportunity to seize
“One positive outcome of the war in Ukraine is recognition that the United States needs to coproduce defense materiel quickly and at scale in the wartime theater. This will be a potentially decisive challenge to U.S. national security objectives in the Indo-Pacific.”
Challenge to overcome
“Despite NATO coming together to support Ukraine's defense against Russia's aggression, the increasing appeal of populist and quasi-authoritarian politics threatens the alliance's foundation as a coalition of democracies.”
Opportunity to seize
“The integration of Sweden and Finland marks the first time—since the initial influx of Former Warsaw Pact states—that countries with significant military capabilities have joined NATO. This creates an opportunity to readdress the fundamental of burden-sharing.”
Challenge to overcome
“NATO faces the problem of competing demand signals to resupply Ukraine, replenish NATO’s equipment stocks, and sustain military force rebuilding for defense and deterrence. It must also make defense industry supply lines more resilient.”
Opportunity to seize
“Today, NATO is reinventing itself in response to the changing security environment. For example, the new regional defense plans allow the alliance to again prove its key role in the defense and deterrence of its member states.”
Challenge to overcome
“It is possible that a future U.S. administration will substantially reduce its traditional level of leadership and support for the alliance because of a shift in American domestic politics or a conflict in Asia that consumes U.S. attention and resources.”
Opportunity to seize
“Russia has incurred major losses in Ukraine and will face challenges dealing with either defeat or victory. This gives NATO a window of opportunity to make major changes in structure and defense plans—even if they are disruptive to the alliance in the near to medium term.”
Challenge to overcome
“Facing aging and declining populations, European militaries will have to demonstrate that they can keep recruiting volunteers—or risk falling back to conscription—to both deter Russia and decrease their reliance on the United States.”
Opportunity to seize
“American arms production and export is undergoing a transformation at the same time that Europe's defense industrial base is being revitalized. This offers new opportunities for transatlantic coproduction and codevelopment of systems.”
Challenge to overcome
“NATO countries must have the will to make long-term investments—individually and collectively—in a robust defense industrial base that has the variety and excess capacity to adjust to a broad set of conflicts.”
Opportunity to seize
“NATO has yet to leverage its advanced industries to develop configurable, high-volume, low-cost munitions. Next-generation smart and cluster munitions would be more responsive and effective while reducing collateral damage.”
Challenge to overcome
“One of NATO's greatest challenges will be contending with Russia in the long term and agreeing on optimal post-war goals—especially as a near-term Russian defeat in the ongoing conflict appears less and less likely.”
Opportunity to seize
“Finland's and Sweden's accessions as NATO members give the rest of the alliance an opportunity to learn from the two countries’ whole-of-society approach to defense and resilience. This could help better prepare NATO citizens for today's threats.”
Digital Credits
Deanna Lee (content, production) and Pete Wilmoth (editing)
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