Fall 2017 JPI

ights. Nevertheless, I would argue NATO accession of Montenegro is threatening to American
national security because it places the United States in a position of potentially triggering a conflict
with Russia, chiefly if Russia were to test NATO's propensity for collective defense in regards to
Article 5.
STRUCTURAL CONCEPTUALIZATION OF NATO
Before any relevant discussion, one need examine the structural characteristics of NATO. In
the late 1960s, Harlan Cleveland, a former United States Permanent Representative to NATO
described it as a “transatlantic bargain.” 6 Using this framework, he argued that the alliance was “based
firmly on unsentimental calculations of national self-interest on both sides of the Atlantic.” However,
as Cleveland asserts, it was likewise especially noteworthy to append that “it also depends on some
amorphous but vital shared ideas about man, government, and society.” 7 It’s important to remember
that the concept of a collective defense was unique at the time of NATO’s founding in 1949. President
George Washington once warned that we should avoid permanent foreign partnerships, a warning
that the US mostly adhered to until 1949. 8 Former British statesman, Lord Palmerston once declared
that “nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests,” an assertion
challenged by the very persistence of the NATO alliance. 9 Structurally, the NATO alliance is bound
by fourteen articles of the original North Atlantic Treaty signed in Washington on April 4, 1949, and
subsequently ratified promptly in each respective state. The treaty was modeled on the United Nations
Charter, signed on June 25, 1945 by 51 initial signatories. Both treaties are mirrored on the theories
of Woodrow Wilson, where the “importance to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and
civilizations of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule
of law,” consolidated the world in a cohesive system. 10 This cohesive consensus among the signatory
states in NATO negates the very foundation of alliance theory; theories that have been studied and
written on extensively since the Peloponnesian War. Hans Morgenthau, regarded as the father of
modern-day realist school of thought, wrote in the renowned Politics Among Nations:
[G]eneral alliances are typically of temporary duration and most prevalent in
wartime; for the overriding common interest in winning the war and security
through the peace settlement the interest for which the war was waged is bound
to yield, once victory is won and the peace treaties are signed, to the traditionally
separate and frequently incompatible interests of the individual nations. On the
other hand, there exists a correlation between the permanency of an alliance and
the limited character it serves; for only such a specific, limited interest is likely to
last long enough to provide the foundation for a durable alliance. 11
Nearly seven decades later, (and nearly three decades after the conclusion of the Cold War), the NATO
alliance is still as formidable and efficient as ever. Although the primary purpose that generated the
configuration of institutions in NATO, such as its vast civil and military structure, has evolved and
improved over the years, it still possesses a robust bureaucracy in Brussels and abroad. 12 NATO has
an abundance of independent agencies; an interspersed multinational military command composition;
6 Harlan Cleveland, NATO: The Transatlantic Bargain (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).
7 Stanley R. Sloan, Defense of the West: NATO, the European Union and the Transatlantic Bargain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).
8 Washington’s Farewell Address, 1796, US Department of State, accessed May 01, 2017, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1784-
1800/washington-farewell.
9 Stanley R. Sloan, Permanent Alliance?: NATO and the Transatlantic Bargain from Truman to Obama (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).
1010 NATO, “Founding treaty,” NATO, accessed December 08, 2017,
https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/stock_publications/20120822_nato_treaty_en_light_2009.pdf
11 Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Mc Graw Hill, 1993).
12 Stanley R. Sloan, Defense of the West: NATO, the European Union and the Transatlantic Bargain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).
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