Zhou Bo

Opinion | Only a China-Russia alliance could revive a ‘brain-dead’ Nato. But with that unlikely, the transatlantic alliance may be on its last legs

Nato’s fatal problem is it has no real enemy, with Russia a spent force and terrorism a vaguely defined threat. US efforts to set up China as the new bogeyman are doomed to fail, as Sino-Europe ties warm and Beijing carefully distances itself from Russia

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Nato heads of government watch a marching band perform as they pose for a group photo at the Nato summit at the Grove hotel in Watford, northeast of London, on December 4. Photo: AFP

Zhou Bo

Published: 11:00am, 1 Jan 2020Updated: 11:15am, 1 Jan 2020

If the Nato summit held in London in early December is remembered at all, it will not be because it marked the 70th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, but because it confirmed French President Emmanuel Macron’s comment that the transatlantic alliance was “brain-dead”.

Rather than a show of unity, the summit was marked by public spats, open divisions on policy and dramatic effect. United States President Donald Trump called Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “two-faced” after a video appearing to show him and other world leaders mocking Trump.

Since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Nato has been trying to kill two birds with one stone: portraying Russia as a threat to ensure Nato’s survival and the alliance’s solidarity. Trump is not the first American president to fret about Europe’s “free riders” – as Barack Obama termed them – but he is more successful in bashing them about their obligation to spend 2 per cent of gross domestic product on defence, with his erratic and offensive behaviour.

While Nato’s European members might wish Trump away, their fear is that a US that decidedly pivots towards the Indo-Pacific will gradually reduce its lion’s share of Nato’s spending, leaving Europe’s security to Europeans. To hedge against this, the Europe Union started the Permanent Structured Cooperation (Pesco) in 2017 with a vision of building a European army one day.

Nato’s real problem is not its budget, Russia or terrorism. It is that it does not have an agreed enemy. At the most tense points of the cold war, the defence spending of Britain and France were above 5 per cent of GDP. Faced with genuine threats, no Nato country would hesitate to spend more than 2 per cent of its GDP on defence.

Russia continues to top the list of threats in the London Declaration, but Nato’s European members spend three to four times more than Russia does on defence every year. Citing terrorism as a threat second only to Russia proves precisely that Nato has no major threats.