NATO

Why the U.S. Should Not Arm Ukraine Right Now March 6, 2015 Today, members of Congress and outside voices are continuing the push to send lethal aid to Kiev. These calls are ill-timed, especially while a tenuous ceasefire seems to have taken hold pursuant to the Minsk II agreement reached last month between European powers, Ukraine, and Russia. While the future of the ceasefire remains very much in doubt, a decision to send arms to Kiev now would carry more cost than benefits, undermining rather than protecting U.S. and European interests. Top costs include inducing Russian escalation, giving Putin political cover to violate the ceasefire, and undermining transatlantic unity in confronting Moscow’s aggression. Despite these costs, American arms will not empower Kiev to successfully resist… Read More ›

The Obama Administration is cautiously escalating its efforts to defeat the Islamic State, building an international coalition to support ongoing operations that have included advising Iraqi Security Forces and Kurdish Peshmerga and supporting offensives in Iraq against the Islamic State with airstrikes. But as the United States increases its efforts to push back the Islamic State, it is now more critical than ever to frankly assess the threat the organization poses and formulate clear goals and a sustainable strategy for defeating the Islamic State. The United States needs clear goals and a fully-articulated strategy to avoid mission creep and the risk of miring itself in a potentially long, costly, and inconclusive conflict. The United States needs an honest, clear-eyed assessment of the Islamic State and… Read More ›

Recent reports indicate that Russia has escalated its assistance to rebels in eastern Ukraine with a greater flow of armaments and the direct involvement of around 1,000 Russian troops. This morning, a day ahead of the NATO summit in the United Kingdom, Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to have endorsed a ceasefire plan in Ukraine following conflicting reports. Nonetheless, the summit beginning tomorrow provides an important venue for NATO to respond to Russian aggression to increase European stability regardless of the outcome of the apparently preliminary ceasefire arrangement under consideration. Top agenda items include reassuring NATO member states – particularly Baltic states, where President Obama is currently visiting – of alliance commitments, increasing preparedness for countering unconventional operations like those Russia has conducted in Ukraine, addressing underwhelming… Read More ›

  Lt. Gen. Frederick Hodges, the commander of NATO Allied Land Forces Command, greets Lithuanian Army Col. Vilmantas Tamosaitis, commander of the Iron Wolf Mechanized Brigade. [Lithuanian Ministry of Defense photo by Eugenijus Zygaitis, May 17, 2014]This week, President Obama is meeting with European leaders to discuss security and economic issues amidst continued uncertainty surrounding Ukraine’s future and recent European elections. The European tour offers the opportunity to further the kind of multilateral leadership the President reiterated during his foreign policy speech at West Point last week. And there’s no shortage of challenges. With uneasy NATO allies in Eastern Europe, the United States must offer right-sized reassurance to partners without unnecessarily provoking a Russian response. While this mark may have been hit by Obama’s announced… Read More ›

By Bill French May 2, 2014 | The National Interest How to effectively respond to the crisis in Ukraine has elicited a fierce debate in Washington. Given the stakes, a carefully crafted, longer-term strategy is called for beyond near-term crisis management. But some of the proposals offered entail severe risks and self-defeating consequences. This is especially true of recently renewed calls for a fresh round of NATO enlargement ahead of the alliance’s summit this September in the United Kingdom. These calls appear to be more of a perpetuation of NATO enlargement’s post–Cold War inertia than a seriously thought out strategy that considers the balance of potential costs and benefits. At a minimum, proponents of enlargement have not met the burden of demonstrating its supposed positive… Read More ›

Huff Post Live, Oct 12, 2012 Read More ›

Washington, D.C. – As international leaders converge in Chicago for this weekend’s NATO summit, presidential contender Mitt Romney today issued his latest salvo chastising our allies and the President’s foreign policy. In response, NSN Executive Director Heather Hurlburt (bio) issued the following statement:  “On a day that House Republicans voted to block implementation of an arms control treaty with Russia our NATO allies strongly supported, and ban future reductions of US nuclear weapons in Europe, our allies arriving for the NATO Summit might well wonder what American conservatives’ view of our great Atlantic alliance is.  They won’t get any help from Governor Romney, who issued a statement that said nothing about NATO’s essential partnership in Afghanistan, or the future of NATO’s relationship with Russia, or… Read More ›

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit starts on Sunday, May 20, in Chicago. The issues to be addressed at the summit are broad and include the war in Afghanistan, the future of alliance operations such as last year’s campaign in Libya and nuclear weapons policies. Attempts to move beyond obsolete Cold War deployments, and reverse the weapons’ spread worldwide, have led to global posturing. In Congress, conservatives are looking to buck a bipartisan consensus and have larded this week’s National Defense Authorization Act with billions of dollars in unnecessary nuclear projects, while demanding, against the Pentagon’s advice, an expensive missile defense system for the East Coast. Meanwhile, the Russian government continues to use a European missile defense shield aimed at countries like Iran as… Read More ›

Washington, D.C. – On May 20 and 21, international leaders will meet in Chicago for the first NATO summit on U.S. soil in over a decade. The meetings will showcase the Alliance’s response – and prospects for unity going forward – to the demands posed by transition in Afghanistan, nuclear policy and non-proliferation gains and setbacks, and economic uncertainty in Europe, as the Alliance works against the backdrop of NATO’s out-of-area success in Libya and the continued challenge posed by Syria. On May 15, the National Security Network hosted a press call with Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on European Affairs Chair and 2012 NATO Summit attendee Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and national security experts Amb. James Dobbins and James Goldgeier to preview the NATO summit and assess… Read More ›

The role of alliances in achieving U.S. security and foreign policy goals is again a hot topic of political debate. Oddly, conservative presidential candidates have argued both that the Obama administration is over-reliant on international partnerships and that President Obama has “abandoned our allies.” This is a staple line; Mitt Romney’s foreign policy white paper accuses the president of “undermining our allies.” But in fact the Obama administration has won praise for reinvigorating alliances from Asia to Israel to NATO. And the candidates’ positions toward our allies are scanty at best—if not factually flawed. The Obama administration has backed and rebuilt core American alliances, paying dividends for America. Reassuring Asian allies. As Douglas Paal of the Carnegie Endowment writes, “The [November 2011] Obama trip [to Asia] was… Read More ›