Vital Interests: With the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping across Europe and around the globe, how are the member states of NATO handling this new threat to collective security?

Rose Gottemoeller: You have only to read the newspaper to know how challenging this has been to NATO members, starting with Italy and Spain, but now affecting every single ally without exception. The member states have of course been individually confronting the pandemic, but I want to speak to the way that NATO as an institution is handling this crisis.

NATO has a primary mission which is to continue delivering credible and effective deterrence and defense, but also helping to limit the virus’s spread. That's a new task, a new responsibility with this virus appearing around the globe and NATO has to factor in this frightening threat. But I want to stress for your readers that NATO also has to keep its eye on the prize, and that it is delivering credible and effective deterrence and defense. That means despite the fact that NATO has cut back on exercises and training in person, we still have to be able to move troops around if a crisis happens, be able to move military equipment around. The work that's been done in recent exercise series points to the fact that NATO can continue to do that, despite this pandemic.

The bottom line from NATO's perspective, its primary responsibility is continuing to be well served by what it is capable of doing. Now the flip side of that is helping to limit the virus’s spread. I'm happy to talk about that in some detail as well.

VI: I noticed in the NATO Strategic Concept, the guide that outlines procedures for future threats, there is no mention of the prospect of a pandemic. Is it standard for NATO not to plan for involvement in what might be considered a domestic health emergency? What about contingencies to deal with bio-weapons that could be used to spread a contagion?

Rose Gottemoeller: It hasn't perhaps been mentioned specifically, but there is a necessary focus on resilience in the alliance and that is against all types of threats, both manmade threats, such as an incursion coming across the border in Lithuania, and also natural threats. We do a lot of work through the Euro-Atlantic Disaster Response Cooperation Centre on responding to natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires, even heavy snowfalls. We've had quite a bit of cooperation going on in that area in recent years with the Balkan states, for example.

Because NATO prepares to provide relief in natural disasters, it's at least somewhat prepared to address a pandemic of this kind. Did any of us predict this particular pandemic and how it was going to spread? It doesn't surprise me that the strategic plan doesn't specifically call it out. I do want to say that resilience is part of NATO's modus vivendi, its basic mindset, and so that also prepares the institution to help out.

VI: When it comes to cooperation between the NATO member states in Europe with this virus, is NATO sending equipment and personnel to places like Italy to help them out in this situation? Or to Spain or Germany? Are they actually dispersing troops and material?

Rose Gottemoeller: Yes. NATO has its own strategic airlift capability and NATO has been helping with that to lift over 200 tons of crucial medical equipment which was supplied by China and South Korea to the Czech Republic, Romania, and Slovakia. NATO has also delivered field hospital tents to Luxembourg.

In the case of Italy, you sometimes see action to assist as a NATO institutional matter, and sometimes things are done not under the NATO aegis or rubric, but on a more or less bilateral basis. So the United States has delivered medical equipment to Italy and the Poles have sent a medical team down there. The Czech Republic itself has donated 20,000 protective suits to both Italy and Spain. It's a mixture of helping out with what we call strategic airlift, that is the ability to move things around Europe, and actually providing protective suits and medical equipment and teams of doctors to help where the need is most urgent.

VI: The Trump administration's attitude toward NATO and its European member states has been confrontational. President Trump is even using briefings on the coronavirus to rail against NATO - threatening trade sanctions for countries that are, in his mind, not meeting their NATO funding obligations while refusing to answer questions about whether the United States would without question come to the defense of NATO allies. How is this attitude being taken within NATO?

Rose Gottemoeller: I like to draw a contrast between the displeasure of the President and the attitude of the United States government as a whole. The way I do that is to talk about what the United States, in actual fact, has been doing in recent years, and that is upping its cooperation with NATO. Although it had to be cut back because of the coronavirus pandemic, there was a big exercise planned this year, and the United States was going to move over 9,000 pieces of heavy equipment across the ocean. This exercise was called Defender Europe 20 and it was supposed to be gigantic, with more troops deployed than at any time since the big Reforger exercises during the Cold War years.

The Americans were ready to show that they could move 6,000 soldiers and 3,000 pieces of equipment from the U.S., plus 9,000 vehicles and pieces of equipment that were prepositioned already in Europe. The United States has been investing in and building up those prepositioned stocks in the last few years as it became clear that we would have to consider deterrence and defense again against Russia. Long story short, it's important to listen to what the President has to say because that has lit a fire under NATO allies, I'll come round to that in a second, but also look at what the wider U.S. government has been doing, which is continuing to support NATO in very important and pragmatic ways, and that includes the Congress.  Of course, Congress is responsible for the budget and they have been willing to support bigger budget numbers for NATO in recent years. 

On the flipside, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg just did his annual report on the 19th of March. He was able to make the point that NATO is continuing to up its investment in burden sharing in response to the defense investment pledge that was made in Wales in 2014.

I always like to stress that this is a firm commitment by the allies that was made in 2014 in direct response to Russia's seizure of Crimea and threats resulting from the rise of ISIS. So there was a counterterrorism concern, as well as the worry about Russia that prompted NATO members to realize greater levels of commitment were urgent and necessary.

In that setting, all NATO members decided they were going to spend 2% of GDP by 2024, and they were all going to also spend 20% of that amount on modernizing and replacing obsolete equipment. My way of thinking about Trump's role is that he jolted the allies into more decisive action in this regard, but they had already been moving in that direction by 2015. The drop in defense spending, which was in response to the financial crisis in 2008/2009, had already corrected itself as numbers were starting to rise. However, you did see a big jump after President Trump came into office and provoked the allies about their contributions. There was a 4.6% increase in this year’s funding according to Jens Stoltenberg's numbers, which is going to represent an additional $400 billion by 2024 in spending on defense among the NATO allies, over and beyond funds from the United States. These are significant numbers and both Jens and I have given Donald Trump the credit for that and done it publicly.

VI: The result of this new l funding will be a more modern NATO force, better able to respond to current threats like the ones you mentioned - Russian meddling and terrorist groups. Will that include improved capabilities to counter cyber attacks and nextgen technologies that all countries and security organizations have to anticipate?

Rose Gottemoeller: Absolutely. It is very interesting that these are precisely some of the issues that the foreign ministers looked at during their last meeting.  How do we, as NATO, improve our resilience? There are going to have to be upgrades to baseline requirements for the telecommunications infrastructure and that is going to be a really big investment. The 5G investment is huge, and everybody knows that, but it's going to be vital for a resilient command and control system.

Also cyber has already been declared a domain of operation for NATO alongside land, air, sea, and space. That means NATO has to be prepared to fight in cyberspace, and so that has been an area of emphasis now for over a year. I would also say that obviously this is an important moment for all institutions, thinking about the aftermath of this coronavirus pandemic and what will they need to do to cope with the future? As I said at the outset, NATO has to keep its eye on the prize of deterrence and defense, steady as she goes to a certain extent, but also is going to need to address some of these issues with more focus.

Enhancing preparedness across all governments is something NATO has been working on to strengthen resilience, as I said, but I think they are honestly going to have to place more emphasis on the health sector going forward, so that will be an important step.

VI: The swift appearance and spread of the coronavirus caught every country off guard and left them on their own to protect their populations. These circumstances bring the question of multinational cooperation and collective security into a stark light. Rather than turning to our allies in Europe to offer assistance and mutual cooperation, President Trump announced a unilateral travel ban against Europeans traveling to the United States and blamed people arriving from Europe for seeding the virus into the United States. There was no prior discussion with European leaders. This prompted a pretty harsh response, from the Presidents of the European Commission and the European Council, who said , “Wait a minute, this is a crisis we're all involved in and this is not the way to approach a mutual threat.” What do you think will be the repercussions of that kind of attitude from the President of the United States?

Rose Gottemoeller: Quite honestly, I think for the NATO allies in Europe and Canada, it's more of the same because they've been beaten up by Trump so much in the years since he came into office. NATO was among the first of the institutions that he visited in May of 2017 and, frankly, that was a very difficult visit and the summit meeting the next summer in Brussels was also a very difficult meeting. It was clear that the President was going to be unrelenting in his criticism of the NATO alliance.

I think the allies have been thinking about this for a long time. Some of them do not agree with this, but President Macron at the end of 2019 declared NATO obsolete because Europe was not taking enough initiative for its own defense, was too focused on allowing the United States to lead at a  time when U.S. leadership, he and other European leaders feared, would not be present as it was in the past. He said that Europe needed to pull up its socks and do more of this itself.

That headline-grabbing line concerned me very much because, in fact, Macron praised NATO’s operational capabilities in that very same interview.  What was disturbing was that he reflected, I think, a lot of frustration in Europe about the fact that the role of the United States in the Alliance is changing, was changing, and that the Allies had to think more for themselves. I think it is a question of who will step forward now and take the leadership role that the United States played historically. There's not one single candidate so that is very much a concern of the allies.

I think from the perspective, again, of the larger U.S. system, there is still the focus on U.S. leadership in the Alliance. I certainly saw it, as I said, when we came a year ago to Washington to celebrate the 70th anniversary of NATO and Secretary General Stoltenberg spoke to a joint session of Congress to standing ovations. It was a demonstrable, strong show of support by the Congress. Again, there's the U.S. government, and there's the White House. I like to draw a distinction there and really emphasize that the support for NATO is still extremely strong in other parts of the U.S. body politic.

VI: Looking at the European Union, the coronavirus pandemic impacts member states to differing degrees. The Italian representative to the EU requested help from Brussels, citing the European Mechanism of Civil Protection for medical equipment to be supplied to Italy and not one single EU country responded. The only country that did was China. Chinese supplies came in and were then distributed with the help of NATO. What does that say about European solidarity during a serious crisis?

Rose Gottemoeller: I can't speak about what's going on in the EU. They obviously are wrestling with their own institutional status and strength during this crisis. Speaking on a personal basis, I would say I am certain that they will come out of this stronger institutionally, that's my opinion of the matter. 

I can speak about what's going on within NATO and that involves an enormous amount of solidarity and the individual NATO countries helping each other out a lot. I was very interested to see pictures in the press of the Luftwaffe bringing in giant transport planes to fly critically ill patients out of France to hospitals in Germany. There are things going on inside the NATO alliance that are really impressive.

I do feel like NATO allies are responding to these calls for help and are doing a lot while they're battling this pandemic themselves. One other thing I'd like to mention is that NATO-EU cooperation has been building up in recent years. The relationship among the EU leadership, the European Commission leadership and Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary-General of NATO, has really strengthened in recent years on the back of a couple of joint statements they signed, first in Warsaw in 2016, and then in Brussels in 2018. There's a huge amount of cooperation going on on things like military mobility and construction of transport infrastructure in Europe. The EU has been really helpful with working with NATO on military mobility and that is going to be helpful in moving forces quickly across Europe, whether in crisis or conflict, or peacetime as now.

The EU-NATO cooperation is continuing to take shape now. I can't say it's having an enormous effect on this crisis per se, but I will say that the kind of cooperation that's going on between NATO and the EU will continue to bear fruit going forward. Finally, it's just one of those things where everybody's trying to keep in contact. I saw a reference where Jens said he had been in touch with Joseph Borrell, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs; he has really been stressing that everybody needs to be working together. This is a huge test for all the allies, all the EU members, 22 of which are also NATO members. If we're not working together in responding to this crisis, we're in trouble.

VI: Putting aside for a moment the unprecedented challenge of the COVID 19 pandemic, there are ongoing tensions among NATO members. Turkey, a member with a large army, is involved in activities that alarm other NATO states. There is the ongoing tragic war in Syria, but now there is also Turkish involvement in Libya, and Erodgan’s relationship with Vladmir Putin. How do these tensions impact NATO solidarity on important issues?

Rose Gottemoeller: Well, first of all, Turkey is a big country with a big army, but they're also one of NATO's original members. When you talk to the operations guys in NATO, those responsible for running NATO operations, they always say that Turkey is a model ally. The Turks are the ones who put up their hands first for going into Afghanistan, for example, and for taking on dangerous tasks, for work we are doing in KFOR, our NATO operation in the Western Balkans. They are in Iraq helping with a training program for the Iraqi armed forces. From the perspective of NATO operations, Turkey is valued as an ally. 

I like to start with that because there's no question there have been tensions with Turkey recently. There have been tensions with Turkey historically. For an example you can look back at the battles over Cyprus in 1974. That was a huge crisis that has yet to be resolved and that involves two NATO allies, Turkey and Greece. This is a situation that NATO has been dealing with for a long, long time, but Turkey is a valued ally and NATO wants to keep them in the tent. That's the first comment.

The other comment is that Turkey has an enormous refugee problem. They have taken in and are supporting over two million Syrian refugees inside Turkey. That's, I think, also important to recognize. It's been a big drain on their budget and they have up to this point  been doing a lot to control refugee flows into Europe in a way that's benefited all NATO allies in Europe. 

But it's a mixed picture, and a problem for the NATO allies. It would be interesting to see what the Foreign Ministers have to say about that, but they've been very seized with the situation in Idlib, I have been stressing that all sides need to come to the table and reach a political solution to the problem and trying in every way they can to support diplomacy. But it's not easy.

I like to compare NATO to a stormy marriage. It's not only Turkey that is a difficult ally. I always say that the decision of de Gaulle, back in ‘67, to withdraw France from the command and control system of NATO was probably the most significant, even existential, threat to the Alliance in its history. A number of NATO allies have been difficult over the years.

VI: Other NATO states are problematic in different ways. Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orbán, has been rolling back democratic institutions and assuming autocratic powers. Poland is also moving in that direction and nationalist movements are on the rise throughout Europe.  If you read the preamble of the NATO charter it proclaims that the alliance is based on principles of democracy, individual freedoms, and rule of law. How does NATO deal with member states becoming increasingly autocratic?

Rose Gottemoeller: First and foremost, NATO, with its primary focus on deterrence and defense, does not itself have the instruments to deal with this kind of domestic political development, which is definitely going in the wrong direction. We're very supportive of what the EU is doing in the case of Hungary. I already saw that there were steps being taken in the EU setting to address this issue. 

That said, we do expect that NATO member states will abide by the language in the preamble to the Washington Treaty speaking about the necessity of adherence to democratic values and rule of law. There will be, I'm sure, some serious discussions of those issues during upcoming ministerials and queries about what's going on and there will be strong urging that this not be the new status quo. Certainly this message is one that Secretary General Stoltenberg never fails to articulate, and I did too when I was the Deputy Secretary General. 

VI: As these governments move away from democratic norms and the principles NATO was founded on, they're also moving in the direction of closer relationships with authoritarian countries, China and Russia. What about the influence of Russia and its longstanding ambition to undermine NATO?

Rose Gottemoeller: Everything NATO has done in the last six years since the seizure of Crimea is to contain Russia’s European ambitions. All that points to a strong, coherent effort based on solidarity among all the allies, with the goal of upping our ability to deter and defend on NATO's Eastern borders. The fact is that, in those battle groups in the Baltic states and Poland, every single NATO ally is represented by military units. That means there is a strong commitment alliance-wide to the deterrence and defense mission. That said, different allies have different attitudes toward interacting with Russia. For example, there's been long-time strong economic relations between Berlin and Moscow.

There are differences, as you know. President Trump has been super critical of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project that Berlin has championed. For NATO, what matters is the fact that there is this strong coherent approach to deterrence and defense. In addition to economic cooperation, Macron has been very interested in better political relations developing with Moscow. That is something that those individual countries are undertaking and NATO watches. They are sovereign states which make their own decisions. NATO doesn’t dictate from headquarters in Brussels how member state governments should carry on their foreign policies. What NATO does insist on is that all participate in this deterrence and defense mission, and we don't see any backing away on that, or people saying, “Well, wait a minute, we don't really need to worry about Russia.” That's not the case at all.

VI: Doesn’t Turkey adopting the Russian S-400 missile defence system present a real problem for NATO’s integrated military policies?

Rose Gottemoeller: I dealt with this issue a lot while I was still at NATO. NATO has a policy that decisions about purchasing weapons systems must be sovereign decisions. Again, they cannot be dictated from NATO headquarters. States decide for themselves what kind of aircraft or air defense or missile defense they are going to buy. But what NATO stresses is that these pieces of equipment must be interoperable with NATO systems overall. In this case, the S-400 system is never going to be interoperable with NATO.

We said to the Turks, “This doesn't make any sense. In fact, it's a waste of money. It should be from your perspective as well, because if we have a coherent NATO integrated missile and air defense system, it will be better for protecting you in your neighborhood.” But this is one of those things. Sometimes, as you know, leaders can be very hard-headed and just want it their way. 

VI: This deal with the Russians was, of course, Erdogan using it as leverage against the United States.

Rose Gottemoeller: Exactly, and the Russians are very gleeful about that; they're keen to sell S-400s in a lot of different places, so it was a good marketing technique from the Russian perspective as well. But it's been interrupted now by a number of things, including the crisis in Syria where the United States is trying to continue to work behind the scenes to deconflict militarily, and Russia and Turkey are trying to work with the Assad regime to resolve the situation in Idlib. There's just been a lot going on in the region so the attention is not now so much on the S-400s. I don't know where that's going to go, but NATO wasn't happy about it, there's no question.

VI: And then there is the influence of China?

Rose Gottemoeller: When I first arrived in 2016, China was barely a topic at NATO.  It's very interesting, but what woke up the NATO allies to Asia was not China, but the DPRK testing of long-range missiles in the 2017 time frame. It became very clear immediately to NATO allies that they had to care about threats emanating from North Korea. So that woke them up to the necessity of paying closer attention to countries in that region and trying to work to temper the DPRK behavior. As a result, the interest in more political-military dialogue with China became higher on the NATO agenda. Interestingly, NATO has had for a couple of years military-to-military staff talks going on with China, so there were some contacts with the People’s Liberation Army. But I would say, it was the North Korean missile tests that got NATO more interested in Asian political dialogues.

Then afterwards, as developments went forward  -  particularly as the Belt and Road Initiative became much more active in Europe per se, particularly in the Balkans where the Chinese have been helping to fund the construction of an expressway in Montenegro - China became a focus in Europe itself. There are other examples of them upgrading port facilities or purchasing shares in port authorities across Europe. The United States and a number of others in the Alliance said, "We need to think about what the implications of this are for our military mobility." 

Absolutely, China can make investments, that's all very well and good, China's sitting on an enormous pile of cash. If they want to build better roads for people, that's all to the good, but what causes a problem is, first of all, if the loans that they offer are so structured that countries end up drowning in them, that's a wrong approach. That has been seen by others, particularly in Bangladesh for example, throughout Africa, other places. That's a problem.

Number two, if from a NATO perspective, suddenly NATO is having trouble getting access to port facilities when they need them, we need to ensure that arrangements are free and clear for the movement of military equipment. 

Chinese technology is another issue.  A number of allies have been very concerned about the efforts of Huawei to sell 5G communications equipment to NATO member states.  Will there be implications for the security of NATO communications?  That is a serious question.  Those kinds of issues definitely alerted NATO to the fact that China is coming to Europe now and, therefore, we need to be paying attention.   

If you look at the London statement of the leaders in December, they did stress studying both the challenges and opportunities that China offers. I like to say, let's look at the past examples. When we had that major crisis with the pirates off the coast of Somalia back in 2014 and 2015, the Chinese were among those who stepped forward and helped to provide naval support, and we shut the piracy down.  It was actually an EU-led operation, but NATO was participating as well.  Thus, we can say that China can also be a good guy, and we need to be thinking about ways to encourage that tendency.

VI:  We're coming to the end of our time. Thank you for providing useful insights on the status of NATO and Europe in the challenging circumstances of a debilitating pandemic as well as coping with other current and future threats.

Rose Gottemoeller is the Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Center for Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Before joining Stanford Gottemoeller was the Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2016 to 2019, where she helped to drive forward NATO’s adaptation to new security challenges in Europe and in the fight against terrorism.  Prior to NATO, she served for nearly five years as the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security at the U.S. Department of State, advising the Secretary of State on arms control, nonproliferation and political-military affairs. While Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification and Compliance in 2009 and 2010, she was the chief U.S. negotiator of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with the Russian Federation. Prior to her government service, she was a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, with joint appointments to the Nonproliferation and Russia programs. She served as the Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center from 2006 to 2008, and is currently a nonresident fellow in Carnegie’s Nuclear Policy Program. She is also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.