3
of the Soviet Union, and today, small states seeing little alternative to security under the
NATO umbrella are also obliged on cue to step forth onto the international stage, so they
can be seen in U.S.-led operations—against rogue militaries in the Balkans, against
Taliban remnants in Afghanistan, or against Baathist remnants in Iraq.
Yet, while much conventional analysis rightly confers attention on the qualms of
large European states—particularly France and Germany—against U.S. initiatives,
concern over the transatlantic gap may be distracting observers from an important
dynamic among the small states entering NATO.
1
Structural theories oversimplified the
small state role in 1945 in the sense of ignoring their independent and enduring national
interests. In 2005, after a sea change in the security threat to NATO, this presumption
may still be convenient, but it is far more misleading. Now, perhaps more than ever,
small states coming into NATO have bargaining leverage. As they have in the past,
small allies can be expected to use that leverage in pursuit of independent interests.
If this expectation comes to pass, it will have policy implications for Western
security and US-Europe relations, especially if NATO continues to expand. More
profoundly, the claim also challenges our understanding of how NATO moderates
international politics. The following section reviews how NATO is seen to impose costs
on states, an understanding that can be broken down according to the discordant notes
struck by US versus European complaints about the transatlantic alliance. Then, three
mechanisms are proposed to explain why the traditional views of how NATO works miss
an important constructive dynamic for small members that maintain idiosyncratic
1
Informative analyses of the transatlantic gap include Robert De Wijk, “Europe’s Global Role—European
Military Reform for a Global Partnership,” Washington Quarterly vol. 27, no. 1 (2003): 197-210; John
Peters, et al., European Contributions to Allied Force: Implications for Transatlantic Cooperation (Santa
Monica, CA: RAND, 2001); and David Yost, “The NATO Capabilities Gap and the European Union,”
Survival vol. 42 (Winter 2000-2001): 97-128.
Convention