by Renee M Earle
In 2024, NATO’s 32 members are celebrating the alliance’s 75th anniversary. While each enlargement has made the alliance stronger and member states safer, each also brought obstacles and concerns that new and older members had to overcome. Maintaining unity and unanimity in a growing organization has remained a constant challenge, including today as members disagree on further enlargements, fail to meet spending goals, slide from democratic principles, and face the security challenges of each new decade. In short, since its founding in 1949, it has taken alert and determined effort to arrive at NATO’s 75th. While serving at US embassies in Prague, Ankara, and Paris, I had the opportunity in public programs to support alliance enlargement and reinforce its members’ commitment.
The First Post-Communist NATO Enlargement
I served in the Czech Republic as a public diplomacy officer from 1996 to 2000. The Clinton administration advocated the accession to NATO of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland before the Madrid NATO summit in 1997. While the Czech government enthusiastically favored NATO accession, polls in 1997 showed that only 40 percent of the Czech public was in favor.
Opposition could be found not only in the Czech Republic but also in the United States. A New York Times October 1996 editorial carried in The International Herald Tribune titled its call to the US Senate “Don’t Enlarge NATO,” arguing that the approaching 50th anniversary of NATO was not a sufficient reason to speed up the enlargement and risk what it considered more important policy concerns, such as ensuring that Russia’s transition to democracy and a market economy was not negatively affected by an enlargement that could have political costs for Russia’s leadership.
To offset this last concern, NATO was working hard on the Russia-NATO charter which would establish the Russia-NATO Council before the decision on accession of new NATO members at the Madrid Summit in July 1997. The charter would define future relations between Russia and NATO. While the charter sought to reassure Russia, it also caused renewed concerns among the prospective new members as well as some in Congress about Russia’s continued influence in eastern Europe. Additional concerns in the United States and other member countries centered around whether in such a short period of post-communist change, the three prospective new members really had the democratic credentials to join the alliance.
Deploying US Public Diplomacy Tools in NATO Information Campaigns
US embassies in the three prospective new member states as well as in other NATO member countries mounted information campaigns that favored the NATO enlargement. At the US embassy in Prague, we worked hand-in-hand with the Czech government, including the Czech military, to inform and persuade a larger portion of the Czech public to embrace NATO membership. Specific concerns voiced by some Czechs included whether the status of the new members would be equal to that of the older members. Accompanying this doubt was an aversion to another entanglement where, like under the Warsaw Pact, Czechs feared that the Czech Republic would be subservient, finding itself once more under the control of larger, more powerful nations, including the United States. These concerns were rooted in experience not only with communism but also with the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Before the widespread use of the internet, our approaches to public information campaigns focused on newspaper op-eds and public appearances by US officials at university and think thank seminars and conferences, as well as on local television programs. We also aimed to enlist “third-party endorsers” to make the case: Czech opinion leaders (officials, parliamentarians, media, think tanks, and academics) who spoke and wrote in favor of their country’s membership. To engage these influencers, we often invited them on a “NATO tour,” which generally included a trip to Brussels headquarters and other NATO member states where they would be briefed on NATO’s fundamental principles and practices. The briefings emphasized that NATO is an organization that adheres to consensus, so that each member state, no matter how large or small, must agree before a decision can be taken. Visits to a smaller member state such as the Netherlands were particularly useful since they offered striking examples of smaller nations that participate and influence above their territorial or population weight.
The Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland became NATO members on March 12, 1999. With the time difference between Washington and Prague, we were able to host a streamed viewing of the induction ceremony in Independence, Missouri at the American cultural center in Prague. There were tears of jubilation among our Czech guests with whom we had worked hard to persuade the Czech public during the preceding two years. Later, the Czech Ministry of Defense recognized embassy Prague public affairs support for the achievement with a commemorative plaque.
Addressing Lagging NATO Support in Member States
NATO tours were also useful tools in addressing concerns and building public support for continued NATO membership in long-standing member states such as Turkey or for rejoining NATO’s military command in the case of France.
Ankara was my first posting with the Foreign Service, a training assignment split between responsibilities as assistant press officer and assistant cultural affairs officer, 1986-1989. Although Turkey joined NATO as early as 1952, benefits of membership were still not always a given for the Turkish public, and our public diplomacy activities aimed to strengthen popular support for continued cooperation in the alliance. Once again, we often turned to NATO tours to help persuade opinion leaders. One such “internal” NATO tour was especially memorable for this press officer escorting a group of Turkish journalists to the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz deployed in the Mediterranean as part of a NATO exercise. The visit was not to a ship in port but to one in the middle of the sea. Although the USS Nimitz is one of the largest carriers in the world, boasting the onboard population of a small town, looking down and seeing only a postage stamp in the middle of a blue sea, we held our breaths. As the cargo plane came to its abrupt stop on the carrier deck, even before the formal ship visit began participants felt some pride in their country’s membership in an organization of such strength and capability.
In any successful public diplomacy campaign, an understanding of local perceptions is fundamental. An important component of my work as public affairs officer in Paris from 2002 to 2006 was building support for France’s full participation in NATO, especially as NATO, since the terror attacks of 9/11, had included counterterrorism and stability operations in its scope of work. France, a founding NATO member and early host to its headquarters, had nevertheless had an ambivalent relationship with the organization, remaining torn between independent French sovereignty and full partnership in NATO. In 1966, Charles de Gaulle had withdrawn France from NATO’s military command structure, essentially downgrading its membership. Given this ongoing ambivalence, we were still doing focus groups and NATO tours at the Paris embassy in the early 2000s, seeking to understand what might persuade French officials and the public to support rejoining the military command structure, which France ultimately did in 2009.
From the focus groups and returning NATO tour participants, we learned that, for both long-standing members like France and Turkey and aspiring candidates like the Czech Republic, negative perceptions of the power of the US role in NATO needed to be addressed. While the United States is generally regarded as an essential member of the alliance in Europe, a fine line appears in casting the US as a supportive, committed member versus a dominating one. From a public affairs perspective, we advised that US administrations, starting with US representatives to NATO, in their public appearances and statements would do well to keep in mind that sometimes less is more, and that equal partners don’t always appreciate a public lecture on their performance.
Beyond celebration, last month’s NATO summit in Washington offered an opportunity to renew alliance commitments and focus. Since his election, President Biden has made efforts to reassure European allies about US dedication to the European partnership and multilateralism, hailing NATO as the “cornerstone of transatlantic security” and reversing Donald Trump’s earlier troop withdrawal from Germany. The 2024 Washington Summit Declaration reaffirms NATO as “the unique, essential, and indispensable transatlantic forum to consult, coordinate, and act on all matters related to our individual and collective security.” At the summit, President Biden reminded NATO partners and the American public that the alliance commitment to defend one another, enshrined in Article 5 of the NATO founding treaty, “is iron-clad.” As new challenges arise in Europe, not least Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and also in regions that formerly were considered “out-of-area” for alliance operations, NATO will once again need determination, diplomacy, and thoughtful public diplomacy to safeguard consensus to act for 32 member states.
Renee M. Earle is a retired Public Diplomacy Foreign Service Officer with the rank of Minister-Counselor. She served at embassies in Turkey, USSR/Russia, Kazakhstan, the Czech Republic, France, and the U.S. Mission to the European Union in Brussels. Domestic positions with the Department of State included Diplomat-in-Residence at Duke University in North Carolina, Acting Office Director of Public Diplomacy in the European Bureau, and Chief of the Central Asia Division of the Voice of America, where she directed the Pashto, Dari, Farsi, Uzbek, Azeri, and Turkish language services. Her assignments in Europe and Washington included information outreach about U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.