For coming out this morning. Thanks to georgetown university. I hope the rest of the day goes well. Thank you. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2024] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [applause] welcome. Thank you very much. When mark twain, who was the remount humerus and essayist renowned humorist and essayist, was asked about his rumored failing health, he famously answered reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated, and i think nato can empathize with twains reaction, because overall, over the past 75 years, nato has had to navigate many serious tensions among its members. Some of these are rooted in differences inside nato, about a nuclear strategy, the alliance structure, its operations, and others flowed from disagreements over policies of, or by one or more allies, outside, on issues outside of natos purview. Just to give you a flavor of some of these not so important disagreements, during the 1950s, the allies were struggling over the questions of german rearmament, and with succession into nato, the federal public, they debated the implication for the, what was called the massive retaliation doctrine, that approach to nuclear strategy, and there were sharp divisions among washington, paris, and london during the 1956 crisis. The 1965 intense debate over the conflict of flexible response, very bitter and longlasting recrimination over frances withdrawal. Of natos military strategy. Turkey and greece nearly went to war over the cyprus issue, and the euro missiles affair of the 1980s brought to the focus longlasting tensions and disagreements among allied governments, fed by Massive Public protests that times seemed to pose a threat to the aligns itself. It is important, given that background, it is important to keep in mind that ultimately the Alliance Remains strong, during and after the cold war, because its members did not allow its differences ever to override their enduring, shared interest and values, and i think interest and values are both important, have both been important to nato. Of course, a lot of it has changed over the past 75 years. So the question we have to ask is, will be passed be prologue . We will have a twopart discussion, first, sven and susie will discuss how tomato fared during the how nato fared during the cold war, and heidi will discuss the area of operations. We will then turn our attention to the current and potential future challenges facing the alliance, and i have the clock here, hopefully at least 30 minutes for questions from the audience. Let me start with sven. Congratulations on your recent book. As i mentioned, it has been mentioned already, during the first two decades of the postcold war period, nato did shift largely to crisis response, Crisis Management, and counterterrorism, with russias fullscale invasion of 2022 certainly has put deterrence and collective defense back at the center of natos priorities. So, kind of looking over the cold war period, how has natos approach to deterrence and collective defense during the cold war period influence its structure, assessments, policies, and actions and policies today . Basically, what has changed, fundamentally, and what happened . Sven thank you for that question. Let me first of all say what a pleasure it is to be here in georgetown today and to be honest panel with heidi and susie. Change in continuity. It is obvious to come in a way, be tempted to bracket about 30 years of Crisis Management and cooperative security as say, now we are back. Nato has come home. And its true, there are many parallels, and one of the parallels, i like drawing on is back in the 1980s, we used to say that the europeans would always say you are so lucky, america, you have president reagan, bob ho, johnny cash. Europeans would say, we have our heads of government, but we have no hope and no cash. [laughter] and here we go again. So there are many parallels, defense forward, reinforcement, Nuclear Deterrence, manage the central front and the flames, managed below the threshold threats from the adversary, essentially manage escalation. All this is back. But i would put my emphasis on discontinuing, and this has to do with the fact that, for those 30 years of Crisis Management and security, the muscle memory and nato upgraded defense right away, and they became much smaller, much lighter, they were deployed out of area, vulcans within especially to afghanistan balkans but then especially to afghanistan. It was no longer a collected Defense Organization incapacity. Of course, in name it was. Now that it is reinventing that collected defense capacity, theres a war going on, which is not the case back then. Theres limited defense. Europeans are waking up to the demands of not only mobilizing for defense in the middle of germany but further east. The logistical challenge is so much greater. And for 30 years of cooperative security with russia meant that, in large, nato did not move western forces or if your structure eastward. There was nothing there except, of course, military forces of the new allies, limited as it was. All of that has to be invented. And there is very poor between Convention Today and Nuclear Deterrence. It is a weapon of last resort. It was much more integrated and thinking during the cold war, where you had, again, a theory of escalation that may have been imperfect and controversial, but at least it was a coherent theory. Today, there is no theory, and they are having to reinvent that. All of that has to happen not only 32 allies but there is so much else going on in the alliance. Theres the southern flank, which is about terrorism, and if anything has caused a headaches in nato in the 2010s, it is really not crimea in 2014, the annexation, it is the civil war in syria and how that has estranged turkey come of u. S. , and france and led president macron to say nato has become braindead. That was syria, not russia. It is a lot more different than during the cold war. On top of that, you have china, again, we heard ambassador smith say this, emphasize this, and the need, therefore, to develop partnerships with the key u. S. Allies in the indo pacific, that was always nato partnership policy, it was about creating a multilateral framework around u. S. Allies elsewhere. All this at a time when russia is conducting major war in europe. So the complexity compared to the cold war is much greater, the muscle memory is low to nonexistent, and the need for leadership is therefore much greater. And when i say leadership, i dont just mean the high pace of summit that nato has come to depend on, i think there is a limited amount of leadership in those. When i say leadership, ive been clear priorities for how tomato is going to manage its very complex agenda. A cannot address all these issues and say now theres leadership. It has to prioritize, and that is the work in progress. Leo im glad you mentioned the nuclear subjects. Let me turn to susie. Nato, of course, does not owe Nuclear Weapons. It is the weapons of the three nuclear allies, United States, france, and the u. K. , that form the basis for the nato strategy. The goal of natos earlier policy has not fundamentally changed during the cold war, but the strategic balance has changed during that time, and nato had to make important, sometimes very painful, adjustments. You have chronicled some of these in your excellent book, which i would recommend to our audience here come on the euro missile saga of the 1970s and 1980s. It is a long and complicated subject, but i would like to ask you, if you could describe the key considerations that shape natos Nuclear Posture and its policies during the cold war and how those have evolved during the first 20 years or so of the postcold war. Period. Susie yeah. So when you think about natos Nuclear Posture, we start with these two principles of on the one hand deterring aggression in the north atlantic treaty area, and then, as a complement to that, providing reassurance to each and every signatory of the treaty, regardless of their size or geographic location. And when you put it in those terms, it sounds simple, except the geography of the treaty area is incredibly hard to defend. If you had landed, you know, you are a martian, you land on earth in the late 1940s, and you could design an alliance, cato is the last thing you would want to design. You dont want your most powerful actor, on security, the furthest from the flank you are trying to defend. Now, what those two components mean, deterring aggression and providing reassurance, change and evolve over time. In part because the landscape changes, right . You have changes in Nuclear Weapons technology and capabilities as well as threat protection particularly of the soviet union and of course its core successor after 1991. And so the alliance, as in so many places, needs to adapt. There are a few different areas or key themes we might pull out in natos Nuclear Posture over the years, the first being changes in doctrine and strategy. So come at the time of the signing of the north atlantic treaty in april 1940 nine, the United States is the only Nuclear Power on the planet. That changes only a few months later when the soviet union as an aids its first atomic weapon, and of course that is a very different landscape to think of how you deter aggression with a u. S. Nuclear map. By the early 1950s, nato had decided to rely heavily on Nuclear Weapons, including stationing u. S. Battlefield weapons in europe and relied on the strategy, as leo referred to, of massive retaliation, essentially he will go from zero to 60 very quickly. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the viability of that massive retaliation strategy was heavily debated and contested, right . As many allies wondered whether the changing strategic balance between the soviet union and the United States, changing weaponry, meant that that massive retaliation would really protect them. By 1967, the alliance had adopted a new strategy of response based on the principles of escalation, right . So they used all of these hokey metaphors to describe it, a ladder, chained with various links connecting it, my favorite, a seamless robe of deterrence, right . It had no snags within it. At the end of the cold war, the alliances Nuclear Posture changed dramatically and was considerably reduced, given changes of significant cuts to the Nuclear Weapons that natos disposal, down to battlefield weaponry. Treating Nuclear Weapons as weapons of last resort, something that is still lingering in natos Nuclear Posture today. So with all these changes in doctrine and strategy, that is one piece of the posture puzzle. Another is about reassurance, and reassurance is not easily calculated. It is in the eye of the beholder and everchanging, and in an alliance as large and unwieldy as nato, you have a lot of Different Actors with different perceptions of what will in fact reassure them. It is shaped by a series of proposals, successful and failed to come over the years, to share control and ensure greater input in the alliance about what weapon would be fielded, where they would be deployed, and, of course, how and when they might be used. I could point to the atomic stockpile proposals of the late 1950s or the multilateral force, Atlantic Nuclear force proposals that failed in the early 1960s. Instead, the alliance decided to create a committee, the Nuclear Planning group, or mpg, which is still with us. And instead, move toward other forms of reassurance. We could take, for example, the stationing of u. S. Weapons in europe in the early 1980s. The other piece i would flag is that armscontrol has played a central role in natos Nuclear Posture, in large part to signal allies intentions, and often mayo has relied on a tiered approach where they will modernize order field weapons but also oppose armscontrol talks alongside that to manage the costs of those deployments. That is drawing on a broader principle in ally thinking that has long roots enshrined in the report in 1967, sharing dialogue and defense. And so it is this tiered approach that forms the basis of the 1979 dual track decision which calls for the deployment of those that i mentioned a second ago. I focused primarily on the cold war period, because Nuclear Posture is so much less important in the postcold war period. I think this is something we are grappling with now, sort of Nuclear Weapons, the theory of the turns his back, and we are trying to figure out how much of the old cold war contacts can and should inform the conversations today. Leo we will come back i think in a second round here about king ahead to some of the nuclear challenges looking ahead to some of the nuclear challenges. Heidi, it has been mentioned this period, since the end of the cold war, up until, arguably, two years ago, with the russian fullscale invasion of ukraine, natos focus very heavily on operations, including peacekeeping bombs, air conveys a kosovo, serbia, and libya, stabilization and training efforts in afghanistan. One could add training of Iraqi Security forces. And, just to remind you, we all suffer a little bit from amnesia here. At its high point, the natoled operation in afghanistan included approximately a little bit more than 130,000 military personnel. 90,000 of whom were americans and 40,000 of whom allies and partners, 30,000 strictly from allies, canada and the europeans. And there were, at one point, six of our nato allies that suffered, per capita, more killed and wounded in action than u. S. Forces there. Certainly not to minimize the contributions and the sacrifices of the american forces, but we should not forget that bravery and also the losses were not a monopoly of the United States. It was a very long war. I think it is fair to say, though, that those operations had mixed results. And you have written a book, trying to look at how nato went about trying to learn from these operational experiences. Lets start with the question, did the allies even agree on where theyve made strategic errors or what they accomplished through these operations, one of which, of course, is still ongoing, and that is the nato presence in kosovo, although much reduced since the postwar period. Prof. Hardt thank you, again, for the opportunity to be here, to speak. To this point about learning, one of the things that was quite surprising for me in doing the research on learning in a nato context is that nato actually, relative to other International Organizations that are out there, does have quite significant institutionalization. You have a lot of different offices, you have multiple places within the organizations bureaucracy for opportunities to learn. But what i was surprised about that was, despite, of course, the Strong Military culture in this Political Military Alliance, is that so much of the learning happens in the corridors, in the informal spaces. I think i interviewed 120 officials across the alliance, in nato headquarters, etc. , was that much of that learning was through these Interpersonal Networks and relying heavily on oldtimers, many of whom, as we heard earlier, have retired, as sten had mentioned, and are rotating out. Oldtimers who are becoming very important for, you know, the knowledge that they have as these socalled cold war warriors. What does that mean . That means that learning still matters. The advantage of having less informed processes means it encourages people to think and talk about learning. I think one of the big takeaways is that we should maintain these bureaucratic structures, but, unfortunately, we see a large reticence to sit down and read these things. So, to answer your question, yes, there is consensus. Yes, there have been strategic lessons that have been put out. Much of the value, i would say, is in some of the internal documents, and i would say im speaking at a personal capacity, since i worked for the state department, nato desk, at the time of ukraine were invasion, but that in itself is very important, having in creating aces for learning to happen. Even though you have extreme time pressure and they dont have a quite significant reactive culture, to maybe reference what you mentioned. What are some of the lessons that came away from my research . First of all, when we think about afghanistan in particular, one of the questions that i asked was, what do you thing in interviewing all of these government officials is the biggest strategic lesson, particularly strategic failure that you think we should reflect on . To be clear, this was done before the taliban took over. This was several years back. But the key take away was civilian casualties, that we really underestimated the importance of civilian casualties. What is interesting about that is, subsequently, we have seen Research Come out to show that, you know, on a very subnational level, scholars have been able to trade how specific incidences of violence against civilians that has translated to higher rates of radicalization within those areas of afghanistan. So certainly we need to start from the front that civilian casualties matter, for clear, moral reasons. I was say, additionally, civilian casualties matter for operational defense. That is something that came up very clearly. I would very much implore anyone who is continuing to work on nato today to not forget afghanistan. There has been, like i said, these Lessons Learned processes. Some of them have been referenced by former assistant secretary general john. I would encourage you to read my book as well, because there are countless quotes of fol