On the occasion of his first major speech as NATO chief, Mark Rutte, a former Dutch prime minister, did not mince his words, calling on members to “shift to a wartime mindset and turbo charge our defense production and defense spending.”

Cynics would probably say that this was a new secretary-general taking a “rather safe than sorry” approach, warning of existential dangers, or even soliciting bigger budgets. But this is no time for cynicism or looking for ulterior motives, but for recognizing that this was a genuine battle cry for Western countries in the face of military threats coming from different directions.

For too long, the West, members of whom comprise this international security organization, has been hanging on to the post-Cold War euphoria of its “total victory” over the Soviet bloc, in both military terms, and more significantly from an ideological-perceptual view. A combination of military superiority and value-based triumph has led Western countries to erroneously imagine that they are invincible.

From the early days of the post-Cold War era in the 1990s, there have been profound military-security challenges, among them Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the wars in the Balkans, genocide in Rwanda, and many other flashpoints. Moreover, leading powers, mainly Russia and China, have gradually become disgruntled and begun to challenge a unipolar international system dominated by the US.

Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, NATO members preferred to believe that they could procrastinate on investing in defense to meet these growing global threats, and simply enjoy the dividends of peace by investing in their economies and improving their living standards and public services. But Rutte’s speech presented a strong case for ending the denial of danger, rightly reminding the organization’s member states that their paying no heed to Russian aggression against Georgia in 2008 and in the Crimea in 2014, and their refusal to accept the likelihood of Putin launching an all-out war on Ukraine, was signaling their weakness to Moscow, with disastrous consequences.

NATO has also paid scant attention to Russia’s many years of aiding and abetting the Assad family’s brutality in Syria — a regime that has only recently collapsed, but which for nearly 14 years has been responsible for more than half a million deaths and immeasurable suffering for the rest of the population.

The message is twofold. First, while Russia is spending 7 to 8 percent of its GDP on defense, which also amounts to a third of its budget, and as China is quickly catching up when it comes to its own defense expenditure, the average spend for NATO members in Europe and Canada is estimated at just 2 percent of their GDP, which is insufficient to meet future threats.

These figures are a significant increase on only a few years ago, mainly due to a moment of epiphany provided by the onset of Putin’s current war against Ukraine, but also to more than just a nudge from the US during the first Trump administration, an issue that was one of his articles of faith back then, and one that he is likely to pursue with even more zest in his second term. To be sure, these figures are somewhat deceptive in terms of military preparedness, as a large proportion of countries’ defense budgets tends to be allocated to pensions and other items that do not directly contribute to combat power.

The second challenge to NATO members is to accept that the world has entered a period of long-term instability, with increasing threats to Western values and ways of life. This situation requires an increase in military capabilities and preparedness that should be complemented with diplomacy in its widest sense, including investment in soft power. 

Modern wars are increasingly becoming of the hybrid type, and although kinetic wars, as in Ukraine or the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, have proved to be still a large facet of warfare, it is cybersecurity and cyber-disinformation, the introduction of AI, migration, and regular and irregular forces, that all require close attention in terms of new skills and preparation.

The cost of military platforms is also soaring exponentially, and with Western economies growing sluggishly, the diverting of resources to defense expenditure, whose benefits are not easy to measure and demonstrate, while public services are yearning for additional resources, has become a polarizing issue in many societies.

As NATO’s new secretary-general underlined in his remarks, the threat to Europe is no longer theoretical or abstract but now sits on its doorstep: “Hostile actions against Allied countries are real and accelerating. Malicious cyber-attacks on both sides of the Atlantic. Assassination attempts on British and German soil. Explosions at an ammunition warehouse in Czechia. The weaponization of migrants crossing illegally into Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland. Jamming to disrupt civil aviation in the Baltic region.”

Any delay in building capabilities to respond to these types of threats will only encourage Putin, and others, to undermine NATO’s member states.

As a result of the war in Ukraine, since February 2022 much of the focus has understandably been on Putin’s threat to Europe, but the challenges originating from China and Iran and this pair’s collaboration with Russia are also a major concern. With Donald Trump elected for a second term, tensions with Beijing are almost guaranteed to rise, but at the same time his return to the White House, considering his prickly relations with NATO in his first term, do not necessarily suggest easy relations with NATO.

Trump sees the rest of NATO’s members as free-riders at the expense of the US, although this has changed considerably and most countries are now meeting the expectation of spending 2 percent of their GDP on defense. Still, after four years of ironclad commitment by the Biden administration to its NATO allies, it remains to be seen if a second-term Trump and his hawkish appointees to key foreign and defense posts will be more amenable to playing the leading role in NATO, including in terms of providing a nuclear umbrella.

NATO as a collective security instrument has come full circle since its formation in 1949, when the fault lines between the two rival US and Soviet blocs were very clear and demonstrated the need to defend Europe and the rest of the world from Soviet aggression. But in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, NATO became a collective security mechanism in search of a purpose, and its members on more than one occasion disagreed on how to respond to crisis situations, and acted unilaterally instead of collectively.

The war in Ukraine and the challenges emanating from China are contributing to the 21st century model of NATO as defender of the West and its values, and the decisions by Finland and Sweden to join the organization after decades of sitting on the fence have demonstrated a general fear of Russia. But this still leaves open the question of whether member states are capable of meeting all of the current challenges by developing a clear collective security vision supported by diplomacy and the allocation of adequate resources, as they were urged to do by the organization’s new secretary-general.