Will Nato Survive “BREXIT”?

July 8, 2016

In the June 23 referendum known as “Brexit” — shorthand for Britain’s exit from the European Union — a clear majority of voters across the United Kingdom (Great Britain, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales) chose to leave the EU. Only in London, Scotland and Northern Ireland did the “stay” camp prevail.

Since then, several of the remaining EU member states, led by France, have pressured the U.K. to file its “divorce” papers quickly. That act would trigger a two-year renegotiation of trade and immigration rules between the EU and what’s left of the U.K. If negotiations cannot be completed in two years, and barring an unlikely extension, trade barriers and tariffs would kick in automatically.

Wisely, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called for patience and courtesy toward the EU’s wayward British friends. While she has emphasized that Britain will not be able to cherry-pick what parts of EU membership it wants to retain, she cautioned against precipitous action that might further upset EU markets and economies.

The key issue that swayed U.K. voters to want to leave the EU was free movement of labor and immigrants into the U.K. from other EU states. Between 2007 and 2016, the Polish population in Britain jumped from 80,000 to 850,000; many are Poles who are willing to work for lower wages than their British counterparts. Yet Merkel made it clear that Britain must accept free movement within the EU if it hopes to retain favorable trade arrangements with the EU.

What happens next is pretty murky. Londoners, who by a 60-40 vote opposed leaving the EU, won’t have a choice. They’re stuck with the decision to leave and will now discover what that decision really means. Already, several London-based banks and financial institutions are planning to relocate to an EU member state.

But the voters in Scotland and Northern Ireland may have more options. Northern Ireland’s leaders are exploring whether to merge with the Republic of Ireland, an EU member. The unification of the two Ireland’s could well become one of the unintended consequences of the Brexit referendum.

Of even greater importance to European security is what Scotland might decide. Scottish voters two years ago voted in a referendum to remain in the U.K. (and therefore, in the EU). Scotland’s chief minister has said she will explore withdrawing from the U.K. in hopes of keeping an independent Scotland in the EU. Were this to happen, the NATO Alliance and the British Navy would face a crisis. Most of NATO’s strategic deterrent — the U.S. and U.K.’s nuclear submarines armed with intercontinental range missiles and their “hunter-killer” subs — operate from the U.K.’s Holy Loch bases. With Russian warships and aircraft operating more actively in the Baltic Sea and off the coast of NATO-member Iceland, the bases in Scotland play a key role in deterring Russian adventurism in and above the Atlantic.

Inadvertently, the Brexit vote has thus exposed a broader strategic reality facing today’s NATO, one that presidential candidate Donald Trump also has raised. Trump alleges that NATO is still fighting the Cold War and has failed to adapt to 21st century security challenges. But so long as Vladimir Putin seems determined to recreate the Cold War with his intervention in Ukraine and his continued troublemaking in the Baltic region, what is NATO to do? Trump’s criticism and the recent Russian challenges to NATO together underscore that NATO must indeed address both old and new challenges.

This is not news to NATO. For the last few years, NATO and the EU have collaborated on finding a means to tackle emerging threats like cyber-crime, maritime security, piracy, human trafficking and terrorism. It’s no simple task. Many elements of these new threats are purely police matters — outside NATO’s lane. But some aspects of this new threat matrix are transnational and might involve the use of military force — NATO’s wheelhouse. Legal, privacy and security issues all come into play in formulating responses.

Just as the U.S. has struggled with coordinating the Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency, drone strikes and the employment of U.S. Special Operations troops, so NATO, the EU and the transnational police agency, Interpol, encounter the same challenge. These institutions have been working to achieve some level of coordinated response to these complex security problems, but the EU does not move quickly.

Where the EU’s founding principle had been to promote greater trade and to generate wealth, instead, citizens of many EU member states today see the EU as an ineffective bureaucracy. The stalled European economy, economic chaos in Greece and a chaotic EU response to the flood of refugees from the Middle East, Afghanistan and North Africa all point to an institution that is unable to deliver on its promises, especially regarding security.

Populist, nationalist, and often rightwing politicians have seized on the EU’s perceived ineffectiveness and are suggesting withdrawing from the EU, as the U.K. has done. Six decades of work to create a union of European states that would be unable ever again to go to war could be destroyed by short-sighted easy answers that ignore the importance of cooperation, cohesion, ease of travel and communication, and free movement of goods, services and, yes, labor.

So far, aside from Donald Trump’s occasional threats, there are no calls for any nation to leave NATO. But the current crises in Europe and the simplistic proposals bouncing around to solve Europe’s woes could easily lead voters in several countries to want to opt for “solutions” that ultimately create more problems than they solve.

NATO leaders thus have their hands full during their July 8–9 Summit in Warsaw. Regardless of what happens within the EU, it is critical to global stability that dismantling NATO not be one of the unintended consequences of Brexit.

Jack Segal was a senior NATO diplomat from 2000 to 2010. He and his wife, Karen, co-chair Traverse City’s chapter of the World Affairs Councils of America, the International Affairs Forum (tciaf.com).