Reimagining NATO after Crimea: Defender of the rule-based order and truth?

ABSTRACT

Russia’s annexation of Crimea and war on Ukraine has led to upheaval in NATO’s discourse and practice. Taking a step back from the security debate, this article contends that the very process of responding to Russian aggression has led to the reimagining of NATO’s identity. While NATO tends to present change as continuity, this article’s mixed methods analysis illuminates how a trio of new and ambitious self-representations have risen to prominence within NATO’s post-Crimea discourse. NATO has anointed itself defender of the international rules-based order and purveyor of truth and facts amidst a world of disinformation, while pushing a resilience policy agenda that expands its authority into new domestic domains. Problematizing these shifts, the article warns that NATO’s new narrative ignores its own role in the problems it seeks to solve and thus risks undermining NATO efforts to rally global support for Ukraine.

KEYWORDS:

• NATO
• Russia
• Ukraine
• narratives
• securitization

The major failure,

first of all I don’t think we have made any major failures

and if we had made any I would not tell you.

Jens Stoltenberg, NATO Secretary General 2017

Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 engendered a turning point in the relations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with Russia. The years that followed saw a rapidly deteriorating security climate on NATO’s eastern flank that culminated in Russia’s full-blown invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. This prompted unprecedented sanctions against Russia and military support for Ukraine, albeit stopping short of direct military engagement by NATO (see Lupovici, 2023). Indeed, Russia’s war on Ukraine has accelerated the trend within NATO discourse and policy towards the comprehensive securitization of Russia across policy domains (Wilhelmsen, 2021). Most eye-catchingly, the onset of the war prompted Germany to overturn 70 years of recalcitrant security policy and commit to spending 2% of its budget on defence in addition to cancelling the Nord Stream II pipeline. Similarly, the war has led both Finland and Sweden to disavow their long-term neutrality and apply and become full NATO members. Most analyses to date have focused on the strategic implications of these developments: the unifying effects and newfound collective will within NATO are said to illustrate Putin’s miscalculation and/or irrational worldview (Rak & Bäcker, 2022). Instead of dividing NATO, initial analyses suggest that Putin has instead fermented a new unity of purpose and resolve, and new NATO countries on Russia’s border to boot (Flockhart, 2024, p. 471).

Taking a step back, this article joins a smaller branch of scholarship (e.g., Böller, 2018; Mälksoo, 2018, 2021) exploring the social and political side effects of what appears in retrospect like NATO’s prudent if patchy securitization of Russia post-Crimea. Revisiting Williams and Neumann’s seminal article (2000) on how NATO reinvented itself as a security community¹ in the wake of the Cold War, we pay particular attention to how multifaceted but uneven securitization processes have redrawn the self-other nexus that constitutes NATO’s identity narrative, thereby changing the bandwidth for what can be both said and done. In other words, rather than asking whether Russia has been securitized (Floyd, 2019) or theorizing how and puzzling over why (Sperling & Webber, 2017), we explore how the substance of these securitizing moves, understood here as representations that position something or someone as a threat to the referent object (Buzan, 1998, p. 25) have transformed NATO. Building upon the well-established discourse-theoretical strand of securitization theory (Hagmann, 2015; Wæver, 1995; Wilhelmsen, 2017), as well as works that draw attention to the illiberal, unintended, and potentially tragic consequences of identity reconstruction processes (Mälksoo, 2018; Van Rythoven, 2020; Wilhelmsen, 2021), this article empirically explores how NATO’s evolving discourse on Russia has been transforming NATO self-representations and critically examines the consequences of these processes. Whereas most scholarship on the breakdown in Russia-NATO relations treats NATO’s identity as a constant—focusing instead on how its strategy and capabilities have changed—we put it in motion and ask: How have the unfolding securitization processes led NATO to revise its narrative of the self?

Our starting point is that all political entities strive to secure the unity and cohesion of their social borders (Barth, 1969). A diverse, complex, and enlarging political entity such as NATO needs to undertake constant maintenance work to secure the boundaries of its identity. Without such work on social cohesion and delimitation, it is difficult to agree on an agenda, and even more difficult to act on it (Mitzen, 2006). In the years preceding Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, such boundary work became especially pressing. NATO’s unity had been challenged by the uncertainties of US commitment to the alliance triggered by the Trump presidency (Cooley & Nexon, 2020, pp. 1–2). Such signs of fracture came on top of the internal tension created by enlargement to the east and diverging priorities between NATO countries² (Noetzel & Schreer, 2009, pp. 215–216). The 2014 annexation of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine—perpetrated by NATO’s most significant historical other, Russia as the successor state to the Soviet Union—returned a sense of insecurity to the European continent, most acutely in the countries bordering Russia (Mälksoo, 2024, p. 542). Taken together, these unfolding struggles generated the requirement and opportunity to (re)shape and confirm NATO’s sense of self. Yet, as Patrick Porter (2020, p. 42) has noted, NATO tends to present change as continuity and such changes are thus easily overlooked. As we will show, a close reading of NATO’s narrative post-Crimea unearths significant transformations in its articulation of the self, which we contend are broadening NATO’s policy horizons while also potentially undermining those same aspirations.

Based on a systematic mixed methods analysis of NATO’s discourse between 2013 and 2022, we identify three interlocking changes in NATO’s self-narrative that have emerged while addressing the Russian threat post-2014. First, by differentiating NATO’s securitization of Russia by the referent object (in need of securing) we show how NATO’s new narrative performs two distinct self-identities. As existing research has shown (Sperling & Webber, 2017), NATO’s hitherto fading identity as a regional collective defence organization was revitalized as it (re-)securitized and took urgent measures to respond to the threat Russia posed to NATO’s eastern flank. However, we show how NATO more ambitiously, post-Crimea and especially in the run-up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, increasingly attempted to securitize Russia on behalf of the “international rules-based order”. This narrative enabled the yoking together of China and Russia as authoritarian regimes striving to undermine the order’s rules. Crucially, it also casts NATO as the natural and necessary “defender” of the said order, in the past and present. Second, unpacking the link between NATO’s threat construction processes, identity narrative, and new emphasis on self-discipline, we show how NATO increasingly identifies a “hybrid” threat posed by Russia that requires collective attention to ensure its security. References to hybrid threats are subsequently used to legitimize bolstering NATO members’ so-called “societal resilience”, thereby expanding its mandate to monitor and coordinate members’ internal response in non-military spheres. Third, and part and parcel of the new concern with hybrid threats and resilience post-Crimea, NATO simultaneously identifies and increasingly prioritizes the threat posed by disinformation and attempts to establish itself as purveyor of “truth and facts” amidst a world of worsening disinformation.

Taking stock of this tripartite of narrative shift, the final section critically reflects upon the instability and political difficulties generated by NATO’s new narrative. We contend that these three features of NATO’s new discourse have amplified a pre-existing tendency—following its reinvention as a liberal security community in the 1990s (Williams & Neumann, 2000)—within NATO towards inward self-legitimization at the expense of listening to non-NATO and non-Western members of the international community. We conclude the article by discussing whether NATO’s new narrative is sustainable or prudent in a period when its “symbolic power” (Williams & Neumann, 2000) is on the decline and NATO requires and desires a credible identity narrative that can resonate beyond its members’ borders.

Beyond the mainstream debate post-Crimea 2014

Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its use of military force in the Donbas prompted a mutually constitutive debate within (Western) security studies and within the policy community (McFaul et al., 2014). Two interconnected questions animated this agenda: Who or what caused Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine and how should NATO respond? A similar set of scholarly and policy questions (and answers) animated the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Our article here overlaps with these works to the extent that it shares an empirical concern with the consequences of the deterioration in NATO-Russia relations between 2014 and 2022. Our theoretical concern, however, is with how securitization unfolded across NATO, which is orthogonal to much of this discussion. Rather than epistemological rivals in a scholarly debate, these works are, for our purposes, better understood as objects of analysis in so far as they constitute actors and audiences implicated in securitizing and desecuritizing processes. This section provides a reading of the literature that serves two functions: it situates this article within these discussions and provides a broader empirical context which NATO’s discourse on Russia recursively draws from and responds to.

The usual way of outlining the contours of the NATO-Russia debate begins with structural explanations, moves down through different state-level explanations, and closes with micro-bureaucratic and quasi-psychological explanations (see Götz, 2016a for a review). In brief, neorealists (Götz, 2016b; Mearsheimer, 2014) suggest that Russia’s drive to secure its sphere of influence is rational security maximization: what any great power would do in its position. Within this rendering, by blithely expanding eastwards, NATO failed to take into account Russia’s security interests and unnecessarily provoked Russia into a military response. Whereas neorealists ultimately blame the anarchic structure of the system for Russia’s fear of NATO expansion (and “the West” for not recognizing this likelihood), others suggest the pattern of interaction between Russia and NATO has fostered a self-propelling spiral that generated and solidified an enemy image of the other. These works emphasize that this spiral, and the enmity produced, has become “autonomous” from both the structure of the system and the internal politics of either side (Wilhelmsen, 2021, p. 2; see also Casier, 2016; Sakwa, 2017). The final but most populated category of explanations are internal explanations. These works either implicitly or explicitly take Russian hostility to NATO to be deviant and a puzzle requiring explanation. This research disaggregates the Russian state to highlight how the character of the regime and domestic political processes explain its aggressive behavior (McFaul, 2020; Stoner, 2021). For instance, some highlight how Putin is more interested in regime survival than maximizing state welfare (Matovski, 2023), and/or how prevailing identity narratives (value placed upon great powerhood or empire), “worldviews”, and sometimes “strategic cultures”s (Bukkvoll, 2016; Giles, 2017) explain Russia’s hostility to NATO and/or military aggression. While differing in the weight given to different domestic mechanisms, unlike realists and interactionists, they background NATO in their analyses.

Within this scholarly debate, NATO’s identity tends to be assumed to be more or less a constant. In particular, when debating the causes of war, internalist explanations often render NATO as a self-evidently benevolent liberal force (e.g., Bukkvoll, 2016; McFaul et al., 2014). The policy wing of this scholarship concerns how best to formulate a strategy to cope and contain its threatening neighbor given their diagnosis of Russia’s behavior. Hence security experts debate NATO’s force deployments, military spending, doctrine, cohesion, and resolve (e.g., Giles, 2016, 2017). Crucially, NATO’s political and social identity—as a liberal, democratic, and defensive force—tends to be assumed to remain stable. Certainly, the prospect of change to the NATO self looms in these analyses, but primarily as the prospect of failing to adequately respond to and deter the Russian threat, thereby allowing Russia to overturn the hard-won peace and stability in Europe; or failing to adequately respond to Russian disinformation and hybrid warfare, thereby enabling Russia to sow internal discord and fan illiberal forces within Europe (Blackwill & Gordon, 2018; Giles, 2016; Schoen, 2016).

Conversely, the neorealist diagnosis also takes NATO’s liberal democratic identity as a constant but blames it for NATO’s imprudent expansion into Russia’s sphere of influence. Mearsheimer, writing in the aftermath of Crimea, (in)famously claimed it was NATO’s “liberal delusions that provoked Putin” (2014, p. 77) and “helped cause the crisis in the first place” (McFaul et al., 2014, p. 175), and reiterated that argument in 2022 (Mearsheimer, 2022). Hence, the policy prescription proffered by Mearsheimer contends that NATO should dial back its liberal internationalist ideals in order to better ensure its member states’ security. Ultimately, amidst the heat of their very real analytical and policy disagreements on explaining Russian behavior and formulating a prudent response, these works share an assumption of a relatively stable NATO liberal self. Indeed, while Mearsheimer may paint NATO’s liberal ideology as utopian and dangerous, he does not deny its liberal color. And while interactionist contributions, in contrast, take the changeability of NATO identity as a given, their work has focused on the rearticulation of Russia as other and not how the NATO self has changed through the process.

Notably, even some constructivist scholarship glosses over changes in the substance of NATO’s identity narratives. Taking stock of the challenge posed to NATO by Russia, China and the prospect of a multipolar order, Flockhart (2024, pp. 477–478) suggests that NATO’s security community identity may rise or decline in prominence depending upon the global context but offers little “room for manoeuvre” for “changing the content and character of the values that express the essence of what NATO is”. We contend that this analysis warrants nuancing. While NATO’s stated commitment to liberal values does not waver, as we show below, how NATO narrates its liberal identity and the relationship to the world—the specific substance of its identity performances—has shifted in ways that indicate NATO has undergone more change, and thus has more “room for manoeuvre” than Flockhart and others’ analysis allows.

Putting NATO’s self in motion

By taking NATO’s identity for granted, as the research cited above tends to do, one remains blind to social side effects on NATO and its members of formulating and undertaking a robust strategy vis-à-vis Russia. Put more poetically, these works overlook what Maria Mälksoo (2018, p. 376, cf. Nietzsche, 2003, Aphorism 146) identifies as “the inherent danger of becoming a monster in the course of fighting monsters”, which is “particularly poignant for democratic polities.” Addressing the relative lack of attention NATO’s identity has received, this article brings to bear the well-established research agenda that studies identity as a process, always in the making, and joins a small number of scholars that engage in critical self-reflection about the unintended consequences of NATO’s securitization of Russia (Mälksoo, 2018; Sperling & Webber, 2017) and those that have focused on the discursive (re)construction of NATO’s identity (Böller, 2018; Mälksoo, 2018, 2021).

While our study focuses on the securitization of “Russia” as a threat post-Crimea, we do not suggest that these representations have emerged sui generis. To the contrary, despite being conceptualized as open-ended, changeable and historically contingent, discourses are highly structured (Milliken, 1999, p. 230) and conditioned and shaped by historical securitizations (Donnelly & Steele, 2019, p. 219). Hence, the re-securitization of “Russia” could draw upon latent but readily available discursive resources from the Cold War legacy.³

One way to understand our endeavor here is as an inversion of Williams and Neumann’s (2000) seminal intervention in the debate seeking to account for NATO’s persistence and reinvention following the end of the Cold War as a “democratic security community”. Rather than being a function of the intrinsic and essential liberal identity of its members, as some constructivists had argued, or a function of American interests in controlling Europe and extending its unipolar moment, they document how NATO innovated with the discursive resources available and reinvented itself:

as an organisation whose essential identity and cohesion was based upon common cultural and civilisational – particularly “democratic” – bonds, not primarily upon a shared military threat posed by the Soviet Union. This reconstructed identity provided a logic of continuity and action for the Alliance which not only offset claims that it had lost its meaning with the end of the demise of the Soviet Union, but also provided it with a motivating and legitimating vision of a new role: the consolidation of a “Western” civilisation which had been illegitimately torn asunder by the Cold War. (Williams & Neumann, 2000, p. 361)

While NATO’s self-reinvention following the Cold War succeeded in legitimizing NATO’s persistence, it was not without its social costs. According to Williams and Neumann (2000, p. 361), NATO’s new narrative left Russia with a choice between being an “apprentice striving to join ‘Western Civilization’” and accepting NATO enlargement and being a “counter-civilization force” opposed to NATO. They argued that “vacillations in Russian NATO policy in the first half of the 1990s”—and we would suggest well into the 21st century—were a function of its difficulty in accepting either role (2000, pp. 361–362).

To many commentators’ minds, the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 has settled Russia’s identity within NATO discourse firmly on the side of a counter-civilization force. Yet, as discourse analysts are prone to point out, all depictions of the other rebound upon the self. Therefore, the solid consensus around Russia as a threat to NATO and the so-called rules-based order, begs the question of how these processes find their counterpart in NATO’s self-narrative. Indeed, if the end of the Cold War saw NATO’s reinvention as a self-declared “security community” said to offer stability, prosperity, and ultimately peace to its members, how has this narrative fared in the so-called “new normal” ushered in by the return of territorial conquest, nuclear threats, and proxy warfare in Europe (Stoltenberg, 2022)?

Whether or not one considers NATO enlargement moral or prudent, recent events are difficult to construe as the successful entrenchment of stability, peace, or prosperity. At a minimum, NATO’s narrative will need to adapt. Moreover, how NATO adapts its narrative (or reinvents itself) will likely have significant downstream effects upon its relations with the rest of the world and its prospects for pursuing its objectives. Following Williams and Neumann then, we can ask how is NATO’s emerging narrative redrawing the boundaries between NATO, Russia, and the world writ large, how is this changing the bandwidth of what can be said and done, and what are the consequences for the future of NATO?

To grapple with these questions on the articulation of the NATO self and its significant other(s), and the policies that are made possible through such processes, we take inspiration from the discursive strand of securitization theory (e.g., Hagmann, 2015; Wæver, 1995; Wilhelmsen, 2017). In its discursive reading, this conceptualization of securitization departs from the seminal work of Buzan (1998) in three complementary and overlapping ways. First, studying the articulation of threat as a discursive practice of juxtaposing other and self rather than as a speech act, securitization becomes a comprehensive process not a single event. Second, by emphasizing process and degree, it eschews seeing securitization as all or nothing, but as potentially uneven and given our discursive ontology, necessarily incomplete and in need of labour (Hansen, 2006).⁴ Third, these two analytical moves enable the analyst to fulfil the oft overlooked critical potential of securitization: regardless of whether one considers securitization to be good or bad (see Buzan, 1998, p. 29), it systematizes and insists upon reflexivity around the processes and consequences of threat construction for those involved.

Given the explicitly liberal identity of NATO,⁵ it seems likely that NATO’s securitization of Russia (well-documented by prior research) would clash with NATO’s narrative of the self and thus require significant discursive labor to (attempt to) stabilize. We therefore ask: How have the unfolding securitization processes led NATO to revise its narrative of the self? What identity performances, policies, and concrete measures does NATO discourse demand to alleviate the Russia threat? To what extent do they generate internal or external instabilities in the NATO narrative?

Methods and data collection

To answer these questions, the following analysis triangulates qualitative and quantitative data. First, we conducted a systematic discourse analysis via a close reading of NATO’s representations of Russia between 2013 and 2022. We selected 2013 to begin the analysis in order to generate a window into how Russia was represented prior to its annexation of Crimea. When combined with the quantitative data—that stretches back 17 years earlier—we consider this to prove a sufficient empirical basis to ground our claim that securitization processes had led to change in NATO’s identity. Within our approach, verbal and textual representations are conceptualized as identity performances when articulated by NATO and are therefore treated as primary data that are not proxies for NATO’s identity but constitutive of it.

The empirics are based upon data collected from NATO’s website and include close interpretative analysis of all NATO’s annual reports—10 in total, over 1000 pages, as well as the 2022 Strategic Concept (the only one issued in this period), summit communiques, as well as all Secretary-General speeches and Q&As that mentioned Russia, and all items listed under the NATO-Russia Council on NATO’s online archive (see Table 1). In this qualitative analysis, we also drew upon secondary scholarly literature and NATO Defense College policy briefs. These provided both primary data that is implicated in the construction, reproduction, and potential contestation of NATO’s identity and are also a means of triangulating our analysis. Combining analysis of both carefully prepared top level written and oral statements and more spontaneous responses to reporters (that are likely to be broadcasted in the media), we consider this to offer an excellent window into NATO’s self-presentation during this period, which when triangulated with quantitative data provides solid grounds for our analysis.

Table 1. Data overview.

Method	Data	Time span
Qualitative close reading	Annual reports, strategic concept, communiques, NATO-Russia Council items, Secretary General speeches, press conferences etc. with mentions of Russia; academic literature, NATO School policy briefs	2013–2022
Quantitative contextualization	Texts labeled as Speeches & transcripts on the NATO website	1996–2022

To further contextualize our close qualitative reading, we mapped NATO usage of key concepts identified in our discourse analysis over time. We did this by downloading all the “Speeches & transcripts” from NATO’s website from the years 1996–2022, totaling 5005 documents.⁶ Within this more narrowly defined yet more extensive text collection—henceforth the “NATO corpus”—we were able to both situate NATO’s post Crimea narrative within a longer historical period and check that the changes in self-articulation we identified are not artefacts of the scope of our text selection. Figures 1–3 thus include the years 1996–2012 in addition to the article’s primary time scope of 2013–2022.

The data on which the article is based is summarized in Table 1

Reconstructing NATO post-Crimea: defender of orders and truth

Across the period in focus (2013–2022), NATO strives to present a coherent narrative of itself as a unified, strong, competent, and law-abiding alliance, dedicated to freedom and democracy, that has successfully brought peace to Europe, while managing instability abroad. The official discourse thereby presents an ever more chaotic and dangerous world, one which NATO tackles through an ever-improving technical capability to deter threats, defend its members, and “project stability” globally through technical and political cooperation with countries both in its neighborhood and further afield. NATO’s annual reports present a linear trajectory of technical and functional improvement, defined in terms of interoperability, institutional reforms, and new technologies. These are enacted, symbolized, and celebrated through a continuous series of large-scale complex military exercises. Here, post-Crimea, Russia’s pattern of “assertive” behavior—demonstrated willingness to use force and other hybrid means to coerce its neighbours and attempt to establish a sphere of influence—is highlighted as the stimulus for urgent reforms. Hence, up until the final months before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, NATO depicts itself as undertaking continuous technical adaptation and improvement designed to meet an increasingly challenging “security environment”. This narrative is recapitulated across contexts and brooks little critical reflection; NATO does not recognize mistakes, it only “learns lessons”.

Notably, NATO’s relentlessly positive self-image of the present is also applied to the past: NATO’s history is retold as a heroic tale of success in fending off the Soviet Union before playing a crucial role in bringing peace, stability, and democracy to Europe through enlargement; and fighting terrorism in the Middle East before successfully adapting to reinforce its regional defence against Russia post-Crimea. Hence, a key NATO refrain is that it is the “most successful alliance in history”.⁷ Although NATO projects constancy, as discourse theory suggests and Porter (2020) warns, this style of narrativizing obscures some significant changes that we will now discuss.

NATO as defender of the international rules-based order

A critical reading would suggest that Russia’s annexation of Crimea provided NATO not only with a challenge but also with a renewed raison d’être. Public support for NATO’s “out of area operations” in Afghanistan and its non-combat mission in Iraq had dwindled as the US-led occupation and counter-insurgency operation dragged on. Meanwhile, even the ostensibly successful intervention in Libya generated new security problems, instability (Kuperman, 2015), and widespread accusations that NATO had overstepped its UNSC mandate (Terry, 2015). Hence, in a speech on the future of NATO in 2013, the Secretary General was struggling for purpose: “Our job today is to make NATO ready, robust, and rebalanced for the future. So that, in an unpredictable world, it remains an essential source of stability we can all rely on” (Rasmussen, 2013a), while NATO’s Chairman of the Military Committee described the need for a “roadmap” for the “recuperation, restoration and reform of NATO military capability delivery” (Bartels, 2013). Indeed, with NATO’s ill-feted efforts in Afghanistan winding down and opposition to the global war on terror widespread, to paraphrase Colin Powell, NATO was running out of demons that members could agree to fight. NATO’s citizenry had little appetite for getting involved in another quagmire, especially following the financial crisis and long-term austerity. This opposition to more out of area operations was reflected in NATO members’ diminishing defence budgets from 2012 to 2014 and in how NATO’s defence intellectuals were worrying that “the edge”—the West’s military advantage—was coming to an end (Monaghan, 2019, p. xi). Clearly, calls for defence spending to remain a “source of stability” and for “recuperation” was not proving effective.

In short, Russia’s annexation of Crimea allowed NATO to solve this problem by restoring a historic other—or “bête noire” (Mälksoo, 2024, p. 432)—against whom NATO could define and defend itself. While NATO and its members may never have ceased considering Russia as a threat backstage, prior to Crimea, NATO officially presented an optimistic, de-securitized, picture of NATO-Russian “partnership” and prospects for future cooperation (e.g., Rasmussen, 2013b).⁸ Yet, on 6 March 2014, NATO discourse changed dramatically as the annexation became apparent and NATO rushed to condemn Russia and call for an urgent response from its members. Rasmussen’s speech to the Brookings Institution is a good example of the genre:

There are no quick and easy ways to stand up to global bullies. Because our democracies debate, deliberate, and consider the options before taking decisions. Because we value transparency and seek legitimacy for our choices. Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine is in blatant breach of its international commitments and it is a violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. The annexation of Crimea through a so-called referendum held at gunpoint is illegal and illegitimate. And it undermines all efforts to find a peaceful political solution. This is a wake-up call. For the Euro-Atlantic community. For NATO. And for all those committed to a Europe whole, free and at peace. (Rasmussen, 2014)

Rasmussen’s calls for NATO to wake up were heeded. Russia’s annexation of Crimea provided the rationale to restore NATO’s historic purpose of regional defence and replace (if not fully) the “crisis management” and “stability projection” agenda of the 2000s, which despite NATO’s official line, seemed not to be its forte. However, as Sperling and Webber (2017, p. 20) note, rather than securing Ukrainian territory, “expressions of concern in this regard belied the fact that something more important was at stake: European security governance—a system of order with NATO as the presumptive core—was seen to be threatened”. This strand of the securitization process emphasizes that European security or Euro-Atlantic security could and would be used to legitimize a regional military response from NATO, albeit one that eschewed direct military confrontation with Russia.

In the years that followed, a series of NATO summits (Wales in 2014, Brussels in 2016, Madrid in 2022) would see NATO introduce a raft of policies aimed at “assuring” the eastern member states by: committing to continuous multinational NATO patrols of the region (“Four 30s”), conducting the biggest military exercises since the Cold War (e.g., Trident in 2018), and successfully reversing the downward trend in military budgets. At the same time, NATO ceased its partnership program with Russia, though it did persist in attempting dialogue regarding matters such as arms control. Hence, Sperling and Webber are surely correct to suggest that NATO and its members’ securitizing moves were successful in initiating an urgent response that broke with the status quo and transformed the NATO-Russian relationship from “less of a partner [into] more of an adversary” (Vershbow, 2014).

However, this argument overlooks how NATO’s securitizing moves embodied two distinct referents for NATO to secure. Sperling and Webber do not analytically differentiate between threats to international order and threats to European security governance, noting that: “For NATO, the Crimean annexation undermined the European and international order, an order that the Alliance regarded itself as custodian [of]” (2017, p. 20). But whether NATO aspires to be the custodian of the European or the international order are radically different claims to authority. Although not important for Sperling and Webber’s analysis, these two referents generate quite different identities for NATO. The first is the least controversial; NATO becomes constituted as the key long-term defender of regional European security. This representation is certainly not unproblematic: critics might ask whether Ukraine, Georgia, or indeed Russia are not part of Europe. However, it is considerably less ambitious than the identity claimed via the second referent: defender of the international order (Böller, 2018). This representation would further evolve during the decade that followed into the more ambitious still defender of the “international rules-based order”. Hence, “investing in NATO” became the logical corollary of protecting said order:

We cannot ensure our security without working with others. But together, we can shape the strategic landscape for the better. Compete in a more competitive world. And defend the rules-based international order against those that seek to undermine it … So we must continue to invest in NATO. Politically, militarily, and financially. To make it even stronger. So it can continue to withstand any crisis, and any changes in political weather. (Stoltenberg, 2021)

Although a number of high-profile scholars had long-warned of China’s threat to American hegemony and/or the liberal order (see Ikenberry, 2008, pp. 23–28), talk about the “rules-based international order”⁹ in our NATO corpus first appeared in 2013 (see Figure 1). Russia was explicitly cited as a threat to this order during 2014–2017. Only in 2018 did China appear in this narrative, with Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller warning about “the assault that we see from countries not only like Russia but also China, you know calling into question the international system, calling into question the international rules-based order” (Gottemoeller, 2018). By 2021, however, NATO had begun to routinely group China and Russia together as threats to the international rules-based order.

Figure 1. Uses of “security order” and “rules-based international order/international rules-based order” in the NATO corpus 1996–2022. (The main column charts display the number of occurrences per year, and the numbers below show the number of occurrences per 100,000 words. The years 1996–2012 (in gray), while outside of the article’s main time scope, are included to provide a broader context of the development of NATO discourse.)¹⁴

NATO’s changing concern with “orders” is well illustrated in Figure 1. In the 1990s, the order in question was a “security order”, almost always specified as European or Euro-Atlantic. The type of order NATO is now preoccupied with is the “international order”, more specifically the “rules-based” one.

The trouble with this narrative is not that it failed to mobilize support within NATO in the aftermath of Crimea. On this count it appears to have served its purpose relatively well. However, defender of the international rules-based order implies attempting to legitimize urgent actions beyond NATO and organize an alliance of “like-minded countries”. On this count this narrative—supported by the EU—has produced rather limited results with regards to encouraging non-Western countries to join the sanctions regime and isolate Russia diplomatically (Alden, 2023). The struggle to mobilize global support to punish Russia in both 2014 and 2022 has a number of causes (Alden, 2023, pp. 2–5). However, it certainly does not help that NATO’s narrative relies upon a rose-tinted rendering of both the legitimacy of the rules-based order and NATO members’ historic relationship with it.

Indeed, NATO’s securitization of the rules-based order on the world’s behalf offers an apt example of what Patrick Porter (2020, p. 18) calls a “mytho-history”, which relies upon a nostalgic view of the past that systematically excludes NATO and its members’ frequent willingness to break the “rules” of their own order (most obviously and persistently during the global war on terror¹⁰). As Finnemore (2009, p. 61) has noted in a different context, such hypocrisy undermines other countries’ deference to and respect for the values upon which NATO’s legitimacy rests. To be sure, one can certainly argue that Russia’s violations of international law are several orders of magnitude worse than those of NATO and its members states. Yet NATO’s new narrative goes further than claiming it merely breaks the rules less severely than Russia, NATO aspires to be recognized as defender of the rules-based order, a much more demanding claim given its members’ recent history.¹¹ We will return to the political difficulties generated by this ambitious narrative in the conclusion, but for now it is suffice to say that this new identity narrative suffers from prioritizing “internal stability” (see Hansen, 2006, pp. 26–27)—the coherence of the narrative—at the expense of its congruence and thus resonance with discourses from outside NATO’s policy circles.

Countering hybrid warfare, building societal resilience

Another major consequence of NATO’s securitizing processes following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and military operations in the Donbas was the rapid rise to prominence of the concept of “hybrid warfare”. Capturing the zeitgeist, the concept seemed apt to describe Russia’s effective use of irregular warfare and especially new technologies (e.g., cyber and disinformation), which appeared to enable new means to interfere in an adversary’s domestic politics in aid of military goals. Indeed, some defence intellectuals within NATO’s broader epistemic community saw Russia’s swift annexation as ushering in a “paradigm shift” in modern warfare (e.g., Schmid, 2019).

There is not a single dominant definition of hybrid warfare, but for our purposes here, it is important to note that most are conceptually rather flexible.¹² For instance, a well-cited report issued by NATO’s parliamentary assembly in 2015 defined hybrid warfare as “the use of asymmetrical tactics to probe for and exploit domestic weaknesses via non-military means, backed by the threat of conventional military means” (Calha, 2015, p. ii). Security researchers have extensively debated the analytic utility and revolutionary character of hybrid warfare (see Lanoszka, 2016, p. 177–181) or lack thereof (Fabian, 2019). Most pertinently, Renz draws attention to what she sees as the pernicious spread of “hybrid warfare” as a crude framework for understanding Russian motivations and behavior: “In the aftermath of the Crimea annexation ‘hybrid warfare’ has evolved from [a] military concept describing an operational approach to warfare into an idea that is now routinely used to describe Russian foreign policy in general”. The danger, according to Renz, is that seeing all Russian foreign policy through the rubric of hybrid warfare risks misunderstanding the myriad of motivations that informed both Russian military modernization and its gamut of foreign policies (Renz, 2016). Renz thus worried how concerns about hybrid warfare had begun “permeating the doctrine and thinking of NATO member states” (Renz, 2016, p. 6).

It is precisely the post-Crimea permeation of the hybrid warfare concept within NATO and its members’ discourse that we problematize here. Despite the scholarly backlash, the concept of hybrid warfare continued to grow in salience (Renz, 2016; Fabian, 2019; see also Figure 2 below). From our perspective, debates surrounding its strategic or analytical utility and its novelty are insightful, but they overlook the discursive effects of NATO accepting the hybrid framing of Russia and the world at large. That is, rather than exploring whether it adequately describes Russian foreign and defence policy, we can ask what it does to NATO’s identity/policy nexus when it is uttered and what new roles for NATO it enables and legitimizes (see Hansen, 2006). Asking this question, the concept’s “plasticity” becomes a feature rather than a bug and can help account for its popularity (Mälksoo, 2018, p. 379). Indeed, Maria Mälksoo (2018, p. 378) has theorized how the “hybrid war discourse epitomizes the contemporary ontological insecurities of the EU and NATO” whereby “NATO and the EU’s emerging discourse and practice in countering hybrid warfare seek to prove their continuing relevance in the contemporary era.”

One way in which the concept of hybrid warfare serves to keep NATO relevant is how it can be used to securitize and therefore enable and expand NATO’s authority and activity in a range of non-military domains. As a report for NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly argues, Russian hybrid warfare required NATO member states to “consider local, national, and international action to prepare and defend their populations in light of the post-2014 security environment” (Calha, 2015, p. 1). Although the new General Secretary expressed scepticism that hybrid warfare itself was novel, he readily endorsed the notion that Russia’s hybrid tactics were on a new scale and from 2015 onwards NATO steadily expanded its countermeasures. As a speech by Stoltenberg in 2015 illustrates, there were notably few limits envisioned for NATO’s counter-hybrid strategy:

Of course, hybrid warfare is nothing new. It is as old as the Trojan horse. What is different is that the scale is bigger; the speed and intensity is higher; and that it takes place right at our borders. Russia has used proxy soldiers, unmarked Special Forces, intimidation and propaganda, all to lay a thick fog of confusion; to obscure its true purpose in Ukraine; and to attempt deniability. So NATO must be ready to deal with every aspect of this new reality from wherever it comes. And that means we must look closely at how we prepare for; deter; and if necessary defend against hybrid warfare … Hybrid warfare seeks to exploit any weakness. So scientists who are well-governed and well-integrated are more resilient and less vulnerable. So good governance is an essential part of defence. And this is why we need a comprehensive approach, working together with the European Union and other international partners. We also must deter hybrid threats. Hybrid warfare is a probe, a test of our resolve to resist and to defend ourselves. And it can be a prelude to a more serious attack; because behind every hybrid strategy, there are conventional forces, increasing the pressure and ready to exploit any opening. We need to demonstrate that we can and will act promptly whenever and wherever necessary. (Stoltenberg, 2015, emphasis added)

By 2016, NATO had stated that it was willing to trigger article 5 in response to hybrid threats. Moreover, over the next few years, NATO began to flesh out, develop expertize and institutionalize its response to hybrid threats. It established the Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats in Helsinki in 2017 and new “counter-hybrid support teams, which provide tailored targeted assistance to Allies upon their request” (NATO, 2018).

Notably, NATO increasingly anchored its response to hybrid threats around the idea of actively fostering “societal resilience” (see Figure 2). As Stoltenberg explained in 2017:

we are working hard throughout the alliance to make our societies more resilient to attack. Resilience is essential to our ability to resist hybrid threats. Such threats are quicker, more potent and more intense than ever before. Combining many different elements. Including cyber-attacks, disinformation and the use of hard military force. From tweets to tanks. (Stoltenberg, 2017a)

As well as establishing an all-encompassing frame for what threats could be and where they may originate, when paired with the concept of resilience the hybrid discourse legitimized a distinctly inward emphasis for NATO. Crucially for our argument here, NATO developed a specific conception of resilience that framed its values as “the glue of our Alliance, the glue of the political West”. NATO resilience was said to depend upon “freedom, democracy and the rule of law; where people are free to act and choose as they will; a just society where people trust the institutions and the people who govern them” (Geoană, 2020). With more than an echo of Cold War hunt for internal others (see Campbell, 1991), the resilience narrative demands that NATO “must constantly be on our guard for the erosion of our values—from without or from within” (Geoană, 2020).

A quantitative inquiry confirms how the terms “hybrid” and “resilience” have risen to centrality in NATO discourse since 2014—presented in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Uses of “hybrid” and “resilience” in the NATO corpus 1996–2022. (The main column charts display the number of occurrences per year, and the numbers below show the number of occurrences per 100,000 words. The years 1996–2012 (in grey), while outside of the article’s main time scope, are included to provide a broader context of the development of NATO discourse.)

This emphasis on societal resilience defined in terms of NATO’s values is logically connected to its transformation into a “security community” in the 1990s. As Williams and Neumann (2000, p. 370) observed, “the problem of security becomes defined largely as the emergence of specific cultural or civilizational structures” and NATO’s ability to ensure the security of its members became “ascribed to the kind of states they are and the kind of alliance NATO is”.

The key difference between NATO’s 1990–2000s and post-Crimea discourse—and the reason why resilience constitutes a change rather than continuity for NATO—is that it renders those values fragile and in need of ongoing active protection. As the Deputy Secretary General (Geoană, 2020) asserted in a speech in Bucharest, it is now up to NATO to guarantee “freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law” because “without these values we place ourselves at risk. And we cannot allow that to happen.” Indeed, by 2020, Stoltenberg could proclaim that NATO “has already put in place our agreed set of what we call the resilience guidelines, in seven specific areas from airports, healthcare to telecommunication and all the rest. But there is a potential and a need to do more to strengthen the way we approach this challenge together as 30 Allies” (Stoltenberg, 2020). In other words, NATO’s new concern for resilience to hybrid threats would both grant NATO a new authority to inform domestic policies of members and extend security logic into domains where economics (or other logics) once ruled.

NATO as purveyor of facts and truth

As Stoltenberg’s “from tweets to tanks” line implies, NATO’s counter-hybrid discourse following Crimea identified the public sphere as a battleground, which demanded a new and expanded role for NATO in “strategic communications”. Indeed, many within NATO’s epistemic community articulated the threat to NATO from disinformation. For instance, one NATO Defense College policy brief contended that the “information domain” should be treated as the “new operational domain of war” and urged “countermeasures” to “convince them [the NATO citizenry] of the necessity of the alliance” (Minzarari, 2020, p. 1). While NATO’s annual reports and the Secretary General’s speeches refrained from the strongest securitization moves, their substance and NATO’s associated practices increasingly reflect the same logic. This comes across in NATO’s 2020 annual report, which has a new and significant subsection on “engaging citizens”. Its opening line explained that:

Ensuring that citizens in Allied countries understand and support NATO’s mission is an important aspect of the Alliance’s work. NATO actively engages with people around the world to explain and promote the Alliance’s efforts and activities in Allied countries and beyond. At the same time, it works hard to counter disinformation with fact-based, credible public communications. (NATO, 2021a, p. 40)

The same year, NATO’s annual reports began including public polling on support for NATO among members’ citizens (NATO, 2021a, 2022). Meanwhile, NATO’s annual reports now reported on its social media activities on Instagram and Twitter, and even employed social media “influencers” to promote its military exercises (Hedling et al., 2022). The wisdom of NATO’s new social media presence has been well-critiqued elsewhere (Hedling et al., 2022), here we instead wish to draw attention to how NATO’s new hybrid discourse generated an ambitious new identity for itself: purveyor of truth and facts.

Notwithstanding that Russia (among others) does use disinformation to sow discord within NATO, there are at least two problematic policy representations that stem from NATO’s counter-disinformation agenda. First, NATO discourse frequently draws a monocausal link between disinformation and opposition to NATO. While NATO’s counter-disinformation discourse often asserts the importance of a free and open debate, as the quotes above illustrate, within NATO’s official discourse it also treats the high level of support for NATO as evidence of the failure of disinformation and thus implies that domestic opponents of NATO have been victims of disinformation or are fifth columnists. The notion that an onlooker may have perfect information and still oppose NATO does not fit within NATO’s framing.

Second, beyond constructing critics as a threat to NATO members’ “societal resilience”, NATO’s hybrid threat strategy emphasizes NATO’s role as an “unbiased” (NATO, 2020) purveyor of “truth and facts”. Here, NATO establishes a sharp binary between Russian propaganda on the one hand and NATO’s truth and facts on the other:

We are every time we see false information, disinformation about our presence, we react and we provide facts. We don’t believe that the response to propaganda is propaganda. We believe that the best way to counter propaganda is by providing the truth. The truth will prevail over propaganda in the long run … But of course we have to be there sharing the facts, clarifying any misunderstandings, and countering disinformation about our battle groups and any other NATO presence. (Stoltenberg, 2017a)

The difficulty with this binary is that many of NATO’s complaints about Russia cannot adequately be described as matters of fact and truth. For instance, in 2016 NATO’s “Public Diplomacy Division” published a factsheet that also served as a website dedicated to debunking “Russia’s top five myths about NATO” (NATO, 2016, 2021b). The point of interest for this article is not the plausibility of NATO’s interpretations as such, but that they cannot be logically rebutted with brute facts that disinterested observers could not contest. For instance, Myth 3 claims that “NATO rejects Russia’s arms control proposals” while NATO’s counterclaim contends it is a “fact” that “Russia’s proposal for a moratorium on the deployment of ground-launched intermediate and short-range missiles in Europe is not a credible offer”. Clearly, NATO’s fact in this case hinges upon its subjective definition of “credible”. Similarly, the myth that “NATO is not interested in real dialogue with Russia” depends upon what one considers “real dialogue”, while whether NATO is “trying to encircle Russia” cannot be reduced to the portion of Russia’s total border that NATO countries share, as NATO’s rebuttal implies.

Moreover, beyond misconstruing what often amounts to a battle over narratives as a battle between fact and propaganda, NATO’s new identity as purveyor of truth runs against NATO’s institutional practice, which is self-consciously economical with the truth. Indeed, one of the key roles of the Secretary General of NATO is to put a diplomatic face on NATO’s internal disagreements and policies (see Schuette, 2021). Hence, when asked by a student in the audience—following a speech in Sarajevo—what he considered to be NATO’s greatest failures, Stoltenberg responded that: “The major failure, first of all I don’t think we have made any major failures and if we had made any one I would not tell you” (Stoltenberg, 2017b). The unwillingness to acknowledge mistakes—even those that are widely recognized as such by NATO member governments themselves or the Western security community—is a common theme across NATO’s official discourse. The starkest example of this practice is how NATO’s 2021 annual report presents the withdrawal and evacuation from Afghanistan. Although NATO acknowledges the collapse, it mentions it only in passing but dedicates considerable space lauding the feat of evacuation (NATO, 2022, pp. 86–87). Of course, all social entities manage the narrative of the self and selectively draw upon history to present coherence. However, NATO by virtue of the scale of its political project and scope of its military and political ambitions makes its task both more difficult and more subject to scrutiny. With regards to the NATO-hybrid threat discourse, the Afghanistan debacle illustrates the problems with NATO’s self-description as a source of truth, facts, and credible information. Put differently, how can the critical onlooker accept NATO as an unbiased source of information, truth, and facts, when its official narrative celebrates Afghanistan as a success?

Again, a quantitative inquiry helps to document and illustrate changing patterns in the NATO discourse and self-narrative. Figure 3 demonstrates the spike of NATO concern with disinformation and propaganda since 2014. As an example of how NATO intends to battle these problems with facts and truth, the buzz phrase “the truth will prevail” emerges. The phrase was absent from the NATO corpus before 2016, but in the following seven years occurred 24 times.

Figure 3. Uses of “disinformation” and “propaganda” in the NATO corpus 1996–2022. (The main column charts display the number of occurrences per year, and the numbers below show the number of occurrences per 100,000 words. The years 1996–2012 (in grey), while outside of the article’s main time scope, are included to provide a broader context of the development of NATO discourse.)

There is also a deeper issue here with regards to NATO’s official discourse’s tacit Manichean ontology and even epistemology. It sits at odds with the 21st century historical-social context within which it operates and leads NATO to present a black and white identity narrative in a hyper-reflexive world. That is, its fact-checking, myth-debunking, and anti-disinformation campaign result in a simplified and even patronizing depiction of international politics that brooks little nuance. This is politically problematic (and potentially self-defeating) because NATO ends up insulting many of its members’ citizens and potential allies, who are far more reflexive than NATO’s narrative gives them credit for. As such, this renders NATO’s attempts to define the truth about itself (and others) to be not only limited, but also offensive to many onlookers. Indeed, because NATO’s narrative denies that there are other reasonable positions besides being pro-NATO, it tacitly assumes that critics either lack adequate information, are victims to disinformation, or are just plain bad. Thus, the scepticism amongst non-aligned countries towards NATO becomes a problem in terms of PR or countering disinformation rather than a question of reflecting upon what it could be about NATO practices past and present that makes these alternative narratives resonate beyond and within its security community.

Conclusion: would a humbler NATO be a stronger NATO?

This article documented how the unfolding securitization of Russia following the annexation of Crimea in 2014 has led to a re-imagining of NATO and its role within Europe and the world. The preceding argument can be divided into a thin baseline claim that NATO’s identity narrative has shifted in significant ways as a result of this process, and a stronger claim that this adaptation embodies major instabilities that render it vulnerable to discursive contestation within and beyond NATO’s borders. The first claim we believe is difficult to contest: the securitization of Russia has clearly engendered the emergence of NATO’s claim to be defender of the international rules-based order, purveyor of truth and facts, and its new emphasis on in internal resilience. To be sure, NATO would eventually describe China as threat to the rules-based order too, but it was the response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea that catalyzed these changes to NATO’s grand narrative in the first place. This thin claim, while relatively uncontroversial, still nuances and partly contests the common refrain that NATO’s commitment to liberal values remains constant and thus lacks meaningful “room for manoeuvre” to perform different identities (Flockhart, 2024, pp. 477–478). Against this, judging by other identity representations in circulation—notably, NATO as the defender of the European security order—there are humbler identity narratives available for NATO that are consistent with meeting the Russian threat yet far less contentious. Even if it may not have facilitated NATO’s ambitions to become “relevant” to the United States’ efforts to contain China, we would contend that it would prove less susceptible to charges of hypocrisy.

This brings us to our second, stronger claim regarding the stability, sustainability, and prudence of the new NATO identity narrative. This claim is more controversial and thus we will use this conclusion to address potential counterarguments before providing our interpretation of its policy implications for NATO. First, it is crucial to note that in identifying the vulnerabilities of NATO’s new narrative, we do not claim a “view from nowhere” (Nagel, 1989) to adjudicate fact from fiction. Rather, by describing it as “unstable” or “vulnerable to contestation”, we highlight how NATO’s narrative relates to the discursive context within which it operates (see Hansen, 2006, pp. 27–29). To some extent, we should be on safe ground here: To point out that NATO and its most powerful member (the US) have pursued wars and practices that bend, break, and undermine international law is hardly controversial within western policy and academic circles as well as domestic societies. Recall the lengthy debates regarding the implications of George Bush’s unilateralism and the “global war on terror”, which hinged not on whether the US followed the rules but whether breaking them was prudent and/or served the greater good (e.g., Ikenberry, 2003, p. 533; Dunne & Mulaj, 2010, pp. 1290–1295). Meanwhile, even those in the center of NATO’s epistemic community take it for granted that NATO’s public statements do not and cannot reflect accurately the disagreements going on within NATO nor that NATO glosses over its failures. We doubt therefore that our critics would contest that these social facts—readily in circulation within NATO states and beyond—sit in tension with claims to be the defender of the rules-based order and purveyor of truth and facts. Instead, we suspect critics would likely respond that these instabilities are politically unimportant, and/or the best option given the challenging circumstances.

Here, sceptics may very well accept that NATO’s claim to be the natural “defender” of the international rule-based order is hypocritical, that NATO’s narrative of the self presents an overly rosy image, and that its disinformation discourse may stifle internal criticism and sit uneasily with NATO’s own relationship with truth. However, they might reasonably retort that if the new narrative helps NATO protect its members, strengthen its defence, and meet the threat posed by Russia then for all its imperfections it is a net benefit. Against this reading, we argue that NATO’s self-narrative imposes unnecessary costs upon itself, is likely self-defeating and risks undermining the very goals its narrative is intended to achieve, including rallying a global response to Russian aggression, and longer-term, Chinese assertiveness. While NATO’s narrative may work well-enough within NATO members’ societies—and hence to legitimize a NATO-wide collective effort vis-à-vis Russia—the narrative does not travel well.

In our view, these problems have been laid bare in NATO’s efforts to mobilize full condemnation and economic isolation of Russia following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Notably, the narrative falls flat among a number of potential allies within the “Global South”. For instance, as Rao (2023, pp. 17–18) argues, India

has limited patience for U.S and European narratives, [that] are both myopic and hypocritical … Europe and Washington may be right that Russia is violating human rights in Ukraine, but Western powers have carried out similar violent, unjust, and undemocratic interventions—from Vietnam to Iraq.

Similar views are widespread among elites and laymen in democracies such as Brazil and South Africa (Sjøli, 2023). Notably in his recent summary, Alden (2023, p. 2), identifies “exasperation at Western hypocrisy towards violations of sovereignty” as a key reason behind the “indifference and even hostility” among the “Global South” towards condemning Russia and supporting the Western sanctions regime. Notwithstanding other geopolitical and economic motivations for avoiding taking NATO’s side, the request to support and thereby recognize NATO as the defender of the international rules-based order is a particularly difficult narrative to swallow for leaders and citizens with generations of NATO and especially American scepticism behind them.¹³

To be sure, Russian propaganda certainly strives to capitalize on and helps amplify such views, but this does not explain why they resonate. While it may prove comforting to NATO to blame Russia for their prevalence, we contend it would prove more prudent to reflect on how its members’ behavior over the past decades has made their task easier. In our view, NATO’s new narrative, which refuses to countenance taking responsibility for its past mistakes nor criticize its leading members’ breaches of the rules-based order it portends to defend, reduces the chances of NATO proving itself capable of coordinating and mobilizing a genuinely global coalition against Russia. Notably, the gap between NATO’s self-narrative and how it is viewed by states and peoples from the “Global South” is not only poorly understood through its counter-disinformation agenda but worsened by its very undertaking. Crucially, this difficulty risks becoming a chronic strategic problem given the growing need for NATO to work together with countries beyond the usual suspects.

Indeed, zooming out, NATO’s new narrative seems likely to prove ill-adapted to the geopolitical and geosocial transformation that has taken place over the last decade. The symbolic power of NATO’s narrative that Williams and Neumann identified 25 years ago rested upon an unusual and temporally specific constellation of power that insulated it from the need to listen to external critics. Writing at the height of both the unipolar moment and liberal optimism, Williams and Neumann (2000, p. 357) could assert that “the place of the [NATO] Alliance at the center of contemporary [international] relations seems beyond dispute”. Meanwhile, multipolarity was primarily a historical phenomenon, used in the past tense by a dwindling number of wistful neorealists. In 2000, Russia had just been forced to ask for an IMF bailout, China was only beginning to rise, and the G20 had not yet been invented. For its part, NATO had just toppled Milosevic and not yet embarked upon its costly, quixotic, and frequently illegal war on terror. In short, Williams and Neumann could reasonably claim that

the power of the Alliance in the post-Cold War period derives in considerable part from the ability to maintain its military dimension while at the same time combining that dimension with a powerful cultural and political narrative that overcame the challenges faced by a purely military representation of the Alliance. (2000, p. 386)

Fast-forward to 2014, and it is clear that the military and cultural dimensions that had constituted NATO’s symbolic power had dramatically declined and with them so too had NATO’s ability to establish its narrative without concern for outsiders.

Ultimately, despite NATO’s constant efforts to “adapt” to meet new military challenges, we contend that it has not adjusted its identity narrative to its new circumstances. Indeed, resting one’s narrative of the self upon a story that only the in-group shares is a privilege of a hegemon or a hermit. Yet NATO is neither: it wants and needs partners in a multipolar world. In our view, finding a story that resonates beyond its members’ borders will require NATO to reckon with its past mistakes and listen to its (legitimate) critics. The resulting narrative may well be humbler, but we contend that NATO would be all the stronger for it.

Acknowledgments

This article benefited from the insights of numerous people at key points during the research process. First of all, we are indebted to the exceptionally constructive and considered comments of the two anonymous peer reviewers, which we are convinced significantly tightened the argument and will help it reach a wider audience. Earlier in the process, Anni Roth Hjermann and Gerard Toal’s critical engagement helped us develop the idea. We also had the privilege of having a late draft of the paper interrogated by the students and faculty from Addis Ababa University’s IR program: Their feedback both helped improve the paper and convinced us that we were on the right track. Finally, we would also like to thank Tony van der Togt for his thoughtful comments at the Annual Tartu Conference on East European and Eurasian Studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The Research Council of Norway provided the funding for this research via the WARU project: “When every act is war: Post-Crimea conflict dynamics and Russian foreign policy” (300923).

Notes on contributors

Paul David Beaumont

Paul David Beaumont is Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.

Julie Wilhelmsen

Julie Wilhelmsen is Research Professor at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.

Kristian Lundby Gjerde

Kristian Lundby Gjerde is Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.

Notes

1 “Security community” is well known to scholars as a category of analysis, but it is worth noting that NATO officials self-identified NATO as a “security community” from the 1990s, though with notably less frequency after 2014.

2 The key disagreements within NATO included whether to focus upon regional/European defence or out of area operations, as well as what role NATO should play in American efforts to “pivot” to Asia (see: Noetzel & Schreer, 2009, pp. 215–216).

3 Although it is beyond the scope of our analysis here, it would be worth conducting a close reading to compare to what extent and how Cold War commonplaces are reflected in NATO’s new discourse.

4 In the context of our article this implies that while few would argue that Russia was entirely desecuritized following the end of the Cold War, following Crimea it became increasingly securitized, as evidenced by the new and urgent measures undertaken by NATO to bolster deterrence on its Eastern flank (Mälksoo, 2021; 2024).

5 NATO officials and documents have since its inception asserted NATO’s commitment to defending democracy and upholding international law (see Flockhart, 2024, p. 477).

6 From https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions.htm. (Documents older than 10 November 2022 were retrieved on 10 November 2022. Documents dated 10 November 2022 and later were retrieved on 8 March 2023.) This text collection required some further curation. Presented on the NATO website under the rubrics of “Newsroom” and “Speeches & transcripts”, among the documents are several speeches and texts from invited guests at NATO events (e.g., foreign ministers of non-member countries), transcripts of panel discussions where only one participant represents NATO, Q&As with journalists, etc. While the number of such texts is not large enough to influence the trends presented in the charts in this article, to improve the reliability, we analysed only language used by speakers representing NATO. To this end, we used the corporaexplorer software (Gjerde, 2019) to manually review all documents including our keywords and removed from our count words and phrases uttered by speakers not representing NATO.

7 Starting in 1996, this phrase, with minor variations, appeared with irregular frequency in our NATO corpus, but its popularity increased later on. During 2017–2022 the phrase was used 128 times, compared with 48 times over the preceding 21 years.

8 Notably, NATO’s Strategic Concept while acknowledging disagreements upon particular issues, also couches NATO’s relationship with Russia in terms of “partnership” (e.g., NATO, 2010, p. 30) and makes no reference to the rules-based order.

9 With varying word sequence and punctuation.

10 For instance, Russia has suffered little retribution or even condemnation from its fellow BRICS countries, while 30+ states from the “Global South” have abstained on motions in the General Assembling condemning and calling for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine. Meanwhile 50 states voted against expelling Russia from the Human Rights Council (Alden, 2023)

11 Besides the so-called war on terror and its military “interventions” of questionable legality, it is also difficult to square the US’s long-term aversion to ratifying human rights and environmental international treaties with NATO’s claim to be the defender the rules-based order.

12 Notably, some security scholars have developed tighter definitions (e.g., Lanoszka, 2016) even if they do not appear to have succeeded in displacing the looser usage that dominates within policy circles.

13 NATO members may reasonably protest that American foreign policy is not NATO policy, but it remains the case that NATO and many of its members have played a supporting role in many of the military interventions that form the basis for anti-American and anti-NATO sentiment.

14 The regular expressions used in the search were /international rules.based order|rules.based international order/ and /security order/. Searches were case insensitive.