Abstract
Ambiguous American commitments to European security, Brexit, national populist forces and the lack of political leadership have put NATO under stress and challenged its cohesion, which represents the Alliance's centre of gravity. Counterintuitively, burden-sharing as a set of institutionalised cooperative practices can strengthen that cohesion, yet since the 2014 Defence Investment Pledge the debate has gone out of balance, focusing almost exclusively on the 2 percent of GDP spending figure and further polarising the allies. This paper re-examines the Alliance's philosophy of burden-sharing along the lines of Article 3 of the Washington Treaty, introducing a mutual-aid dimension into NATO's cash-capabilities-contributions framework to emphasise what member countries can do together rather than what divides them. Moving beyond defence accounting to the quality and effectiveness of burden-sharing, and stressing that allies cannot simply buy interoperability, it argues that a conceptually well-adjusted burden-sharing narrative can improve cohesion and enhance interoperability as the ability to act as a group, and concludes with recommendations for achieving greater cohesion and more interoperable armed forces.
Panel: Session III