Description
This article inquires a way to forecast NATO’s burden sharing disputes. The main argument is that the controversies related to burden sharing in NATO can be assessed in terms of their cyclic or arrow kind nature, rendering some burden sharing issues more likely to recur than others and providing different kinds of starting points for their forecasting.
This way, we identify four cyclic categories in which burden sharing has tended to transform into a political debate among NATO members during the post-Cold War era: first, geopolitical change related to Russia, second, periods of US foreign political retrenchment or renewal, third, the passivity or activism of European NATO members, and finally in relation to significant NATO out-of-area operations.
This approach helps to demonstrate that new issues and new vocabularies have emerged to NATO’s post-Cold War burden sharing agenda in addition to more enduring questions. We also argue that there are indications that the scope of the debate continues to expand in certain ways.
