Ben Sheen: Hello my name is Ben Sheen, I am a member of the editorial team here at Stratfor and I am joined by military analyst Paul Floyd and we are going to talk a little bit today about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. So, Paul, as a young boy growing up in West Germany on a military airbase, I have clear memories of going into Berlin, which at the time was a city bisected by the Iron Curtain. The Cold War seems like a good place to start with NATO. What were the origins of the alliance?

Paul Floyd: Well, coming out of World War II and moving into the Cold War there was an obvious threat emanating from the communist Soviet Union and so the United States wrapped what remained of Western Europe into this security organization to prevent any further incursion into Europe. And it was kind of highlighted by obviously the Iron Curtain, but that line was held by conventional forces of hundreds of thousands of troops, tens of thousands of pieces of equipment, forward-deployed American personnel on hundreds of bases through Germany and really we saw the same thing on the exact opposite side, so it was real just a conventional standoff across the Fulda Gap.

Ben: Well that standoff lasted for only so long and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and then the Soviet Union a couple of years later in 1991, that really changed things for the alliance. How did NATO respond to that and how did it seek to grow beyond the demise of its traditional adversary?

Paul: Right, so I mean during the Cold War NATO was designed as this collective defensive agreement for these nations and there was a clear existential threat right across the line there. And as the Cold War ended it really was the huge turning point for NATO because now it had no strategic focus, no existential enemy that it was built around and structured around. And so it kind of struggled for a mission for years I would say, and has kind of dipped its toe into these different interventions but what we have seen in those conventional military structures I was talking about, because they are so expensive to have standing all the time and defense spending in Europe in general as part of NATO has steadily declined, these forces have been withdrawn and now it is basically a shell of its former self in the sense of conventional power that is under NATO framework that is ready to actually do anything. So NATO is kind of transformed from this large standing deterrent defensive force that was on the line to this rapid reaction force and really kind of a leadership structure and a logistics structure that can be applied to multinational missions where all the member states agree to do something — like anti-piracy patrols where we can rotate many different naval ships from many different countries, NATO members, at any given time.

Ben: Now you mention a good point there, which is the fact that there needs to be a degree of unanimity within NATO — countries need to agree. Now just getting, say, the British, the French and the Germans to agree is one thing. But when you have 28 member countries that's difficult. And you touched upon the idea of interoperability and the fact that NATO is seeking to standardize across the alliance. How and to what extent has it achieved that?

Paul: To the expansion question, NATO kind of I would say because it did not have this strategic focus, it didn't have that enemy in the Soviet Union anymore and it expanded into former Soviet states — contrary to promises it had made to Russia. So actually Russia felt threatened, at least in the future, that NATO could be on its doorstep. But also you by expanding the number of members from the 12 you had originally, to the 28 that are standing now, you need unanimous consent to really have any kind of action under the NATO framework, you have really limited what NATO can do, you've really diluted its ability to kind of be this forward-looking, rapid-reaction body that can make maybe unpopular decisions, because it just takes one member state who has slightly different interests to really blow up the entire alliance framework.

So we have actually seen that — you have this geographic fault line within NATO now, where the eastern states, which are now closer to Russia, are feeling more threatened are much more focused on Russia and Russia as a threat, versus Western Europe which will you know right now because of actions in Ukraine may be focused on Russia but that probably is temporary at best depending on what Russia does, they are not necessarily so interested. And to make matters even worse, the infrastructure for NATO, the old infrastructure is still kind of on the western part of Europe. Those are the most powerful military nations, in Western Europe, and the eastern NATO members are the weakest militarily, so not only do they feel the most threatened but they actually need the resources money and the cost of the units coming over from Western Europe and they do not necessarily want to provide that because they have other concerns right now, such as a financial crisis in the European Union.

Speaking of interoperability, that is probably the single biggest legacy of NATO I would say, the most important part of it is the idea that the fact is that if Western Europe had the will to do it and the United States has the will to do it, we can actually push forces all the way over into eastern NATO members because of that interoperability. And so I would say that is the most important part and probably what Russia fears out of NATO. They do not fear the Baltic States themselves, but they fear that they are in NATO, they're that close to St. Petersburg and Moscow. The United States with the right impetus could actually bring over its entire military might and plant it down and work in some kind capacity to facilitate the Baltic military.

Ben: So with the developing situation in Ukraine, how do you think this changes the picture for NATO? And you mentioned the different security providers, the larger contributors such as America, and you have got NATO consumers such as the Baltic States and the ones that are in the most risk from proximity to Russia. So how do we go forward with increased Russian aggression against Ukraine and people looking toward NATO and saying, "What is going to happen?"

Paul: Well, Ukraine, is still in a gray area. Russia has not crossed a certain line that has been so overt that it has completely gelled all of NATO together into cohesive action against it. We have seen lots of small little bits and pieces — a company in the Baltic States and in Poland, different overflights, some aircraft being moved, some ships in the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea. None of this is serious combat power yet. And it really depends on what Russia does and how much of a more permanent threat Russia tries to make itself to actually conceivably bring NATO together and give it a political will and solidify it again with that strategic, focused threat. But if Russia plays its hand in a different way and tends to be more reserved and keeps its actions under a certain line, I think the geographic tensions we have already seen in NATO and the size of NATO and some of that strategic waffling we have seen because of the size of NATO will continue and kind of slowly continue that loss of effectiveness that NATO used to have like it did in the Cold War.

Ben: Paul, I think that is about all we have got time for but thank you very much for joining me. If you would like to read more about NATO, look forward to our NATO series, which is in three parts publishing soon.