Holey alliance: NATO's worries at 75

This episode discusses NATO's challenges and strategic considerations as it marks its 75th anniversary, with a particular focus on the implications of potential political changes in the US and their effect on European security.

1. NATO's unity is crucial for its continued relevance, especially in light of current geopolitical tensions.
2. The political stability of the US plays a significant role in NATO's strategic planning and response capabilities.
3. Financial commitments from member countries are essential to meet security needs and to adapt to new military strategies.
4. The expansion of NATO, including the potential inclusion of Ukraine, remains a contentious and complex issue.
5. The episode underscores the importance of strategic foresight and adaptability for NATO as it faces both old and new challenges.

1. NATO at 75: Challenges and Achievements

This chapter explores the origins of NATO, its achievements, and the current challenges it faces as it marks its 75th anniversary. Anton LaGuardia: "NATO has been the most important alliance in the world, really. It's lasted an incredibly long time."

2. The Political Landscape and NATO's Stability

Discussion on how the internal politics of the US and other member countries influence NATO's stability and decision-making processes. Anton LaGuardia: "Joe Biden of the United States, the main protector of NATO, is so weak."

3. The Future of NATO and Defense Strategies

Focuses on the strategic planning required to address emerging threats and the financial implications of these strategies. Anton LaGuardia: "It is probable that the 2% threshold for NATO spending on defence is not enough to meet those plans."

1. Stay informed about geopolitical developments that could impact international security.
2. Engage in discussions and educational opportunities to better understand the roles and challenges of international alliances like NATO.
3. Support policies that promote international cooperation and peace.
4. Encourage political leaders to maintain commitments to international alliances.
5. Foster a better understanding of the economic implications of national defense spending on global security.

It was formed to unite the world’s strongest countries and preserve peace, but as NATO holds a celebration summit for its 75th anniversary, it faces tricky challenges. Climate change is jeopardising Scottish salmon, one of Britain’s biggest food exports (10:15). And why North Korea is sending hot air balloons over to the South, filled with rubbish and faeces (16:50).

People

Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Immanuel Macron, Anton LaGuardia

Companies

None

Books

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Guest Name(s):

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Content Warnings:

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Speaker A
Ever heard of test driving a phone network? Well, us cellular is letting you test drive their nationwide 5g for free. Try out us cellular wherever you have spotty service, your commute to work. Or maybe that one spot in your house where your service just dips like the back corner of our bedroom. It's as easy as doing a little meepaparp.

Speaker C
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Speaker E
The Economist.

Speaker F
Hello and welcome to the. Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Blore. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Speaker E
Scottish science salmon is Britain's biggest food export. Now the fish are dying in droves. We ask what's going on and whether a globally noted brand risks losing its cache.

And we hear a lot about North Korea's nuclear weapons program and ballistic missile tests. But a different type of object is currently being lobbed over the border. Hot air balloons are sailing from north to south, filled with rubbish and feces.

First up, though.

Speaker G
In Washington, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee begins hearings on the ratification of the North Atlantic pact. In 1949, four years after the end of the Second World War, the leaders of the strongest military allies in the world united if we wish peace, we. Must be prepared to wage peace with all our thought, energy, and courage. That is the purpose of this treaty. NATO was born.

The furnishing of military assistance to the Atlantic pact countries is designed to assist us in attaining the fundamental goal of our foreign policy, that is, the preservation of international peace. As he signed the treaty, President Harry Truman laid out the signatory's commitments to. Consult together whenever the territory or independence of any of them is threatened, and to come to the aid of any one of them who may be attacked. This is the core of the famous article five an assurance that an attack on one member was seen as an attack on all. Today, NATO leaders are meeting in Washington for the organization's 75th anniversary.

Speaker E
President Joe Biden and the heads of the 31 other member countries will discuss NATO's future. There'll be a lot to talk about. NATO has been the most important alliance in the world, really. Anton LaGuardia is the economist diplomatic editor. It's lasted an incredibly long time.

Speaker C
It won the cold war it kept Europe at peace. It helped it expand and remains as relevant as ever given. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has reaffirmed NATO's original purpose, which is to keep Europe safe from outside threats. Now, before we get on to what people are talking about today, I'm interested. Can you just paint a picture for me about what it's actually like at one of these NATO meetings?

Well, this was supposed to be the great 75th birthday party at which NATO members would celebrate themselves. It is a very odd year, however, because Joe Biden of the United States, the main protector of NATO, is so weak. He had a terrible debate and has not really recovered since. And many people are asking whether he will survive. With Donald Trump now seeming to be on the rise and heading for victory in November, Immanuel Macron is also very weakened.

He suffered a crushing defeat at the european elections. The parliamentary election that he called was less bad than many had feared, but nevertheless is not great. And he now has to deal with a hung parliament. And he also has to deal with the fact that Marine Le Pen could be the next president in 2027. All of which makes it feel like a last supper for NATO.

Rather than celebration. The one chink of light is Keir Starmer, who has won the british election in a triumphant way and will give hope that centrist politics can still survive. But he must certainly be wondering what kind of international situation he is walking into at his first big international gathering. And what do you think they're all going to be discussing at this last supper? Do we survive?

Is one big question, particularly if Donald Trump comes to power. But the more immediate business will be how do we deal with Ukraine in this forever war, now in its third year in which the Russians are starting to make gains, or at least inflict a great amount of damage? Will the allies find the will and the money to keep supporting Ukraine, Ukraine through these very difficult months. Right. So you've alluded to their concerns over Donald Trump.

Speaker F
What threat does he actually pose to NATO if he gets elected? Well, I think the threat comes in three parts. First of all, the health of America's democracy. Does America remain the shining city on a hill that serves as a beacon to all others and continues to have this incredible drawing power? Second of all, does he abandon Ukraine?

Speaker C
Congress withheld and aid for many months, and therefore, it raises questions about the will of the Americans to keep supporting this costly war, which in turn will raise questions also about the Europeans, of which there are many, and some of them are flagging. And Viktor Orban has a presidency of the EU Council of Ministers and has used that role to cast himself as a peacemaker. Hes been to Kyiv, hes been to Moscow, and now hes gone to Beijing, unasked by anybody, to supposedly try and find peace. So will the allies hold together if the Americans don't keep supporting Ukraine? And Donald Trump has said he would settle the war in a day.

And the only way you can really do that is by abandoning Ukraine. And so what's the third part? The third question on everybody's mind is whether he will abandon Europe and NATO. He has mused about it. His aides have said he threatened to walk out and leave the alliance.

He uses very equivocal language. He says that the Europeans don't pay up, don't pay their bills, as he puts it, which is don't pay 2% of GDP and spend it on defense. He will not defend them. And once you say, I will defend some allies but not others, you call into question the glue that holds the alliance together, the promise that all allies shall be defended. And if you destroy that trust, then you really destroy the alliance.

And that, in turn, will have all kinds of consequences for America's other alliances. And allies everywhere will ask, if he can't be relied on to defend NATO, what can he be relied on to defend at all? Obviously, this is something that everyone's got to think about, but Trump's not there yet. So what are the more immediate concerns and threats that people are discussing at this NATO meeting? I think it comes in two buckets.

One is sustaining Ukraine, as we've already touched upon. The other is the defense of Europe itself. Last year, the NATO supreme commander drew up and had approved three wide ranging plans to defend NATO territory. And that comes with a bill. And it is probable that the 2% threshold for NATO spending on defence is not enough to meet those plans.

And countries are going to have to say, ok, we're going to be able to provide the following brigades, equipment, airlift capacity, fighters, and so on. And what they have is not enough to meet the plan. So the question is, how do they retool to confront the threat from Russia, which is now plainly grown? And I think the last thing theyll be doing is trying to do a bit of Trump proofing, trying to nail things down before the election. For example, they will adopt a plan for NATO to oversee the delivery and the coordination of weapons to Ukraine, as opposed to having the Pentagon do it, because it will be harder for a future us president to undo that.

And given that most of the weapons come from NATO allies individually, NATO may as well have a role in doing it and may as well coordinate it. And Anton, we've been talking a lot about the age of various leaders, or wannabe world leaders. NATO at 75, is getting on a bit. How can it best make sure that it is fit for purpose for the next decade and coming decades? Well, it begins by not failing in Ukraine and continuing to renew itself.

It is 75 years old, but it keeps producing offspring. Sweden and Finland have joined fairly recently. Countries still want to join this alliance because they see its value and therefore to remain relevant and to show that it can defend its allies and show that it is greater than the sum of its parts. Go forth and multiply. Sounds like a great slogan.

Speaker E
Will that include Ukraine? This is a huge question. And the problem is that very few allies really want to absorb and give membership to a country that is at war with an active front, because it means that they are all then committed to defending it, not just to arming it. At the same time, nobody wants to give Russia a veto over who gets to be a member or not. So expect many words that will probably mean not very much.

Speaker C
We will be discussing whether to extend and expand to Ukraine, but that will be a pregnant question. Thank you so much, Anton. Great to talk to you. Great to talk to you, Rosie.

Speaker A
Ever heard of test driving a phone network? Well, us cellular is letting you test drive their nationwide 5g for free. Try out us cellular wherever you have spotty service, your commute to work, or maybe that one spot in your house where your service just dips like the back corner of our bedroom. It's as easy as doing a little me bar on your phone. What was that?

That was me getting the app. Like that's me to try it out. Cause I'm good with sound effects. That's what it sounds like. Okay, test drive us cellulars nationwide.

Speaker B
5g coverage for free for 30 days. Just download the Tryus app. Us cellular built for us. Terms. Apply.

Speaker A
Visit uscellular.com tryus.

Speaker D
I grew up in Edinburgh, and like lots of people who grew up in Scotland, you spend a lot of time holidaying on the west coast and traveling across the Highland and islands with family. Fraser McIlraith is a journalist at the Economist. One of the things that you notice when you're traveling around is that lots of the sea locks and bays have these big salmon farms dotting them. They're these ringed pens that you'll see bobbing on the surface of the lochs. Tourists and locals often grumble and complain that these salmon farms damage the view and spoil the setting.

But actually, they're home to what was last year Britain's biggest food export. The scottish salmon industry is worth about a billion pounds a year, according to the scottish government. It's been around for a while, but in recent years, it's really, really boomed. Production doubled between 1996 and 2016. The problem is, though, that as production has increased, death rates have risen.

So data from Scotland's Fish Health Inspectorate shows an increasing number of premature salmon deaths in saltwater farms. More than 10 million farmed salmon died offshore in both 2022 and 2023, and that was well above the average for the previous six years. If you include freshwater pens where young juveniles are reared, those figures are much, much higher. And salmon Scotland, which is a trade body, they basically record mortality rates, and those have doubled since 2018. Why are so many salmon dying?

Speaker F
That sounds bad. Salmon are dying for a number of reasons. These deaths happen often quite dramatic and troubling ways. So you've got lots of mass die offs which have happened where large numbers of fish have died at once. So there was a farm in Colonsey where over 200,000 fish died in the space for week.

Speaker D
And things like this tend to happen because disease spreads quite readily in these enclosures. Critics of the industry say that pens force salmon to be tightly enclosed without enough space to move, and that fosters sea lice and other issues that plague the fish. But you also have environmental factors. So as seawaters warm, weve had an increasing number of algal blooms, blooms of certain types of plankton, micro jellyfish as well. And those will sweep across farms.

Theyll damage the gills of fish, and that can cause them to fall sick and die, often in these large numbers. So these mass die offs are driving the absolute overall numbers of deaths. What can fish farmers actually do to tackle this problem? They're trying out a few experimental solutions, and it's not really clear which of these will work. The evidence is a bit patchy, but one of the things they're trying to do is move the farms from out of the sea lochs further offshore.

So once you move it out of a loch into deeper waters with faster currents, those waters tend to be cooler. They tend to allow the waste that naturally gathers in these pens to be swept away. Stronger currents are supposed to encourage fish to swim harder and get stronger. But the problem with these offshore farms is that they're much harder to monitor. They need to be much more robust in order to cope with the conditions further out to sea.

And as a result, they're more expensive. So it's sort of unclear whether or not the industry will fully embrace those. One of the stranger solutions that I came across is a company that's trying to build onshore salmon farms. So building big underground caverns, filling them with salt water, and having fish grow in those. And the idea is that it would be easier to maintain a higher standard of conditions within those enclosures.

They're really expensive. It's been done in some places in America, and it's not clear that it's particularly economical. And then another one, which is probably the most widely used, but there's fairly patchy evidence for its effectiveness, is just keep the farms where they are, in the sea lochs, but to encase the nets in a kind of lice proof mesh or some other kind of plastic container, which will stop lice or algae or plankton or whatever from sweeping into the farm and harming the fish. But again, the evidence isn't all there that that will be effective. There have certainly been some cases where it hasn't worked.

Speaker F
Those last two solutions, either of them feels like we could end up with stories about battery fish as opposed to battery chickens. Is this just a scottish problem? No, it's not a scottish problem at all. So, one of the starting points from this piece was me speaking to Gerald Singh, who's a researcher in Canada, and he led a team who basically looked at all of the big fish farming countries. So those are Scotland, but also Norway, Canada, Chile, Australia, New Zealand.

Speaker D
And basically, they found that all of these countries were being affected by pretty much the same problems. Increasing numbers of absolute deaths and an increasing number of mass fatality die offs, where lots of fish die in a very short space of time. So it's not unique to Scotland at all. One of the problems is that perhaps this is an industry which Scotland relies on slightly more than some of these other countries do. In Scotland, the industry is worth roughly a billion pounds per year.

It employs about 12,000 people. So it's a big part of the scottish economy, and it's certainly a big part of the local economies of these more rural areas. It's a global problem, but it's definitely got local significance for Scotland. And I'm sure I'm not the only person who wants to know, does this mean we're going to see less salmon in the shops? It's hard to say.

We're probably not going to see less salmon in the shops. Doctor Singh, who I spoke to, said that maybe if this continues to get worse on current trends, that's something which way off in the distance we might see, but we're not there yet. I think what's more likely, and what's actually a more pressing concern for scottish salmon farmers is that these die offs and these death rates start to damage the brand of scottish salmon. Previously, scottish salmon has traded at a premium against norwegian salmon or canadian salmon. That's essentially an effect of branding.

If scottish salmon starts to lose its cachet as a premium brand, then that's something which could really weigh on producers and pose them some problems. Fraser, thank you so much. Really great to talk to you. Thank you.

Speaker H
So there's a strange sensation that passes over you as you stand looking out over the DMZ, the demilitarized zone that sort of separates the two Koreas. It's a sensation of stillness that there's nothing really going on below. And yet you know in the back of your mind that this is sort of one of the most contested strips of land in the entire world. Andrew Knox writes about the careers for the Economist. But it's not felt so still recently, since the end of May, thousands of balloons have been flying back and forth across the DMZ 2000, going from North Korea to South Korea alone.

And those balloons have often been full with all kinds of detritus. They've had scraps of paper, bits of torn fabric, and even some parasites that the south korean authority think probably came from human feces. Disgust aside, this is sort of part of a long campaign of sending things back and forth across this border that is ordinarily so quiet and still. That has really intensified recently. And I'm just trying to get a picture here.

Speaker F
Are they kind of mini hot air balloons? Maybe somewhere between a hot air balloon and the kind of balloon you get at a kid's birthday party. They're not enormous, but they are purpose built ways of getting reasonably weighty packages. Across parasites that originated in human feces. Sounds like the ultimate euphemism to me.

Sounds disgusting. Why on earth is North Korea sending its rubbish south? So to hear North Korea tell it, or rather, to hear Kim yo yong, who is the regime's propagandist in chief, and also the sister of Kim Jong un, the dictator of North Korea, they're sending rubbish south because South Korea sends rubbish north. There's long been a history of sending things back and forth across the border. Back during the Korean War, there were massive campaigns on both sides to drop leaflets encouraging defection, trying to crippled the war effort and morale.

Speaker H
And they would literally paper the peninsula with these bits of propaganda. Both sides. That continued long past the end of the war, as the two sides sort of locked into their post armistice positions. And the south used to send balloons themselves, loaded with propaganda, even sort of kind of salacious stuff. So some of them would have women dressed in bikinis to entice north korean soldiers to defectore.

And aside from that, various messages about the evils of the northern regime. And in turn, the north would send propaganda over about the decadence of capitalism and how the south was a puppet state of the United States of America. The south stopped doing this back in the early two thousands in a period of quasi rapprochement between the two Koreas. But although the government of South Korea stopped doing it, that didnt mean that the balloon stopped. The baton was really picked up by various groups of activists who would go and launch balloons of their own accord, often with anti regime propaganda or bibles or medicines, and often the thing that terrifies the Kims the most, loaded with usbs that had k pop dramas from south of the border and just information about the outside world.

Speaker F
It feels like the ultimate microcosm of the debate to have bikinis and K pop versus sending balloons of shit. Why are they sending these balloons now? What's happening right at this moment? So the current crop started immediately after one of these activists sent a job. Law of balloons up there, about 300,000, he claimed.

Speaker H
The background to all of this, because these balloons, as I say, are a reasonably frequent occurrence, is that the north and the south have really given up on talking after failed summits between the United States and North Korea back in 2018, 2019. And Covid, when North Korea closed itself off from the world, things just continue to get worse between the two Koreas. And more recently, they've both torn up a military agreement that was meant to keep a lid on tensions, and they've been provoking one and another back and forth across the DMZ. So in this particular instance, Miss Kim, the propaganda minister, essentially has said this will all continue, these sincere gifts, as she put it, until the south stops sending its own trash across. Okay, so, obviously, receiving a balloon full of rubbish is pretty disgusting, but it feels like a microaggression.

Speaker F
Could it lead to something more? It all depends on the temperament of the people in charge. And I mean that on both sides, the balloons themselves might or might not cause an escalation. But these kind of low level, petty provocations you see here are dangerous because there is a risk that one side or the other will misinterpret what the other side is. Doing.

Speaker H
And because they're so ready to strike back, we'll misjudge the situation. We'll hit back too hard, and that will lead to a cycle of escalation. And very quickly, we could find ourselves somewhere that, yeah, no one thought a balloon full of rubbish would have got you.

Speaker F
Andrew, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Speaker E
That's all for this episode of the intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch@podcastconomist.com. we'll see you back here tomorrow. Sadeena.

Speaker A
Ever heard of test driving a phone network? Well, us cellular is letting you test drive their nationwide 5g for free. Try out us cellular, wherever you have spotty service, your commute to work. Or maybe that one spot in your house where your service just dips like the back corner of our bedroom. It's as easy as doing a little meep on your phone.

Speaker B
What was that? That was me getting the app. Like, that's me to try it out because I'm good with sound effects. That's what it sounds like. Okay, test drive.

Us Cellular's nationwide 5g coverage for free for 30 days. Just download the try us app. Us cellular built for us terms apply, visit uscellular.com. tryuse.

Speaker A
tryuse.