NATO And The Future of Collective Security

NATO remains relevant, but the real question now is whether it can sustain political cohesion while coping with a more fragmented agenda. The alliance must now manage not one overriding threat, but several competing pressures that pull different members in different directions.

By Sanjay Kumar Verma

For much of the post 1945 era, NATO was the quiet backbone of Western security. It was not only a military alliance; it was a political signal that the United States and Canada would remain anchored in Europe’s defence. Built in 1949 to counter Soviet expansion, it tied North America to the continent through shared planning, deterrence, and a sense of collective responsibility. For decades, that framework was stable enough that the question was rarely how NATO would adapt, but how it would sustain the order it had helped create.

That logic still holds, but the world around it has changed. The Cold War’s clear cut threat has given way to overlapping crises: war in Europe, turmoil in the Middle East, competition over technology, energy insecurity, and the weight of high defence spending at home. NATO remains relevant, but the real question now is whether it can sustain political cohesion while coping with a more fragmented agenda. The alliance must now manage not one overriding threat, but several competing pressures that pull different members in different directions.

For decades, that framework was stable enough that the question was rarely how NATO would adapt, but how it would sustain the order it had helped create. (Representative Image:X)

The numbers show that this is not an alliance in material decline. NATO’s common budgets for 2026 come to roughly €5.3 billion, split across the Civil Budget, the Military Budget, and the NATO Security Investment Programme. These funds cover common infrastructure, communications, and shared capabilities, yet they represent only a small fraction of total allied defence effort. In 2025, European allies and Canada spent more than $574 billion on defence, and their collective defence burden rose from 1.4 percent of GDP in 2014 to 2.3 percent in 2025. In purely financial terms, NATO is not under funded; it is, if anything, over engaged compared to the clarity of its political mandate.

Disagreement of purpose became particularly visible around the US Israeli war with Iran. The episode revealed different strategic instincts inside the alliance. Some governments treated the conflict as a regional event, with implications for the Middle East but not for Europe itself. Others saw it as part of a broader security picture in which technological competition, missile proliferation, and alliance credibility were all at stake.

This matters because collective defence institutions work best when members broadly agree on the main threat. When that agreement blurs, institutions do not always collapse, but they slow down, hedge more, and become more contested.

A second layer of strain is skewed dependence. NATO remains heavily reliant on American capabilities in command, intelligence, logistics, missile defence, and high end procurement, even as European members contribute more to overall spending and frontline posture. Most of the European airframes, command systems, and intelligence platforms are deeply embedded in transatlantic ecosystems that do not easily translate into independent European power projection.

The defence industrial side of the picture is revealing, and often less discussed in public. In the United States, the Pentagon’s FY2026 budget request is reported at roughly $961.6 billion, with about $205 billion for procurement. In Europe, defence spending reached €343 billion in 2024 and is projected at €381 billion in 2025, with defence investment and R&D rising sharply. Equipment procurement alone surged in 2024, reflecting a rush to replenish stocks after years of under investing in munitions and industrial capacity. So, while political cohesion is under strain, military industrial activity is accelerating. Defence firms on both sides of the Atlantic are benefiting from rearmament, procurement, and research spending. That boosts capacity, but it can also deepen dependence, encourage duplication, and nudge individual members toward national solutions instead of collective ones.

Data from the SIPRI Top 100 arms producing companies show that arms related revenues for the world’s largest firms rose sharply in 2024. US based companies in the Top 100 reached combined arms revenues of about $334 billion, while European firms (excluding Russia) clocked in around $151 billion. Within that group, 23 of 26 European companies reported rising arms revenues, but the absolute scale of the US sector remains far larger. In practical terms, this means that the alliance driven cycle of rearmament has not only boosted European defence spending but has also consolidated the global market position of a handful of US based giants.

There is also an economic dimension. As NATO members expand production and rush to replenish stocks, non alliance and semi aligned defence firms can find new opportunities in exports, co production, and niche technologies.

For other regional and functional groupings, the experience offers a few sobering insights. The first is that treaties and legal commitments are not enough on their own. Institutions can be formally robust, with detailed charters and sophisticated command structures, but they work only when members still agree on what the main threat is and how much risk they are prepared to share. A region wide security compact that lacks a shared understanding of danger will eventually hollow out, even if it is formally intact.

Beyond legal language, the real question becomes how members spend their money. A grouping can increase defence budgets and still remain fragmented if it does not coordinate capability development, industrial planning, and strategic focus. Higher spending that produces duplication rather than complementarity deepens inefficiency rather than unity. The urge to “buy local” or to protect national industrial bases can, if left unchecked, create parallel systems, redundant platforms, and poor interoperability.

Security and industry are also increasingly intertwined. Modern alliances rest on complex supply chains, research ecosystems, and domestic employment structures. Ignoring this political economy makes it harder to manage crises when pressure rises and members feel a pull toward national industrial and employment interests. A grouping that tries to separate “security policy” from “economic policy” will find that the two collide precisely at the most sensitive moments. The private defence sector, in particular, has become a key stakeholder in every security decision, not just a passive supplier.

For other groupings, whether in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, or the Global South, the lesson is that collective security cannot be assumed. It must be consciously rebuilt, again and again, whenever the world changes. It is not a fixed structure, but a continuous political practice. When institutions pay attention to threat perception, to the way money is spent, to the links between security and industry, and to the mechanisms that contain disagreement, they are more likely to endure. When they neglect these questions, even the most impressive alliance can find itself strong on paper and weak in practice. The fact that the private defence sector, especially US based firms, has captured the largest share of gains from the alliance is a reminder that the stability of security institutions must be judged not only by military strength, but also by the balance of power among the interests that sustain them.

Observing these transatlantic fault lines, India’s security and defence engagements are designed to avoid precisely the kind of trust deficit and forced uniformity of purpose that can weaken structured partnerships. Rather than binding diverse partners into a single treaty framework with identical obligations, New Delhi has favoured a looser and more adaptable architecture built around consultation, capacity-building, and convergences of interest. That is why concepts such as SAGAR and the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative matter: they frame security as a shared regional responsibility without requiring every participant to hold the same threat perception or adopt the same political position at the same moment. In this model, cooperation does not depend on perfect consensus. It depends instead on practical collaboration in areas such as maritime security, connectivity, disaster response, and resilience, allowing countries to work together where interests align without turning every disagreement into a test of the entire framework.

The same logic is visible in India’s wider defence diplomacy. Its engagement with the Quad, its role in regional platforms such as IORA, and its expanding bilateral defence partnerships with friendly countries are structured less as instruments of bloc discipline than as flexible mechanisms of trust-building and strategic coordination. This approach reduces the risk of the kind of internal strain seen in more rigid alliance systems, because it does not demand total political unison before cooperation can proceed. Instead, India creates overlapping circles of partnership — joint exercises, logistics arrangements, white-shipping exchanges, training, defence exports, and maritime coordination through which confidence is built gradually and functional cooperation can continue even where strategic priorities differ. In that sense, India’s approach to collective security is not based on enforcing uniformity, but on managing diversity through trust, flexibility, and issue-based alignment.

About the Author:

Sanjay Kumar Verma is a former Indian diplomat with nearly four decades of experience. He served as India’s High Commissioner to Canada and Ambassador to Japan, Sudan, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands. He writes on diplomacy, geopolitics, international trade, technology policy, and global security.