North Macedonia’s (unaffordable) NATO dream takes shape

North Macedonia’s flag is flying over NATO Headquarters today in Brussels as the alliance’s 30th member after the final accession formalities were completed on March 27 in Skopje and Brussels. While the rest of the world wrestled with the COVID-19 crisis, one small piece of the post-Yugoslavia Balkan puzzle has finally been put into place, even though to all of North Macedonia’s new allies it is clear that NATO’s defence spending targets will be unattainable for the foreseeable future.
A long road
It took 14 months for the NATO accession process to work through the various legislative approvals needed for the 29 other NATO countries to ratify the new member’s entry into the alliance, with Greece being the first and Spain the last country to ratify. Despite continuing pressure from NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and officials in Washington who pressed hard to complete the process in 2019 if possible, the formal accession process was completed in the time frame most non-politicised experts on NATO procedures had estimated, that is early 2020.
COVID-19 crisis dampens official celebrations
American officials had a formal role in the accession process as the US is the so-called “depositary” for the NATO Treaty, meaning that it supports formal diplomatic exchanges and retains key documents for NATO. Accordingly, there was an attempt to make the most of the March 27 document transfer in Skopje and to highlight the American role. US State Department documents indicate the accession protocol formally entered into force on March 19.
The US Embassy in Skopje received the “instrument of ratification” from North Macedonian Foreign Minister Nikola Dimitrov for transmission to the State Department and a congratulatory tweetstorm from all sides was heard.
US Ambassador Kate Byrnes, who accepted the instrument on behalf of the State Department, warmly congratulated North Macedonia for becoming the new member of the Alliance. With public diplomacy being the order of the day, Secretary of State Pompeo dispatched a tweet along with formal congratulations from the State Department. “Today, we welcome North Macedonia into the NATO Alliance as our 30th ally and celebrate their commitment to the North Atlantic Alliance. We reaffirm our commitment to collective defence under Article 5, the cornerstone of the Transatlantic Alliance.”
Speaking on March 27 in Brussels, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg declared that “North Macedonia is now part of the NATO family, a family of thirty nations and almost one billion people.” He also noted “a family based on the certainty that, no matter what challenges we face, we are all stronger and safer together.”
A new NATO member with extremely limited resources
Time will tell whether North Macedonia is ever able to attain the NATO target for defence spending of 2% of GDP, which is simply a strong suggestion to most allied leaders other than US President Donald Trump, who has focused heavily on NATO burden-sharing. Ultimately North Macedonia’s economic growth and thus budgetary capacity depends on the country’s eventual EU accession and the inflow of both EU funds and private capital that should follow, a point not lost on Paris, Berlin or Brussels who all understand that a portion of EU funding for Skopje will be repurposed and end up supporting the country’s increased NATO-required defence expenditures.
Finally, while the Name Dispute with Greece appears to be settled and North Macedonia’s Euro-Atlantic ambitions are within reach — at some point after the COVID crisis — a large percentage of the Greek population understands and will not easily forget that progress for North Macedonia came at a substantial cost to Greece in terms of unnecessary concessions on the “Macedonian” ethnicity and language in order to close the 2018 Prespes Agreement.
The UN’s part in this drama was expected, but the role of the US and to a lesser extent Germany in pressing the Prespes Agreement to completion, through continued support for the wildly unpopular and only marginally competent socialist government of former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, will not be forgotten at some point when Washington needs Athens’ support.
For those willing to work through the issue analytically, this entire episode was another case of misalignment of Greek and US interests on a key regional issue. The US proved capable and willing to exploit the short-term opportunity Tsipras provided to recast the Greek negotiating position on key issues. Analysts will be debating these conclusions for years, but more than anything Skopje’s latest step forward provokes angry grumbling in Northern Greece and reinforces the “victimization by foreign hegemons” strain of thinking still prevalent within Greek society after last decade’s economic crisis.