Heidi Hardt has written a magnificent book about “shared knowledge among IO [international organization] elites” (p. 2)—or institutional memory. Hardt zooms in on a specific domain (crisis management operations) and a specific actor (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; NATO) but takes a broad swipe at two literatures that would normally claim to account for such memory: (1) the management literature and its claim that it is quite possible to rationally design formal “lessons learned” processes within organizations and (2) the power politics literature and its claim that, in a world of self-help and low trust, knowledge or memory will be shared only within national channels.

Hardt’s thorough examination of NATO yields several noteworthy observations. NATO does have a repository of shared elite knowledge of strategic lessons learned, but it is informal and maintained outside the formal lessons-learned channels. This knowledge forms across crisis management operations of different kinds—from large and sustained ones, such as in Afghanistan, to short-lived ones, such as in Libya—just as it applies to crisis management scenarios, such as the Ukraine crisis of 2014 in which NATO did not deploy troops but raised its guard. The International Staff (at NATO’s political-military strategic headquarters in Brussels) is a key facilitator of informal knowledge exchange, and particularly important are “knowledge guardians” on the staff: people with multinational experience, language facility, and cultural sensitivity (pp. 131–34). Elites from wealthy European countries and Canada dominate these networks, either by forming the hubs of networks or bridging gaps in them, whereas US elites are not well connected. NATO has a persistent political culture of “reaction over reflection” (p. 178), premised on the belief that it should be ready for whatever comes next and that dwelling on the past will involve a blame game detrimental to its can-do posture.

Hardt derives from this investigation an “Institutional Design Explanation” (p. 10) that attributes the growth of informal knowledge exchange to shortcomings in the formal organization. In NATO these shortcomings are notably the lack of a process to capture strategic (as opposed to tactical and operational) lessons, a lack of anonymity in reporting lessons, and the subjecting of lessons approval to the rule of political consensus. In attributing informality to formal dysfunction, Hardt commits to a rationalist explanatory framework wherein function follows form: because the organization is pregnant with perverse incentives, the practice of sharing knowledge moves into the corridors of informal exchange. The policy lessons for NATO that appear at the end of the book (pp. 213–20) are thus about correcting incentives and rationalizing the organization, involving a strategic lessons process, wider access to anonymous reporting and recorded lessons, expanded training of staff in how these processes work, certain steps to carefully routinize the informal exchange of knowledge (such as providing for overlap in job rotation and making mandatory the exchange of “private” exit documents, as well as limiting the spread of short-term contracts in the staff), and the introduction of a “learning culture” at the highest level.

It becomes clear through all this that Hardt’s beef is with the management school of thought and in particular with rational institutionalists who assume that institutional incentives structure political interaction (p. 39). In fact, Hardt argues, such incentives deter elites from working formally with strategic lessons, and hence these elites turn to informal cooperation. Hardt thus labors on the latest frontier of rationalism; namely, on the rationales of informal political interaction. For rational institutionalists of all stripes, Hardt’s book is a must-read. Especially convincing is her skill at drilling deep from various methodological angles into her subject matter and consistently challenging the logic of formal rationalism. Clearly, Hardt has set a high standard for the quality of her scholarship, and having met it, her book should now become a point of scholarly reference.

Having said that, two alternative explanatory frameworks get sidelined in all this. Hardt’s “proposition 4” (pp. 14–15) is that elites might simply be handing over strategic lessons in strictly private and informal channels that preclude a wider, collective form of knowledge. This perspective, drawn from the literature on elite psychology and risk calculus, gets sidelined on pragmatic grounds: Hardt simply does not have access to sufficient data (i.e., private notebooks and journals) to evaluate the proposition. However, she does note that her finding that knowledge gets shared across NATO elites is indicative of the weakness of this competing proposition.

The other alternative explanation is, as mentioned, one of power politics. Hardt draws on neoclassical realism to elucidate how structural incentives (power shifts or threats) get funneled through national institutions before they shape decisions. One should expect, Hardt argues, that NATO would be dominated by national “silos” wherein national elites draw strategic lessons and thus experience a dearth of collective strategic learning because of the uncertainty and hedging behavior fostered by low-trust environments (pp. 10–13). Hardt observes throughout the empirical assessment how NATO’s knowledge of strategic lessons defies these national “silos” and therefore, by implication, the perspective of power politics.

All observers of power politics should welcome this explanatory challenge because it is skillfully crafted and takes place on their home turf—that of war, defense, security, and alliances. Still, it is noteworthy that Hardt crafts her take on power politics in a distinctively rationalist way, which in effects puts her “state silo explanation” on par with that of rational institutionalism as yet another framework premised on the assumption that political interaction flows from (institutional or power-based) incentives. True, neoclassical realism is indebted to structural realism insofar as it maintains “a system-dominated explanation for state behavior” (p. 11) that is all about rational incentives.

Quite a degree of power political thinking is not captured by this rationalist scheme, however, especially that of the broad and diverse congregation of classical realists. This book will not shake their assumption that NATO rests on convergent values, as well as power interests. Rather, they might ask whether Hardt has not shed light on a particular type of transatlantic power politics whereby the hegemon, the United States, runs power in its usual, rather self-sufficient style, which is the luxury of hegemons, while allies labor within the institution to broker compromises and move consensus forward, all in an effort to maintain the convergence of transatlantic perspectives on which NATO rests. Hardt does not squarely confront this perspective, nor does her quite focused empirical investigation of 120 NATO elites in 2015 offer enough scope to settle the debate. However, Hardt’s book thought provokingly invites further research. Of special interest should be NATO’s enlargement from 16 allies in 1990 to its current 30 allies, along with the 2016 move to a new, sleek, formal political-military headquarters building in Brussels: Does this blend of diverse value sets housed within a modernistic facility erode the bonhomie Atlantic value base, or is the process of institutional knowledge sharing that Hardt proposes an effective corrective mechanism?

NATO and security analysts can do no better than to engage Heidi Hardt’s NATO’s Lessons in Crisis as they set out to address this and other important questions.