Who Needs NATO?

No European should be surprised at the resentful words spoken in Brussels last week by Robert Gates, the departing U.S. defense secretary. Americans have been grumbling about the failure of the European partners in NATO to pull their weight almost since the organization was founded in 1949.

“Because we had had our troops there, the Europeans had not done their share,” President Eisenhower said. “They won’t make the sacrifices to provide the soldiers for their own defense.”

But there is more to it. If the relationship of the United States with Europe in NATO included a dubious bargain from the start, the treaty organization did at least once have a clear purpose.

Now, if Americans are going to ask why they should pay three-quarters of the cost of NATO at a time of “politically painful budget and benefit cuts,” in Gates’s words, then Europeans might respond with a more existential question: Just what is the purpose of the organization any more? Who needs NATO?

Once upon a time there was a simple answer. The object of NATO, said General Lord Ismay, its first secretary general, was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down” (if only we had public servants today with that kind of pith and candor!).

Whether the Americans wanted to stay had been in some doubt. It was widely apprehended that the United States might withdraw after 1945, as it had done after 1918. There were those like Senator Robert Taft, a leading Republican in his day, who opposed American membership of NATO. “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations,” Thomas Jefferson had counseled the American people in his first inaugural address, “entangling alliances with none.” And NATO was an entangling alliance if ever there was.

But most Americans accepted that the goal of keeping the Russians out was worth the price, which meant that the Americans picked up a disproportionate share of the tab. That was not only understandable but inevitable. At the end of the war, the United States was the outstanding winner, having suffered relatively minor casualties and material damage by comparison with devastated Europe, and having undergone an astonishing wartime economic boom, which only highlighted European impoverishment.

Over the postwar course of what the French called les trente glorieuses and the Germans the Wirtschaftswunder , Western Europe enjoyed its own economic transformation. And this miracle of free-market growth was combined — in Europe, that is, with a strong system of public welfare.

By European standards, the United States had the most rudimentary welfare services, and still has. President Obama struggled to introduce a healthcare scheme which, even in its fuller version, would have been rejected by most European conservative parties as too right-wing. And yet, by paying for NATO, the Americans indirectly subsidized Europe’s much more lavish welfare.

The later outcome was still stranger, and even more unsatisfactory. Forty years after it was founded, NATO triumphed. Not only was West Europe saved, not only did the Red Army never cross the Elbe, but the Cold War ended in total victory for the West without a shot fired. The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union imploded, and its satrapies in Eastern Europe were liberated.

At which point the question might have been asked what NATO was now for. Alas, as is so often the case, an institution which had out lived its original purpose had to think of new things to do — like expanding eastward to include the former Warsaw Pact countries.

This was a betrayal of a specific undertaking Washington had given to the Russians. And it also illustrated again the baleful effect of American domestic politics: President Clinton impulsively promised that Poland could join NATO while addressing a Polish-American audience in Chicago.

Altogether, that eastern expansion was a fine example of what’s called an answer without a question. But it was also hypocritical nonsense. It was all very well lightheartedly to admit Latvia to NATO. But did anyone really believe that if Russian troops crossed the border near Karsava, France, Germany or the United States would shed blood for Latvia?

Other new tasks for NATO, quite unimagined by its founders, were “liberal intervention” and “nation-building.”

Whether or not a military response in the former Yugoslavia was desirable, it’s hard to see what it had to do with NATO. Under the crucial Article 5 of the 1949 treaty, the members agreed that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,” and whatever else Milosovic and Mladic might be accused of, they had not attacked any NATO member.

Then came Sept. 11. What happened in New York was certainly an armed attack on a member, though not by a recognizable state. And, once again, the American-led military response under the aegis of NATO could scarcely be justified by the treaty. That same article said that a member attacked could expect the assistance of other members, “including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area .” By what geographical sleight of hand did that come to include the Pamirs?

For all the compromises, NATO did originally represent a fair balance of interests, but that cannot be said of the Afghan war. If Americans complain about having to pay most of the cost of the alliance, Europeans could reply that that’s only fair if NATO is going to be little more than the American Foreign Legion.

A new height of dangerous absurdity came with the short-lived conflict between Georgia and Russia. Hillary Clinton — in electioneering rather than State Department mode — had already demanded that both Ukraine and Georgia should be admitted to NATO, prompting the question how Washington would have felt if Leonid Brezhnev had invited Mexico and Cuba to join the Warsaw Pact.

Then during that crisis in the summer of 2008, David Cameron struck his own attitudes. The Conservative opposition leader, who would be prime minister within two years, flew to Tbilisi and demanded that Georgia should be admitted to NATO forthwith, which bizarre suggestion, if taken seriously, might have precipitated an international war.

A voice of sanity was heard from Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a former Tory foreign secretary, who said how foolish it was to make threats which were not going to be carried out. As Rifkind rightly said, “The U.S., Britain and France would not go to war with [Russia] to force South Ossetia back into Georgia.”

A slow learner, it would seem, Cameron has now led the way for the NATO intervention in Libya, along with Nicolas Sarkozy, who had also flown to Georgia in 2008 to rattle his own flimsy sabre.

Quite apart from the fact that, as our top brass keep telling us, yet another operation puts an intolerable strain on military resources, which the Cameron government is cutting fiercely, this has gone awry with alarming speed, while its justification has also quickly changed. A mission to protect life became an intervention in a civil war, or one more war to effect regime change.

Much mental energy has been expended on debating what the purpose of the European Union is and how its problems could be resolved. The question is even more pertinent about NATO. Is it really needed any more? If not, wouldn’t it be wiser to call it a day.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, a journalist, writer and the author of The Controversy of Zion, The Strange Death of Tory England and Yo, Blair!

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