The new threat to America: NATO
Last Updated: 4:33 AM, June 14, 2010
Posted: 1:12 AM, June 14, 2010
It's not just the euro (and with it the European Union) that's in danger of sinking out of sight. So, too, is NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Unless the United States takes a long, hard look at its connections with this Cold War relic, we may find ourselves caught in the undertow.
Two recent news items ram the point home.
* The Gaza convoy incident underlined the growing support of Iran and the terrorist group Hamas by Turkey -- a NATO member since 1958. That one of the NATO allies now wants to ally with the jihadist cause -- and a country that is NATO's face in the Middle East -- should get everyone's attention.
* France, having rejoined NATO's military structure in 2009 (after leaving in a huff back in 1966), is about to sell up to four Mistral-class helicopter assault ships to Russia. The warships include sophisticated technology that integrates the ships with the military command and information systems used by NATO and the United States, including in Afghanistan.
Indeed, Russia's Vladimir Putin announced he won't do the deal unless he gets that highly restricted technology -- even though, as Agence France Press quotes one senior US lawmaker as saying, it would "shake NATO to the core."
In short, one NATO ally is lining up to help Iran dominate the Middle East. Another, after months of promises that it would not, intends to sell Russia the means not only to intimidate maritime neighbors like Lithuania and Georgia, but possibly to eavesdrop on every NATO operation around the world.
Add in NATO's refusal to carry its share of the burden of fighting in Afghanistan, which is hampering our strategy there and putting our soldiers in danger, and there's only one conclusion to draw: The Cold War alliance that was once an important pillar of Western and US security is becoming a danger to both.
NATO was created in 1949 with the idea that America would supply the alliance with the bulk of its muscle, while its other members would display the solidarity of political will to resist Communist domination of Europe (though each member also promised to devote at least 2 percent of GDP to military spending each year).
That made sense when Germany and France and Italy were still emerging from the rubble of world war, and a war-weary Britain was still rationing meat and sugar -- and the Soviet Union loomed as a nuclear-armed monolith. By the 1970s, the formula was becoming absurd: European countries were flourishing and incomes rising, yet their share of meeting NATO's defense needs did not. Instead, the vast US conventional and nuclear umbrella let them build hugely wasteful welfare states under its shade.
When the Cold War ended, NATO made even less sense. The first sign that it had outlived its usefulness came in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, when the alliance's European members were unwilling to prevent the first genocide on European soil since the Holocaust, unless the United States took the lead. So much for displaying political will.
Then came Afghanistan. The European members of the International Security Assistance Force there have been extremely careful to avoid any serious combat duties, for fear their pacifist-minded populations might demand the troops come home. In many cases, US forces have to spend almost as much time and effort protecting them as engaging the enemy. For the last five years, they've been a misery to us, and an aid and a comfort to the enemy.
Yet President Obama's strategy in Afghanistan relies on "help" from those same NATO allies (even as he himself has undercut NATO's most pro-American members like Poland, Latvia and the Czech Republic by giving in to Russia on missile defense). Likewise, his long-term plans for the Pentagon depend on Europe sharing more of the burden on its own defense, including the NATO budget.
It's a forlorn hope. Today, only five of NATO's 28 members live up to the 2 percent defense-spending requirement. Worse, Karl Heinz Kamp, director of the research division of NATO Defense College, has found that, of Europe's 2 million men and women in uniform, only 3 percent to 5 percent are actually deployable in combat. And the cash-strapped Europeans want to cut NATO's budget almost out of sight.
If an armed conflict ever does come back to Europe, it is easy to guess who will be doing the fighting. Meanwhile, it's increasingly hard to see what we're getting in return when Turkey and France are not only undermining NATO, but seemingly mounting direct challenges to US security interests.
When NATO was created, Churchill's friend Lord Ismay said its job was "to keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down." Today, NATO is letting the Americans and Afghans down, allowing the Russians and Iranians in -- and letting everyone else off the hook. So why are we still part of it?
Arthur Herman's most recent book is "Gandhi and Churchill."
