NATO Is Dying, but Don’t Blame Trump

T. Belman. Of what value is NATO to the US? I see very little. Throughout the cold war, it was thought that the US must keep Europe free as a buffer for America. But things are different now. The EU is at logger heads with many US foreign policy decisions and fights the US all the way. The EU opposes the US on Iran, the UN, the Palestinian question, Israel (US wants to strengthen it while the EU wants to weaken it.) climate change policies and the value of multilateral cooperation (ie, the EU wants to hornswaggle the US with multilateralism at a time when the US wants to go it alone.), nationalism as opposed to globalism. In short, there is no reason for the US to protect the EU. Another reason for the US to jettison NATO is that Turkey is a member. Turkey has turned anti-US and there is no reason that NATO should come to Turkey’s defense.

Germany reneges on defense commitments, thumbing its nose at the alliance.

By Walter Russell Mead, WSJ

Is NATO dying? The idea was once unthinkable, but after the German cabinet decided to keep defense spending as low as 1.25% of gross domestic product for the next five years it has become unavoidable. This decision is not driven by any fiscal urgency. Germany is projected to have a balanced budget after last year’s surplus of €11.2 billion, its fifth annual surplus in a row.

What Berlin means by this decision is clear: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the U.S. are not as important to Germany as they used to be. While irritation with and contempt for President Trump influence German foreign policy, something more profound is at work. Democrats including President Obama, as well as Republicans like John McCain, have long called on Germany to demonstrate its commitment to NATO by spending 2% of GDP on defense. By refusing even to come close to meeting NATO’s spending targets, Berlin is thumbing its nose not only at Donald Trump but at the U.S.

It’s also blowing off its neighbors. Britain and France are seething over German restrictions on arms exports that limit their ability to sell weapons developed in association with German defense companies to third countries of which Berlin disapproves, like Saudi Arabia. Germany’s eastern neighbors, including Poland and the Baltic states, want a stronger, better-funded NATO. Germany’s refusal to honor its commitments, combined with its cooperation with Russia over the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, leaves these countries deeply fearful.

Germany isn’t alone in distancing itself from NATO. Turkey’s plans to buy S-400 missiles from Russia, and Italy’s recent decision to sign on to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, are also measures of the diminished value placed on the trans-Atlantic alliance.

The U.S. has also been backing away from the alliance for the better part of a decade. It did not start with Mr. Trump’s bluster. The Syrian civil war and the resulting flood of refugees caused grave political and social crises in Turkey and the European Union, and the Obama administration’s erratic and indecisive approach to the catastrophe sent an unmistakable message about American priorities to the allies.

NATO members are less committed to the alliance than they used to be because most worry less about conventional military attacks from Russia. During the Cold War, NATO was a military alliance that countries like Germany, Turkey and Italy thought was their best and perhaps only defense against Soviet aggression. For Americans it was the cornerstone of a global containment strategy. After the Cold War, Russia largely disappeared as a military threat for two decades, and NATO was repurposed into one of two tools (along with EU integration) for extending Western political, military and economic institutions into Eastern Europe. After 9/11 there were attempts to transform NATO into a global “out of area” alliance, either against terror or for other, vaguely defined purposes. Those efforts have clearly fallen short.

Countries with the misfortune to be neighbors of Russia are still enthusiastic about NATO. But the anti-Russian zeal of Poland and the Baltic states is something of an embarrassment for Germans eager to cut Nord Stream 2-type deals with Moscow over the heads of their mostly small, poor and importunate eastern neighbors. And even the U.S. is not sure what to think of them. Mr. Trump’s electoral base is divided between national-security hawks, who see Eastern Europe’s NATO stalwarts as serving American purposes against both Moscow and European neutralists, and unilateralists and neo-isolationists, who yearn for a grand bargain with Russia.

Meanwhile, although political support for NATO is in recession, its bureaucratic structures remain robust. There are battalions of generals, flocks of ambassadors, and armies of paper shufflers who intend to go on doing their jobs as long as they get paid. Unintentionally, perhaps, NATO has found a new function: a grand experiment to see how long the bureaucratic structures of cooperation can prolong the existence of an alliance when its key members no longer believe the security calculations at its heart.

Sooner or later, even in diplomacy, reality sweeps even the most imposing shams aside. NATO is not a sham—yet. It is still a valuable institution honoring an important purpose. There will be ceremonies and speeches when it turns 70 in April.

But without a change of heart on the part of its most important members, the outlook for NATO is poor. The longest-lived and most-effective multilateral military alliance in history is not what it was in its prime. This is a consequential fact in world politics, and in Moscow and Beijing, conclusions are being drawn.