What will be the epitaph of NATO?

Victor Davis Hanson gives us some history of NATO and concludes:

By 2000, NATO had devolved into a sort of quasi-European Union organization that happened to include the United States largely for its money and guns.

More importantly, the European Union’s strain of post-Cold War socialism was at odds with the original notion of a muscular democratic and anti-communist NATO. This might explain why European NATO members have cut $45 billion from their annual defense budgets in the last two years alone. The EU gradually sought to consolidate many of the NATO members under the aegis of growing cradle-to-grave entitlements that by needs came at the expanse of military readiness. “Soft Power” was the EU answer to supposedly ossified NATO deterrence—a wonderful cop-out that allowed European social democracies to divert budgets to domestic spending while taking the moral high ground of outsourcing quaint and outdated ideas of hard power to a less sophisticated and rather unruly United States.

Few NATO countries since 1994 have kept their promises to invest at least 2% of their GDP in defense (the alliance-wide average was 1.6%). The few who did like Greece, Poland, or Estonia were not major international players. In the last twenty years, the United States has whined that it has provided a quarter of the yearly military wherewithal of the alliance—more if U.S. training and indirect support are included—even though by the logic of geography and geopolitics, America remains the most secure of its members.

Barack Obama, however, is a president of a different sort from his predecessors. By temperament and ideology he has no special investment in Europe. Indeed, his knowledge of recent European history is patchy (the Americans liberated Auschwitz; Austrians speak Austrian; the “death camps” were Polish, etc.). He envisions European social democracy and pacifism not as a NATO irritant, but as a model. After his own massive defense cuts and imposed sequestration, Obama will be the first president in modern history to see U.S. defense spending dip below 3% of GDP. Obama’s retreat from foreign policy—the loud but symbolic “Asian pivot,” “leading from behind,” and the general recessional from the Middle East—are the public manifestations of a deeper reluctance to worry much about European security—or for that matter U.S. military primacy abroad.

Many observers are worried that NATO might dissolve if Vladimir Putin were soon to invade fellow member states like Estonia or Latvia, if only to dare the alliance to respond. But the organization might equally unwind were a volatile Turkey to start a regional war with almost any of its neighbors, given that many NATO members would prefer to side with Turkey’s enemies rather that with Erdogan.

In sum, NATO is confronting a tripartite existential danger. First, Putin is a far more sophisticated adversary than the old Soviet apparatchiks—projecting confidence, religion, values, and traditions to appeal to the very states that he would absorb. His argument is that European appeasement and disarmament are not just dangerous for NATO members on Russian borders, but the logical ramification of an endemic social and cultural wasteland for which he offers a confident alternative.

Second, Turkey is a far more wayward member than France or the old member dictatorships ever were. The past NATO bond was anti-communism; and all members, from socialists to autocrats, agreed. But the new ostensible mission of NATO involves a deep distrust of Islamism and its many anti-Western agendas—from a would-be nuclear Iran to ISIS and al Qaeda. Every member but Turkey would agree. Turkey is not just aberrant in this regard, but increasingly antithetical to the entire democratic and liberal pretenses of NATO itself.

Third, Barack Obama is not the typical hectoring American president, but a European doppelganger who cannot chide NATO to man up to its responsibilities. Not only does he not believe that its members must step up, but he also does not believe that America should either.

The epitaph of NATO will be that its many weak members won their half-century philosophical argument over its one strong member. Europe got what it wanted and thereby by its indifference has almost destroyed the very organization that it so opportunistically slighted—and always counted on.

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