Defense Secretary Robert Gates spoke bluntly to America’s NATO allies on Friday. They needed to hear it.
America’s key strategic alliance throughout the cold war is in far deeper trouble than most members admit. The Atlantic allies face a host of new and old dangers. Without more and wiser European military spending — on equipment, training, surveillance and reconnaissance — NATO faces, as Mr. Gates rightly warned, “a dim if not dismal future” and even “irrelevance.”
The secretary is retiring at the end of this month, which is likely one of the reasons he jettisoned the diplomatic niceties. But not the only one. As he made clear, this country can no longer afford to do a disproportionate share of NATO’s fighting and pay a disproportionate share of its bills while Europe slashes its defense budgets and free-rides on the collective security benefits.
NATO’s shockingly wobbly performance over Libya, after the Pentagon handed off leadership, should leave no doubt about the Europeans’ weaknesses. And while America’s NATO partners now have 40,000 troops in Afghanistan (compared with about 99,000 from the United States), many have been hemmed in by restrictive rules of engagement and shortages of critical equipment. Too many are scheduled for imminent departure.
The free-rider problem is an old one but has gotten even worse over the last two decades. During most of the cold war, the United States accounted for 50 percent of total NATO military spending; today it accounts for 75 percent. Mr. Gates was right when he warned of America’s dwindling patience with allies “unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.”
Decades of underinvestment, poor spending choices and complacent denial about new challenges have created what Mr. Gates called a “two-tiered alliance.” He is right that too many of its members limit themselves to “humanitarian, development, peacekeeping and talking tasks,” and too few are available for the combat missions the alliance as a whole has agreed to assume.
Libya, a mission much more directly linked to the security of Europe than of the United States, strikingly illustrates the consequences.
Fewer than half of NATO’s 28 members are taking part in the military mission. Fewer than a third are participating in the all-important airstrikes. British and French aircraft carry the main burden. Canada, Belgium, Norway and Denmark, despite limited resources, have made outsized contributions. Turkey, with the alliance’s second-largest military, has remained largely on the sidelines. Germany, NATO’s biggest historic beneficiary, has done nothing at all.
Even fully participating members have failed to train enough targeting specialists to keep all of their planes flying sorties or to buy enough munitions to sustain a bombing campaign much beyond the present 11 weeks.
That should frighten every defense ministry in Europe. What if they had to fight a more formidable enemy than Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s fractured dictatorship?
Combat is not always the best or only solution. NATO needs those European development and peacekeeping capabilities. All alliance members must also have at least the basic military capacities to meet common threats. Without that, the alliance will grow increasingly hollow — a fact that enemies will not miss.
Mr. Gates was right to speak out. We hope his likely successor, Leon Panetta, will keep pushing hard. A two-tiered military alliance is really no alliance at all.
It is not often I agree with the content of the NY Times Op-Ed page. Hence my posting in its entirety a well written and very reasonable editorial. My own view is that the time for pleading is over. I suggest that we give our "allies" a time frame in which to demonstrate (as opposed to giving assurances) a serious intent to assume their fair share of responsibility for the common defense. If they fail to follow through, then our next step might be to take a note from our French friends and pull a "de Gaulle." We can withdraw from NATO while remaining a signatory to the North Atlantic Treaty.
Personally I am finding it increasingly difficult to justify NATO's existence in the modern world. There is a small part of me that hopes the Europeans just tell us to go pack sand in which case we can end our participation in this very expensive cold war anachronism with a clean conscience.
2 comments:
I, too, am surprised that NATO has lasted this long. After the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, I expected NATO to be gone in five years.
My problem with NATO is that it has been transformed from a defensive pact into an aggressive force, largely driven by American foreign policy objectives. The bombing of Yugoslavia was shameful. I think that the Europeans don't want to be part of this anymore.
So, yes, I think NATO should go. If the European nations wish to organize a common defense against the threats they actually face (as against the imperial objectives of the American ruling class), then let them do so, on their terms.
Get Putin out of the way, and then America can pursue an alliance with Britain, Russia, and Eastern Europe. The Central European nations need to figure out if they want any kind of defence.
As for American foreign policy, let's keep in mind that the visionary Bush doctrine in the Mideast was successful, albeit expensive.
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