No Action, Talk Only

NATO, that is. In October, I asked the question, "What has NATO done for us? " in which I concluded,

I think the United States should reassess whether the NATO alliance really is serving American interests. I don't think it is, and I don't think it will do better in years to come. Though we must stay politically engaged, I think we'd be better off withdrawing from the military alliance, and work toward building an Anglosphere military alliance in its stead.

Comes now Nick Witney, "former chief executive of the European Defense Agency, is a senior policy fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations," who agrees with me, going on to say that the alliance itself should be dissolved ("The Death of NATO"). That's implicit in my argument also because without the United States, there is no military trans-Atlantic alliance in any meaningful sense, anyway. Witney says that the European Union should establish its own security arrangements and let NATO shrivel away.

All the talk of an improved NATO-European Union partnership is mainly wasted breath. "Intensified strategic dialogue in Brussels," in practice, boils down to the chilling specter of interminable joint committee meetings at which one nation's ambassador to NATO explains his government's position to a compatriot diplomat who is accredited to the EU and vice-versa.

The problem is not institutional relationships between the two organizations -- except in the important but narrow case of Turkey and Cyprus, which remain bent on pursuing their bilateral feud without regard to the real risks to the personnel of their allies and partners deployed in Afghanistan and Kosovo. The real problem is relations between the United States and European countries, 21 of which belong to both organizations.

NATO has in fact become militarily pointless and politically redundant.