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NATO Doesn’t Serve U.S. Interests

Stanley Sloan’s article on a post-Afghanistan NATO went wrong when he argued this: The main strategic value of America’s European allies, however, is in the capabilities that the Europeans bring to the table, as they did in the case of Libya. Put another way, the European allies do not offer much strategic value to the […]

Stanley Sloan’s article on a post-Afghanistan NATO went wrong when he argued this:

The main strategic value of America’s European allies, however, is in the capabilities that the Europeans bring to the table, as they did in the case of Libya.

Put another way, the European allies do not offer much strategic value to the U.S., which the case of Libya showed once again. NATO reviewed its Libya campaign, and found the readiness of the intervening allies to be lacking:

The report concluded that the allies struggled to share crucial target information, lacked specialized planners and analysts, and overly relied on the United States for reconnaissance and refueling aircraft.

The findings undercut the idea that the intervention was a model operation and that NATO could effectively carry out a more complicated campaign in Syria without relying disproportionately on the United States military. Even with the American help in Libya, NATO had only about 40 percent of the aircraft needed to intercept electronic communications, a shortage that hindered the operation’s effectiveness, the report said.

Scoblete sums up Sloan’s case for NATO, and says that “it’s to have a set of allies to provide the U.S. with some additional capabilities (and legitimacy) for its international adventurism.” I agree that NATO’s value to the U.S. at this point is to provide U.S. military action with the political cover afforded by a multilateral alliance, which is not only at odds with the alliance’s original purpose, but it makes it somewhat easier for the U.S. to start and/or prolong wars. Hiding behind NATO is probably much more valuable for the political legitimacy that it bestows on military interventions than the additional capabilities it provides.

The more that the U.S. can treat its wars as struggles on behalf of the security interests of a larger group of countries, the easier it is to intervene abroad. So long as many European governments feel politically obliged to support U.S. wars around the world, even if it is just with token contributions, the U.S. will be able to use that support to promote unwise foreign wars, as it did in the year before the invasion of Iraq. In that way, NATO can be quite harmful to U.S. interests by encouraging our own bad habits of using force abroad. This arrangement has obvious undesirable consequences for our allies as well. The experience of NATO allies in Iraq and Afghanistan has taught the European and Canadian allies that belonging to NATO in practice means fighting American wars that have no real connection to their security, and all of the NATO allies that were unwise enough to join the U.S. in Iraq have since come to regret their involvement to one degree or another.

When we consider the record of official NATO operations since the end of the Cold War, which excludes Iraq, what we find is that belonging to NATO has more often meant that the U.S. becomes involved in local European and Mediterranean conflicts that have nothing to do with the security of the U.S. or its NATO allies. U.S.-led NATO interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Libya not only had nothing to do with American security, but they were also undertaken because the European allies could not or would not intervene on their own. In the case of Libya, NATO was pulled into the conflict to create the illusion for the benefit of the public and Congress that the U.S. was acting only in a limited “support” role. Libya became a NATO operation to lend the U.S.-U.K.-French coalition the appearance of broader political backing for a mission that the vast majority of NATO members didn’t want and didn’t support. Some supporters of the intervention went so far as to present U.S. involvement in Libya as an act of gratitude for European involvement in Afghanistan. It wasn’t true, but it captured the absurdity of making Libya a NATO operation better than anything else could. The Libyan war is a model of sorts: it is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the continued existence of NATO.

What often gets overlooked in these debates is what purpose the alliance served for the U.S. during the Cold War. It institutionalized U.S. obligations to postwar western Europe (plus Greece and Turkey). When it was still a defensive alliance, NATO was designed to tie the U.S. to the fate of western Europe and to keep America closely involved in European affairs. That made sense when there was still a Soviet threat to the security of western Europe. That threat vanished a generation ago, and along with it vanished any reason for “keeping the Americans in.”

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