Does the U.S. need NATO in Afghanistan?
How much does it matter that the Netherlands and other European countries appear to have little interest in continuing the war in Afghanistan — or fighting wars in general? Quite a bit, says Defense Secretary Robert Gates. “The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to ...
How much does it matter that the Netherlands and other European countries appear to have little interest in continuing the war in Afghanistan -- or fighting wars in general? Quite a bit, says Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
How much does it matter that the Netherlands and other European countries appear to have little interest in continuing the war in Afghanistan — or fighting wars in general? Quite a bit, says Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
“The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st,” he told NATO officers and officials in a speech at the National Defense University, the Defense Department-financed graduate school for military officers and diplomats.
But in a piece in Foreign Policy’s new print magazine, Andrew Bacevich takes a different view, arguing that it makes little sense to reast NATO — a remnant of the Cold War — as an American-led instrument of power projection. Europeans should focus on their own problems:
This doesn’t mean that NATO is without value. It does suggest that relying on the alliance to sustain a protracted counterinsurgency aimed at dragging Afghans kicking and screaming into modernity makes about as much sense as expecting the "war on drugs" to curb the world’s appetite for various banned substances. It’s not going to happen.
If NATO has a future, it will find that future back where the alliance began: in Europe. NATO’s founding mission of guaranteeing the security of European democracies has lost none of its relevance. Although the Soviet threat has vanished, Russia remains. And Russia, even if no longer a military superpower, does not exactly qualify as a status quo country. The Kremlin nurses grudges and complaints, not least of them stemming from NATO’s own steady expansion eastward.
So let NATO attend to this new (or residual) Russian problem. Present-day Europeans — even Europeans with a pronounced aversion to war — are fully capable of mounting the defenses necessary to deflect a much reduced Eastern threat. So why not have the citizens of France and Germany guarantee the territorial integrity of Poland and Lithuania, instead of fruitlessly demanding that Europeans take on responsibilities on the other side of the world that they can’t and won’t?
What do readers think?
Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating
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