Opinion: NATO just turned 70 — and it’s showing its age
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg opens a meeting of the NATO Foreign Ministers' Session at the State Department in Washington on Thursday. By Judy Dempsey Judy Dempsey Bio Follow Contributing columnist April 4 at 3:15 PM NATO is marking its 70th anniversary this week. But its leaders don’t seem to be living in the present.
NATO ambassadors and their bosses don’t like admitting mistakes. No organization likes doing this. But it is high time that NATO came clean over Afghanistan, over its disastrous intervention in Libya, over why it has had has a mission in Kosovo since 1999. Those interventions were not strategically driven. Strategy is something that NATO as an alliance does not do.
One NATO diplomat told me such political discussions cannot be raised inside the organization. “If we put any of these issues on the agenda there’s the automatic assumption that NATO is being asked to think about a military role,” he said. If political discussions are shunned, how on Earth is NATO going to think and act strategically? How is NATO going to react if, one day, President Trump asks the alliance for support in the South China Sea. Imagine NATO saying “no.
NATO needs to get out to cities and towns, to universities and schools, to local political parties and to companies that make military equipment. And it had better do these things soon, given growing anti-Americanism in Germany. It is abetted by the country’s pacifist culture and the ever-present sentiment among the governing Social Democrats to give President Vladimir Putin the benefit of the doubt.
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