In Defense of NATO.

• Author: Jones, David T.

On June 10, on his way out the door as Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates delivered a speech at NATO that was more an expression of exasperation than a measured judgment of Alliance circumstances. Gates vented frustrations that were doubtless personal and accrued during five years as SecDef, but were also institutional expressions of USG attitudes toward NATO.

Unfortunately, pique is not perspective.

One doubts that Alliance members were particularly impressed with Gates' ire or particularly likely to "straighten up and fly right" so far as U.S. preferences regarding their defense and security efforts are concerned. In short, they have heard it all before; indeed, heard it in tone and substance throughout the 62 year history of the Alliance. They heard it during the Cold War, when the fear that Soviet tank armies would plunge through the Fulda Gap should have focused European attention and galvanized their reactions. They heard it following the collapse of the Soviet Union when they were urged not to take a "peace dividend" or at least not as much of a dividend as they intended. (We said, "peace is the dividend," but Europeans acted as if "the end of history" had arrived.) And they have heard it repeatedly throughout the post-9/11 decade as the USG has emphasized the challenges facing the Alliance epitomized by terrorism, piracy, nuclear proliferation, failed/failing states, ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia, a revanchist (not a "reset") Russia, and now the ramifications of the Arab spring illustrated by the effort to do regime change in Qadaffi's Libya without getting our boots dirty.

The Europeans don't buy it. If they didn't commit to the rigors of significant defense spending during the Cold War when arguably their freedom was at risk or during the post-Cold War when their economies were booming, we are wasting our breath seeking major expenditures against ambiguous "out of area" threats during a recession. And we look more than a bit silly urging NATO members to do more when every USG fiscal budget projection predicts major defense reductions.

During the Cold War, Europeans had little interest in attempting to match the conventional forces of the Soviet/Warsaw Pact bloc, although their populations and economies would have so permitted. Essentially, as one European put it to me, "We have no interest in making Europe safe for conventional war." In "translation" that meant they had no interest in a repeat of World War II again...