Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is heading to a meeting of NATO ministers in Estonia at a time when the 61-year-old organization is suffering from a kind of mid-life crisis.
Almost 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 28-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization is in the midst of an intense self-examination, trying to rethink its basic purpose.
NATO was founded to blunt the long-extinct threat of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.
Now it finds itself divided on many fronts: doubts among some members about its combat mission in Afghanistan, unease with the continuing presence of U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe, prickly relations with Moscow and concerns about the wisdom of expanding NATO deeper into Russia's backyard.
Many in Europe don't want to help fight the war in Afghanistan any more than they wanted to help in Iraq, notwithstanding the silly notions of some over here that the former is/was "good" while the latter was "bad."
Russia doesn't like NATO, because it stands--however feebly now--as a potential barrier to reclaiming their European empire one piece at a time.
Some members of NATO, like Germany, worry it could prevent them from cutting deals with Russia at the expense of nominal allies.
Others would prefer a pure European defense organization that won't raise ugly questions as America might when the Europeans decide to appease potential enemies. They can't have some resolute members dragging the meek into defending themselves, can they? This thinking doesn't stop wars--it just makes sure they happen and you only get to wrongly believe--for a while anyway--that you are saving yourself from the coming storm.
We may need to think of Europe as an economic and geographic asset to be fought over and not as allies. Europe is militarily useful to us even without one soldier at our side in the field.
And NATO, however useless as a military alliance in practice when the alliance doesn't have to defend in place against a military threat, is useful as an alliance of nations to counter the rise of an anti-democratic European Union that views its own people as more of a threat than any foreign country or organization could deny us the asset of a generally friendly and cooperative Europe.
We need to preserve NATO. Both for our own interests and to protect the Europeans from themselves, quite frankly. I don't particularly care if they contribute to distant wars. How valuable are they, really? Let's just rely on a coalition of the willing--as we effectively do even with NATO officially on board with the Afghan campaign--and not strain NATO as an institution.
