But What About the Future?

This writer says NATO is no longer useful because Russia is no threat, Europe can take care of itself, and expansion to states like Georgia just risk war with Russia.

I'll ignore the problem with arguing that Russia is no threat to Europe but pledging to defend European states risks war with Russia.

I will say that the price of admission for Georgia into NATO should be to abandon plans to reclaim their lost territory. I don't want to go to war with Russia over their fate.

Given time, those people will learn to regret their unwise choice. By then, Georgia won't want them back any more than South Korea is eager to absorb North Korea with all their problems.

Yet it is profoundly silly to assert that Georgia is at fault for the war. It was a set up that Georgia foolishly fell for, but if Georgia hadn't initiated a war to retain their territories from Russian plots, Russia would have engineered a pretext.

They might again.

However true it is that NATO has no defensive military mission right now is not to say that it won't in the future. Germany was no threat in 1919 or 1929. What was the threat in 1939? Even though Europe certainly had the resources to take care of itself?

As Russia rebuilds their military power, they will push west as far as they can without meeting serious resistance. Right now, that means anyone forward of NATO's eastern line.

I'd think that the fact that our biggest war followed the "war to end all wars" would inspire just a little bit of caution in predicting the future of war in Europe and asserting that our best defense is pulling back to North America and narrowing our defense horizons to our hemisphere. The fact that NATO is with us in Afghanistan where the most devastating attack on our soil originated from should make this objective so obviously ridiculous that nobody would make it. I really have no use for CATO on defense or foreign policy issues.

Maintaining NATO seems a wise insurance policy for an uncertain future, all things considered. And keeping a robust American ground force in NATO should be part of that insurance policy for Europe and beyond.