Things couldn't be better than they are now for the NATO Alliance. While
attending the awards dinner last May in Washington for Lord Robertson, I
felt firsthand the ambiance of an alliance of democracies that was on its
way into a bright future. The Alliance has new members, new capabilities,
new roles and the future belongs to NATO!
But every once and while you will see someone in the mass media or a defense
college lecturer, the usual suspects, pen an article with a title "NATO is
irrelevant," or "NATO is in an identity crisis." Those people are out there
writing those articles, just as they were out there in the late 1950's and
the 1960's. In the 1960's, when President de Gaulle pulled his forces out of
NATO's integrated command and kicked NATO out of Paris, it was also "the end
of NATO."
Well, the doomsayers are out again, but we can "know them by their works."
That is, there is a certain narrow lens that one can spot from articles that
proclaim "the end on NATO."
First, such authors of doom and gloom articles view both NATO and
transatlantic relations from the narrow lens of the Cold War. This includes
evaluating NATO as "a Cold War military alliance 'created' to oppose the
Soviets." By this narrow, Cold War lens, NATO is, indeed, "irrelevant and
indeed suffering from an identity crisis." You will note from such articles
that the author's view is stuck in the Cold War and thus he cannot see NATO
as nothing else but a "Cold War, military alliance" and you will often see
the author of such an article will include references to the Cold War, the
Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact, the end of the Cold War and NATO as only a
military alliance without any other functions. What punctuates these
articles is the author's view of NATO as "the Cold War military alliance
aimed at countering the Soviet threat to Western Europe." It isn't NATO that
is stuck in the Cold War - but the authors of narrow-minded, "Cold War
NATO" genre of articles that are stuck in the Cold War.
Second, the authors of doom and gloom articles will over play conflicts
between NATO members. This is also nothing new and even journal articles in
respected publications recall the long standing, old conflicts between the
United States and France. But such respected publications will rarely take
conflicts between NATO members as a moribund sign on the Alliance. There
have been conflicts between NATO members and Atlantic Pact negotiators, the
most glaring were the conflicts between the US and France in the Charles de
Gaulle era. These conflicts of the 1960's, which were far worse that now,
never brought NATO down, or did they stop European integration. It is a
simple fact that conflicts and quarrels occur in all organizations,
especially international ones, and one conflict does not bring down an
organization. One conflict, or two and more, are not going to bring NATO
down.
Most of "The NATO Citizen" ( www.pronato.com ) website is purposely devoted
to explaining the non-military functions of the North Atlantic Treaty and
educate its visitors that NATO must and can have other functions beside
"arms, armies, tanks, ships and American bases in Europe." While NATO's
founding treaty was intended mainly for collective defense, but this is not
the only purpose of neither the Treaty nor NATO. Gaining an education in
both NATO's founding treaty and the Alliance itself will inoculate rational
people from the narrow-minded doomsayers who see NATO only through the
narrow lens of the Cold War and NATO as "the Cold War military alliance
created to counter the Soviet threat." Believing the doomsayers, who have
been predicting NATO's down fall since the beginning, can be as patience
testing as waiting on the Second Coming of Christ!
--
Erin LaPorte
The NATO Citizen - www.pronato.com
P.O. Box 371162
Milwaukee, Wisconsin - USA 53237-2062
"Long live the entangling Alliance!"
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