This was not an alliance action, but individual European countries making the decisions that best suited them. That cannot be criticized, but this does not constitute an alliance. NATO is obsolete if it defines its responsibility primarily to repel a Russian invasion, especially since it refused to create a military force capable of doing that. It is obsolete in that its original mission is gone. It is obsolete in that it regards the U.S. as the guarantor of Europe’s security, when Europe is quite capable of incurring the cost of self-defense. If European nations are free to follow their own interests, then so is the United States.

When we step back from the argument between the U.S. and Europe on NATO, we see a broader reality. First, the European Union is fragmenting and that fragmentation necessarily affects NATO. Europe is in no position to undertake unanimously supported NATO operations. Nor is it in a position to incur the political costs of a massive military buildup. For the Europeans, NATO is important because it guarantees that, in the extraordinary circumstance of a European war, the U.S. is, under treaty, required to be there.

The United States has other interests. It is interested in preventing Russian hegemony over the European Peninsula, but the U.S. can effectively address that by placing limited forces in the Baltics, Poland and Romania. Just as the Europeans have devolved NATO into bilateral relations between the U.S. and each NATO member, the United States can do the same. Similarly, the U.S. can accept the status quo in Ukraine, written or unwritten. Kiev has a pro-Western government, the east is a de facto autonomous region, and the rights of ethnic Russians in Sevastopol are guaranteed by the Russians. The U.S. is not going to war in Ukraine, and Russia is not going to war there, either.

Third, given the fact that the EU has almost as large a GDP and almost 200 million more people than the U.S., why isn’t Europe’s collective contribution to NATO’s military capability larger than the U.S.’? By contribution, I don’t simply mean money, but a suitably large, trained and equipped force able to support the wars that are being fought now.

This argument, and the accompanying graph, are fucking horsehit. How about this graph?

I will remind you that the argument is for "a suitably large, trained and equipped force". My counter argument is why the fuck do you guys spend so much fucking money in comparison to the next 10 put together, and only have "a suitably large, trained and equipped force". Your military's Budget is 54% of your government 's budget - And that's at it's current low of 3% of your GDP.

And don't cry "world's police" to me. For one, most of the world never sees your policing, and most of what was termed "policing" was just poxy war with the USSR and then Russia. I say "was" like it still isn't - See Syria right now.

Is NATO obsolete? I don't know, does the US still have proxy wars with Russia, and do the former Soviet states still fear being subsumed back into Russia?

The U.S. is not going to war in Ukraine, and Russia is not going to war there, either.

Russia didn't have to go to war. they just took created some political instability within the Ukrainian parliament, then walked in and took what they wanted from Ukraine - their warm water port, which Russia had been using for decades anyways - and no one had the political testicular fortitude to call their shit.

This article is just silly to me. It's like it's using the US's bloated defense spending as a way to say that no one else in NATO is pulling their weight. THEN it has the audacity to say that NATO didn't pull its weight after 9/11 because we all knew that the WMD's were bullshit and that the US was just going in after oil and to get rid of a leader that had worn out his usefulness.

posted 2645 days ago