The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between 29 North American and European countries. The alliance is based on the North Atlantic Treaty that was signed on 4 April 1949. NATO constitutes a system of collective defence whereby its independent member states agree to mutual defence in response to an attack by any external party.
NATO was little more than a political association until the Korean War galvanized the organization's member states, and an integrated military structure was built up under the direction of two US Supreme Commanders. The course of the Cold War led to a rivalry with nations of the Warsaw Pact, which was formed in 1955. Doubts over the strength of the relationship between the European states and the United States ebbed and flowed, along with doubts over the credibility of the NATO defense against a prospective Soviet Union (USSR) invasion.
But there is no USSR now. It was dissolved on 26 December 1991. With its dissolution was gone the threat of USSR ‘invasion’.
So the question is that if Soviet threat during cold war was the key reason for formation of NATO, is it still required?
Has Soviet ‘invasion’ threat been replaced by a Russian threat? Have Russians been a threat from its inception, or given any signs of being a threat? Is the ‘threat’ often talked about, mostly by UK and Ukranian officials, is really a threat? Or, is it just a perceived threat?
According to The Guardian, “When the second world war was over in 1945, Americans again made plans to pull out, demobilising 90% of their troops. But over the next two years it became increasingly clear European states were not going to recover economically without US help and that Stalin’s Soviet Union was looming as a global threat. So the US stayed in Europe, rebuilding Germany, and forming NATO.
Now Europe is mostly prosperous, and the Soviet Union has gone. A revanchist Russia has taken its place, but it is a far punier power, with only the fifth biggest economy in Europe.”
“Russia is not an existential threat. It’s not felt in London, Paris or Rome as an existential threat. It’s not a unifying threat,”, a senior European official said.
“With the cold war conditions that persuaded the US to stay engaged in Europe now in the past, some argue that it is inevitable Americans would at some point reconsider their role.”, reported The Guardian.
Trump has been priming his countrymen towards that. “You know – President Putin is KGB’ and this and that,” Trump said, referencing criticisms of his relationship with the Russian leader. “You know, Putin’s fine. He’s fine. We’re all fine. We’re people.”
“I’ll tell Nato, you got to start paying your bills,” Trump told a cheering crowd in Montana on Thursday.
AS reported by The Guardian, “The president pondered aloud about the value for the US in paying for the collective defence of Germany.”
He said he told Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel: “You know Angela, I can’t guarantee it, but we’re protecting you and it means a lot more to you than protecting us because I don’t know how much protection we get by protecting you.”
“But nobody knows what Trump will say in Brussels or Helsinki, or during his UK trip in between. As he demonstrated after the June G7 summit in Quebec, he can trigger a crisis in western cohesion with just a few off-the-cuff jibes aimed at old allies…
perhaps Trump is not the exception, an anomaly in transatlantic progress. Maybe Nato and transatlanticism itself are the anomalies and that US suspicion of and disengagement from Europe are the norm”, reported The Guardian.
A need for continuity of NATO may have been assessd by Obama when he sought to reorient the focus of US foreign policy from Europe, and towards Asia. “He just did not express his disengagement as crudely and rudely as Trump.”, reported The Guardian.
“During the US presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly lambasted NATO as obsolete, excessively dependent on US funding and ill-equipped to fight terrorism, his chief foreign policy goal. At one stage, he even suggested that the US would not come to the aid of NATO allies if they came under attack – which would fly in the face of one of the alliance’s founding principles, enshrined in article five of the treaty.
Nervous European NATO members are hoping Donald Trump will finally end months of equivocation and policy incoherence by formally renewing America’s commitment to the alliance when he visits its headquarters in Brussels.”, reported The Guardian.
Reference: Wekipedia, The Guardian
