THE North Atlantic Treaty Organization has spent the last 70 years readying itself for its primary task, which has always been to defend Western Europe from attack by the Russians and their allies. When in 1991 the Warsaw Pact collapsed along with the old Soviet Union, the argument was made that NATO no longer had any enemies and had outlived its usefulness. But thoughts of disbanding it were put on hold. To keep its multilateral military formations working with each other, the Brussels-based organization had deployments to shooting wars in Afghanistan and Bosnia. The armed forces of the 29-member countries continued to train together and send senior officers to NATO headquarters. The principle has always been that in the event of a threat, NATO should ready itself to field a credible military counter. The reality of course is that NATO is unified in name only. There are 29 governments that need to sign off any involvement by their own militaries. And then there is the state of readiness of those ground, air and sea forces. NATO countries are bound by the treaty to spend at least two percent of their GDP on defense. In Europe, only Britain, the US' long-standing military partner, Poland, the three Baltic States, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, along with bankrupt Greece, managed to hit that target. Germany was notable for its failure to spend. So bad had the state of Germany tanks become that, for lack of replacement barrels, one major exercise, commanders were obliged to use broom sticks as pretend guns. On the campaign trail in 2016, Donald Trump took the view NATO had outlived its usefulness. His first presidential meeting with European leaders was notable for the frostiness with which he greeted their explanations for missing their military spending targets. He asked why the United States should be doing all the heavy lifting in the alliance when wealthy European countries were not prepared to invest in their own defense. With the rising threat from Moscow following the invasion of the Crimea and eastern Ukraine and Russian involvement with the dangerous regimes in Syria and Iran, European leaders have started to spend again, though most are still below the NATO target. However, Trump's questioning of the continued purpose of the alliance overlooks some important history. America emerged from the Second World War as the dominant world power. While Stalin's Soviet Union struggled to repair the human and economic devastation caused by the invasion of Hitler's armies, the United States economy was humming. The huge military spending on the war had brought the country surging out of its disastrous 1930s recession. America was dominant both commercially and militarily, even though it suffered humiliating defeat in Vietnam. US arms protected and underwrote US business around the world. Trump's instinct is to disengage from foreign war and entanglements that he and many of those who voted for him do not really understand. Americans, in their land of milk and honey, have over the years often preferred to isolate themselves from what they saw as the decayed Old World. But in the final analysis, if Washington cedes power and influence, particularly in Europe, to a revanchist Moscow, its own interests will be compromised. For all its serious inadequacies, the Americans probably cannot afford to abandon NATO.
