Via Larison, Kori Schake's piece on why NATO is worth saving serves up an interesting meditation on how an alliance ostensibly formed for defensive purposes is being warped to serve the needs of intervention:
The big risk is not whether the alliance can win whatever wars it chooses to fight. It can. The risk is that NATO will choose not to fight, that its members will withdraw into their own narrowly defined interests, close to home.
But notice how this concern stands in contrast to NATO's original intention, as described by Schake:
NATOâ??s membership has more than doubled to 28 countries since its inception in 1949, but its basic principle remains the same: â??The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.â?
Many Washington policymakers want to keep NATO in business to provide some kind of multilateral imprimatur on their various international adventures, but European defense budgets point pretty clearly to another reality - Europe itself is not facing any serious military threats and many European countries are scaling back their defense budgets (a trend accelerated by the Eurozone crisis). The great irony is that NATO could remain relevant in this era or austerity by actually serving as a conduit to collective defense - allowing member states to enjoy cost-savings by eliminating duplicate capacities. But instead it's being torn apart by those who insist it fight wars of choice - not wars of self-defense.
