NATO: At 50, It's Time to Quit (Page 3)

Hidden by all the lofty (and misleading) rhetoric about NATO and transatlantic partnership is a simple fact: US policy in Europe aims not to counter others' bids for hegemony but to perpetuate America's own supremacy. American policy-makers seem not to understand that while hegemons love themselves, other states inevitably fear them and therefore form alliances to balance against them. Russia, the state most obviously threatened by US policy in Europe, has responded predictably, countering NATO expansion by bolstering its security ties with Belarus and Iran in an attempt to create counterweights to an expanded, US-led alliance. More ominously for the longer term, NATO expansion has provoked a strategic rapprochement between the Russians and Chinese, based on their anxiety about a world dominated by a single great power--the United States. And as the Kosovo conflict has deepened, Moscow's concerns about NATO action in a historically Russian sphere of influence have, of course, only intensified. Over time, NATO expansion could provoke the very Russian threat it ostensibly seeks to deter. Indeed, NATO expansion may prove to be a diplomatic blunder on a par with the 1919 Versailles Treaty, which, by humiliating Germany, fanned the flames of German revanchism and sowed the seeds for Hitler and World War II.

Forty-nine years ago the French commentator J.J. Servan Schreiber defined America's role in Europe: "When a nation bears the responsibility for the military security and the economic stability of a geographic zone, that nation is in fact--whether it wants it or not--the head of an empire." Fifty years after NATO's founding, as the post-cold war alliance finds itself at war, the time has come to reassess US imperial policy in Europe.

The war in Yugoslavia is a watershed in NATO's history. Today, the United States has expanded the alliance's geographical scope and created a new role for it: intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states whose domestic policies offend NATO's "values"--even when such states pose no security threat to the alliance's partners. If the United States is to avoid the risks and costs that inevitably accompany defending and expanding imperial frontiers, then a new debate must begin. Rather than focus on such narrow issues as the proper military "burden sharing" formula for the United States and its allies, this debate must assess underlying assumptions; it must stop revolving around how the Pax Americana should be administered and instead examine whether there should be a Pax Americana at all.

Arguing for the maintenance of Washington's leftover "cold war" alliances, a high-ranking Pentagon official asked, "If we pull out, who knows what nervousness will result?" The problem is, we can never know, so, according to this logic, we must always stay. Instead of persisting in this open-ended, permanent and hazardous imperial policy, we should finally, fully and in an orderly way devolve to a thriving and democratic Europe the task of insuring its own stability and prosperity. In the West European Union, Western Europe possesses an embryonic strategic identity, and the European Union is committed to implementing a unified, independent foreign and security policy. To be sure, many US policy-makers have argued that in the Balkan crises Western Europeans have demonstrated that they are incapable of acting effectively without US "leadership." But these protests are hypocritical--who can blame the Europeans for their inability to assert themselves in security affairs when Washington has for decades repeatedly squelched European initiatives that would have made that assertion possible?

It's time to stop infantilizing our "partners." Such astute US statesmen as Kennan, Marshall, Eisenhower and Fulbright did not intend for NATO to establish a permanent US protectorate over the continent, and they worried that if it became permanent, the US presence would have the ironic consequence of undermining the emergence of an independent Western Europe. A decade after the cold war's end, the continuing US military preponderance on the continent is doing just that, and thereby crippling the sine qua non of a healthy transatlantic relationship in the twenty-first century. America's strategic interest in Europe does not demand that it insure against every untoward event there.

Certainly, disorder in Kosovo and other places on Europe's fringes should be a matter for Europeans, who have the wherewithal and the maturity to combat it, quarantine it or, if they choose, ignore it. Western Europe today is capable of standing on its own and looking after itself. It is in Western Europe's interest--and America's--that it do so.

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