Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 14, 1994 TAG: 9401260020
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Paxton Davis
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The purpose it was meant to serve has been accomplished. The enemy it was meant to confront turns out to be made of wilted paper. Its cost, especially to the United States, which ought to be addressing its domestic problems, is prohibitive.
NATO is, in a word, an anachronism.
Created in 1949 - ``forged'' is, I believe, the word usually employed to connote its noble purposes - the NATO alliance had a straightforward purpose: Against the threat of expansionism by the Soviet Union it would pose the conjoined military might and strategic technology of the principal democracies of Western Europe and the United States.
NATO's founding treaty put it bluntly: ``An armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.''
Though few said so explicitly, it was very much an echo of the immense alliances that led Europe into World War I and its unimaginable carnage: an alliance that, like them, might prove difficult or even impossible to slow, or stop, once war started. And NATO had the additional feature, which they'd lacked, of military forces in place and under coalition command.
One can think what one will of the Cold War that gave NATO its raison d'etre. I happen to believe that history will view it as a colossal international blunder in which two powerful nations, sick with the paranoia a long and difficult war had left them, successively tried, for more than 40 years, to outwit, out-intrigue and outspend each other, each charging, again and again, that if it did not flex this muscle or threaten that border, its ``security'' would be lost. Others - most Americans and, apparently, most Russians - believed the Cold War a high moral calling.
NATO was an arm of that struggle. But now the struggle is over, the Soviet Union is no more and no serious person believes - despite the bluster of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the Russian fascists and George Will - that the Russia that remains constitutes any genuine threat to the self-styled ``democracies'' of the West.
Replacing NATO with some other form of international coalition - a peacekeeping institution, say, or a vehicle for resolving disputes - would be the thing to do. But that does not mean it will be done.
Even the most arcane governmental institutions have, as we know, lives of their own. The United States still subsidizes tobacco though publicly asserting tobacco's lethal danger. American welfare, though fatally flawed, demands fundamental overhaul, as all agree, but powerful interests resist it. The nation's military-industrial complex continues to build multibillion-dollar bombers and toilet seats that even Pentagon generals admit they do not need.
Thus with NATO, and as President Bill Clinton made his rounds through Europe this week one wondered why membership in NATO had become so crucial an item on his agenda. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic want in, as do Slovakia and the Baltic states. They will not get in right now, but Clinton has offered them instead membership in a ``Partnership for Peace'' that is another of those threadbare buzzwords for a fictional alliance that accomplishes nothing but costs a lot.
Giving up the Cold War is proving as difficult for Americans as it is for the rest of the world. There was, alas, a certain security in having an enemy you could see and hear and smell, instead of poverty, disease and racial hatred. But the abolition of NATO, or at least its rebirth as some other sort of alliance, would be a start.
\ Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB