The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is sick and no one is trying to cure the alliance. While NATO’s last meeting in Europe seemed to focus on which members were meeting the two per cent of GDP expenditure on defence and which were not (Canada was far from the goal), the real problems afflicting the alliance today went undiscussed.

NATO was born almost 60 years ago to contain the Soviet Union and to deter any efforts by the U.S.S.R. to either openly attack non-Communist countries there or to intimidate them to follow the Soviet line even if they were not Communist. The latter condition was dubbed “Finlandization,” because although Finland was a functioning social democratic nation, it lay along the Soviet border and thus virtually every aspect of its foreign and defence policy had to line up with Moscow, or else.

But the Soviet Union is long gone, the Cold War is over and although Russia under President Vladimir Putin is trying to resurrect the military power that once marked the Soviet Union, it is a shadow of its former military self even though it holds the largest collection of nuclear warheads on the face of the planet. The Russians are trying to modernize and reorganize their military as fast as they can, but they have neither the money nor the intellectual resources to match the United States, let alone NATO.

So why does NATO even exist? In the decade or so after the end of the Cold War, NATO became the waiting room for the European Union. Countries that had once formed part of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact broke free and yearned for entry into the European Union where capitalism would, they believed, free their people and their economies of the dead hand of Marxian economics. The first step to that goal was almost always membership in NATO.

And thus NATO expanded but as it did so, serious problems began to appear, beginning in the 1990s. During NATO’s bombing of Serbia and Serbian troops in Kosovo in 1999, NATO was far from united in its goal of forcing the Serbs to stop persecuting the Muslim population of Kosovo. Some member nations were dead set against the military mission, others were neutral. And that reflected NATO divisions that had emerged even earlier during Operation Desert Fox when U.S. and U.K. aircraft flew countless missions over Iraq under Saddam Hussein to both keep the Iraqi airforce on the ground and conduct surveillance missions over alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction sites.

When NATO entered the war in Afghanistan against the Taliban, many NATO countries placed caveats on their troops limiting how they could be used in military operations. Some nations did not allow their troops to operate at night. Some did not allow their militaries to conduct offensive operations. Others limited their troops to relatively placid areas of the country, thus avoiding the real hotspots in the south in Kandahar and Helmand provinces or in the north east in the Korengal valley. The problem of the caveats effectively divided the NATO presence in Afghanistan into troops that would fight, troops that would not, and troops that might fight sometime if the conditions set for them by their home governments were just right. This significant problem has never been resolved.

The end of the Cold War ended the U.S. stranglehold on NATO. When we were all united to stop Communism, the U.S. ran the whole show. Today the U.S. is still the largest contributor to NATO by far, and its chief supplier of the nuclear umbrella, but NATO members are far more loosely united than ever before. And under President Donald’s Trump divisive leadership, major NATO allies are increasingly looking for ways to bypass the United States in their diplomatic efforts, if not yet in their military ones.

Perhaps the greatest danger to NATO today comes from the swing to autocracy among some NATO members. Poland, Rumania, Turkey and Italy are veering to the right, with Turkey having become a nation of one-man rule. The old saw that a NATO member had to be a democracy, adopted after the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, seems to be going by the wayside. Which begs the question, if NATO is to supposed to be bound together to fight as one, would Canadians countenance their military being used to defend Turkey today?

Thus NATO has many problems to fix far beyond the precise share of GDP each country spends on defence. With the uncertainties centred on the White House itself, there is little reason for optimism that NATO will start to fix itself.

National Post