Trump Should Have Already Left NATO

Ted Galen Carpenter

Security, Americas

NATO was an institution to deal with the Cold War; it is obsolete for the conditions of the twenty-first century, and it has become a dangerous albatross around the neck of the American republic.

IT WOULD seem self-evident that wise leaders should always seek to maintain the maximum degree of flexibility and choice in foreign policy. Commitments and strategies that may make sense under one set of conditions can become obsolete and even counterproductive when circumstances change. Therefore, it is imprudent and potentially dangerous to lock one’s country into a set of rigid, long-term obligations.

Unfortunately, NATO is the premier example of a willingness—indeed eagerness—to violate that important principle. NATO was an institution to deal with the Cold War; it is not only obsolete for the conditions of the twenty-first century, it has become a dangerous albatross around the neck of the American republic. U.S. leaders continue going out of their way to limit America’s policy options in order to “reassure” a growing roster of European security dependents that the United States remains willing to incur any risk and pay any price to protect them, no matter how trivial and vulnerable they might be. That policy badly needs to change.

Rigid and/or obsolete commitments have caused problems for great powers throughout history. Perhaps the most tragic example occurred during the years leading up to World War I. Europe’s major countries had divided themselves into rival security blocs, the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance. When tensions soared in 1914 following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, those alliances transformed an emotional, but limited, dispute between Austria and tiny Serbia into a continental crisis. Today’s NATO is the potential incubator of a similar catastrophe.