The Atlantic: The Coming Split in NATO

[TomSea]

The Coming Split in NATO
Reihan Salam
Trump wants our European allies to build their military strength. What will it look like if they do?

One of President Donald Trump’s chief complaints about America’s European allies is that they don’t spend nearly enough on defense; he has again raised the issue on Wednesday at the NATO summit. Granted, Trump is hardly the first American president to point to miserly military spending on the part of fellow NATO member states. This has been a sore spot in transatlantic relations since at least the 1970s. But the vociferousness of his complaints, and his transactional approach to alliances writ large, appears to have had an effect all the same. European powers are thinking harder about how to build their military strength and how they might use it in concert, even in—especially in—cases where the United States won’t be there to lend a hand.

In his seminal 2002 essay “Power and Weakness,” Robert Kagan, the esteemed foreign-policy analyst, warned of a widening transatlantic divide over the exercise of military power. Whereas Europeans saw themselves “moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation,” Americans saw the world through a darker lens, in which “international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might.” In short, “on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” And that is why it was the United States that was always dragging a reluctant Europe into policing conflicts.

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Just last month, nine of Europe’s NATO members declared their intention to work together on a “European Intervention Initiative,” or “EI2,” that is being championed by French President Emanuel Macron. Since the start of his presidency, Macron has been touting the idea of a pan-European security force capable of intervening in crises in North Africa and the Sahel, and it appears to be inching closer to reality.

Read more at: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/the-militaristic-europe-of-the-future/564971/

One might read what the author actually says, per the last paragraph above, it is expected that the African population is going to soar, hence, Europe may want this force to intervene in crisis in Africa... not calling on the USA to do this.

It says Ethiopia's population could hit 191,000,000 in this century.... Nigeria is huge too.  Concern of more refugees? Genocide maybe?

[Fishrrman]

There isn't much need for NATO any more, not in its traditional role of providing a common defense from an attack "from the east" (USSR).

These days, what Europe needs is a "coastal defense force" to protect its "southern flank" from the immigrant invasion.

One that will actually DO something, and isn't just there "for show"...

[Free Vulcan]

What is the point of NATO when Western Europe chooses to make themselves vulnerable to Islamic refugees and Russia, while sniveling EU autocrats seem to want to strangle the native population with oppressive bureaucracy?

You can't protect someone who's trying to destroy themselves.