TheHill.com
NATO today: The sad decline of a grand alliance
By William Moloney, opinion contributor — 12/20/21 10:00 AM EST
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is the most successful military alliance in modern history. For 40 years, NATO protected Western Europe from the hostile might of the Soviet Union until that ideologically driven empire collapsed in 1990. Victory in the Cold War, however, would be the beginning of the end for NATO, an alliance that has outlived its time and today is an expanded membership group of disparate nation-states unable to agree on its current purposes.
The 72-year-old alliance has become the victim of its own success and the simple passage of time. In NATO’s heyday, the glue that held it together was a very realistic fear of Soviet Russia and its immense military establishment. Now most members of NATO do not feel threatened by today’s post-communist Russia — and worse, feel little inclination to militarily support the few “frontline” states (e.g., Poland, the three Baltic nations) that do feel threatened.
Polls in recent years confirm this new reality. In 2015, a Pew Family Foundation poll found that, among NATO members, only in the United States and Canada did a majority support military force to aid a NATO member that was invaded. Earlier this year, the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) polled 60,000 people in its 11-member states and found that, by margins well over 2 to1, public opinion believes that their countries should remain neutral in conflicts between the U.S. and Russia or China.
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/585673-nato-today-the-sad-decline-of-a-grand-alliance
