Winning: NATO Regains Purpose
April 14, 2022: Most NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) members saw little real purpose for the organization after 1991. Still, NATO remained active and NATO forces were used in the 1990s for peacekeeping in the Balkans, where Yugoslavia violently came apart, and later in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. These peacekeeping efforts revealed more weaknesses and disorganization in NATO than proof that the organization could be more than a defense against a major threat.
When the major threat manifested itself in 2022, as Russia invaded Ukraine with the goal of absorbing back into a Russian empire, NATO did quickly return to its original unity of purpose. The change was surprisingly rapid and rather thorough. After decades of decline and failure to find a new purpose, NATO again became a valued mutual-defense organization.
NATO members sending peacekeeping forces to the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan encountered some serious leadership and morale problems. The generals, and the troops who served in these combat zones, were unhappy with how their politicians back home endangered the lives of troops by putting restrictions on what the NATO soldiers could do, even when it was a matter of life-and-death to the men involved. The generals were angry at politicians who ordered troops into a combat zone without bothering to learn what exactly was going on there and ignored generals and staff officers who tried to explain the situation. This got pretty ugly and the disputes did not go away.
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