#WTH Is NATO really an alliance anymore?

Our "allies" seem to be done "allying" with us.

In polite society, there are things one does not say. And if one wishes to remain a member of polite society — The hors d’oeuvres, my dear! Sublime! — one embraces such politesses and keeps one’s opinions to oneself. Ditto for polite international relations. It’s the height of outré to mention your host’s 10,000 political prisoners or comment on his $200 billion bank account. It’s also best to mouth the pieties at the heart of international organizations, treaties, and alliances. Thus, we have been lying about NATO for years.

It’s time to stop.

An alliance is like a marriage — each partner brings something to the relationship, and recognizes that we are better together. But for decades in the NATO alliance, we have repeated that we are better together, notwithstanding that only one partner was bringing true commitment to the relationship. Here’s a graph in an earlier piece I wrote on the limp commitments of our NATO allies:

You might be forgiven if you thought the Cold War was won around 1952 based on this chart. Here’s another from that same piece, making clear that it was only the angry demands of Donald Trump that finally got our NATO allies to begin to live up to their own commitments on defense spending:

But, my friends, even this sad data set doesn’t tell the entire story. Let’s review the bidding, shall we?

There are about 85,000 US troops stationed in our European NATO allied countries, most of them in Germany, Italy, the UK, and Spain. That’s less than 20 percent of the number that were there at the height of the Cold War, but it’s still a substantial chunk of servicemen and women. Why were they there? Because they were protecting our allies from Soviet predations. Why are they still there? Because we are protecting our allies and using convenient forward European positions to project power in our shared interests.

What have we done for our European/NATO allies recently?

Let’s see. We refueled and resupplied the Brits for their Falklands War. We’ve been supporting our pals the French with intel and more as they march about in their former colonies in Africa, sometimes for good reasons. We joined the Balkan war in 1995 when our European friends weren’t up to the job of stopping Slobodan Milosevič… on their own continent. And then some of our NATO allies stepped up for our own conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. We joined Europe’s feckless operation in Libya in 2011, at their request, leaving the country in al Qaeda’s thrall. And then there’s Ukraine.

Last I checked, Ukraine is not in NATO. Not in the European Union. Efforts to encourage Ukrainian membership in our alliance were pushed hard by Congress, but opposed by most of our European allies.

Last I checked, Russia invaded Ukraine and occupied Crimea in 2014, and our European allies refused to force Moscow to abide by either the Minsk I or Minsk II agreements that should have short circuited further Kremlin efforts in Ukraine. Not only did they fail to enforce Minsk, the Germans maneuvered to bypass Ukraine and build a direct pipeline to Russia, Nordstream II, that was stopped only by… Donald Trump.

Nonetheless, our European allies believe the United States should be doing more to help Ukraine repel the Russians, and keep Europe safe from Vladimir Putin. I agree with them. It is not in our interest to have the likes of Putin believe he can simply rewrite the map of post-Soviet Europe without consequence. Not only that, I’d like to see Europe mirror the Congressional legislation that allows our President to confiscate Russian sovereign assets and spend them on Ukraine. After all, there is nearly $300 billion of Russian dough sitting in European banks, most of it in Belgium, lately the EU capital and home to NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe.

Have the Europeans done that? No.

So now, as we engage in a war to squelch the nuclear, missile, and terroristic ambitions of the Islamic Republic (not to speak of stopping them from killing their own people), is it presumptuous of us to ask — not for help, mind you — but to overfly or use bases in our NATO allied nations? We’re not asking for troops; not for planes; not for fuel; not for love. Just overflight and landing rights. And guess what? We had to bully our “bestie” in Europe, Sir Keir Starmer, to allow us to use Diego Garcia. Our pal Giorgia Meloni denied us landing rights on Sigonella in Sicily. The Spanish won’t let us fly over their precious Jew-hating country. France has reportedly refused us overflight to resupply Israel.

And these refusals have not been quiet or behind the scenes.

"Iran is not our war." — Keir Starmer

"The United States of America and Israel decided to launch military operations. They were carried out outside the framework of international law, which we cannot approve of." — Emmanuel Macron

"I'm just not convinced that what Israel and the U.S. are doing right now will actually succeed... I believe that at least the U.S. government—and probably the president as well—has now accepted that we [Germany] cannot support this." — Friedrich Merz

"[This war is] illegal... [the global system of international law may be] collapsing." — Giorgia Meloni

"[The strike] flouts international law and the conventions of a rules-based international order... [it is] by any fair measure, unilateral and illegal." — Mark Carney

These are our “allies.” These are nations in which Iran has conducted multiple terrorist attacks. These are nations that acted to refer Iran’s nuclear non-compliance to the UN Security Council. These are nations that import more oil via the Strait of Hormuz than the United States. Far more.

Tell me, as a supporter of NATO; as a stalwart of the transatlantic alliance; as someone outraged by Donald Trump’s earlier threats to withdraw from the alliance; what am I to say? How am I to defend the indefensible?

In short, I cannot. We should still help Ukraine, and Donald Trump is doing far more than many wish to acknowledge, though not enough. However, slowly, with regret and even dread, I am coming around to the view that it is time for America to reconsider whether our it still serves our interests to base thousands of troops in Western Europe. If Europe is not just going to sit out, but actually affirmatively obstruct America’s efforts to disarm an aspiring nuclear power committed to the destruction of the West, we need to ask whether our Armed Forces could more usefully be deployed elsewhere. More than 100 years after we first raced in to defeat shared enemies in World War I, perhaps it’s time for Europe to stand —- or fall — on its own.