Reinvesting in the Art of NATO: The President's Best Strategic Option

David Abshire and S. Wesley Cross

International discourse about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has overlooked the organization's real potential and capability to tackle security challenges that the United States and Europe face today. Respected writers and publications have repeatedly misunderstood or misrepresented the United States's most valuable foreign policy instrument: the roundtable of its closest allies. NATO critics from the left and right on both sides of the Atlantic have declared NATO a Cold War dinosaur, chided it as a lackey of U.S. policy, or deemed it multilateral quicksand. E. Wayne Merry, a former U.S. diplomat and Soviet expert, blames NATO for transatlantic squabbling: "NATO is not the solution to this split; it is at the heart of the problem."1 Joseph Jaffe, editor of the German weekly Die Zeit, issued an even harsher condemnation of NATO: "The Atlantic Alliance has been dying a slow death ever since Christmas Day 1991, when the Soviet Union committed suicide by dissolution. Having won the Cold War, the alliance lost its central purpose and began to crumble like a bridge no longer in use-slowly, almost invisibly."2

Similar beliefs have gained currency in some circles. NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer noted this trend during his first visit to the United States in January 2004: "Over the past few months and years, some pernicious myths have started to become a little too popular. Myths that are undermining the foundation of our cooperation-trust."3 Ironically, this comes at a time when NATO has the opportunity to become the West's first line of collective defense against terrorism, a common threat tragically underlined on 11 March 2004 in Madrid.

David Abshire is President and CEO of the Center for the Study of the Presidency. He served as U.S. Ambassador to NATO under President Ronald Reagan.

S. Wesley Cross is Special Assistant and Advisor to the President of the Center for the Study of the Presidency.