Why does nato still exist today

Russia is back and playing a much subtler role in undermining and threatening the organization. The short answer is no. Many of the American interests it served in the Cold War are still advanced by NATO today, and walking away from the alliance will likely cost us more than staying and strengthening it. That shared fate is being celebrated in early April as NATO marks its 70th anniversary in Washington with events including an address by its Secretary-General to a joint session of Congress.

But to save the alliance and advance the democratic values it was founded to defend, its leaders must take aggressive, creative action. The original alliance was optimized for the lengthy, bipolar Cold War and had a relatively simple mission: stop the Soviets. It was a very costly approach that required massive expenditures on troops in Europe—around , at one point, compared with 62, today. But with only a dozen original members and a few added along the way, NATO was relatively tight in both size and mission.

Bush envisioned it, felt distinctly possible. At the same time, NATO 2. I felt this constantly in Brussels as Supreme Allied Commander, briefing the leadership of the then 28 nations: the air and sea campaign in Libya truly split the alliance; the Afghan campaign, with its rising casualty count, appeared to be a quagmire; and, later, debates over whether to have a formal NATO mission in Syria, on the border of NATO member Turkey, led to difficult sparring matches in the North Atlantic Council, the governing body of the alliance.

It felt like the organization was fragmenting badly at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century. I vividly remember attending an alliance meeting shortly after I took command in during which Chiefs of Defense of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania laid out a passionate, intelligence-based briefing on the possibility of Russian intervention in the Baltic countries.

I assessed it to be a very low probability at that moment, but in the years afterward, I became increasingly concerned. We updated our NATO defensive war plans, conducted significant training exercises and requested additional forces across the organization to maintain a higher level of readiness. But even as NATO reawakened, the challenge from outside was changing.

A lethal mixture of propaganda, social-network manipulation, cyberoperations, special forces and unconventional terrorist-like attacks poses a different kind of threat than the tanks and missiles of the Cold War. Unlikely, but possible. And that threat only gets more difficult to counter with the advent of advanced military technology.

As the tools of offensive cyberwarfare continue to grow—making definitive attribution of an attack difficult to achieve—Russia might be tempted to subvert smaller NATO allies in the Baltics or the Balkans.

Doing so, Moscow might calculate, could create fissures in the alliance as the larger nations debate their willingness to fight for a tiny ally. It would be a smart tactical move by Putin, who seems increasingly prepared to bet that the answer to the foundational question—Would you die for NATO? President Trump is compounding that danger. He excoriated the alliance during the campaign and hectors the allies at every turn to increase their level of defense spending.

That tactic admittedly has had some effect, as several allies have finally stepped up their spending to pledged levels. That creeping lack of common purpose poses perhaps the greatest risk to NATO. Signs of authoritarianism are already emerging in some of the allied nations, like Poland, Hungary and Turkey. The looming danger of Brexit seems to cut against the core values of the alliance. For all those harbingers of trouble, though, by many traditional measures, NATO remains extremely healthy.

It is powerful. It is smart. Particularly in cybersecurity, unmanned vehicles, space operations, special-forces technologies, maritime and anti-submarine capability, and air and missile defense, NATO is a technology and education superpower. It is capable. The alliance boasts a large command structure of highly qualified teams of military officers from all of the 29 nations.

Throughout Europe and the East Coast of the U. Geography matters, and the European peninsula is particularly well located on the western edge of the Eurasian landmass.

When necessary, they allow us to operate in the Middle East and Africa. But they primarily serve as a bulwark: NATO is not global in its scope, scale or ambition and will remain tightly focused on the North Atlantic. A strong NATO means not only having allies in a fight, should it come to that, but also a powerful deterrent to the aggression of ambitious adversaries. The disasters of the 20th century alone pulled the U. History provides few achievements that compare to those seven decades of peace.

They were built not on the ambitions of cold-eyed leaders but something more noble. With that kind of behavior comes a loss of reputation. President Teddy Roosevelt, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein did too — though McFarland notes that their times in power brought war, defeat and international disapproval to their countries.

Festival of Social Science — Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. French President Emmanuel Macron, left, and U.