The Evolution of NATO

Political scientist Henry Farrell remarks on the changes that may result from President Trump’s meetings with our NATO allies in the Washington Post:

While the public is more familiar with the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States, the German-U.S. relationship has arguably been more important. One of the key purposes of NATO was to embed Germany in an international framework that would prevent it from becoming a threat to European peace as it had been in World War I and World War II. In the words of NATO’s first secretary general, NATO was supposed “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Now, Merkel is suggesting that the Americans aren’t really in, and, by extension, Germany and Europe are likely to take on a much more substantial and independent role than they have in the past 70 years.

I’m glad he brought that up. It may be the case that the U. S. is no longer in; it is unquestionably true that Germany is no longer down.

This portion of his op-ed caught my eye:

If the current U.S. administration has decided that it no longer needs to rely on allies as much as in the past, those allies are deciding that they cannot rely on the U.S. anymore and are starting to forge their own arrangements, which will diminish the U.S. ability to influence their actions and decisions.

I wish the professor had cited an instance of the last time that the U. S. influenced Germany’s actions and decisions. I can think of any number of times that our European allies influenced our actions and decisions, cf. our 2011 military intervention in Libya. Has NATO expansion been the U. S. policy or Germany’s? Helmut Kohl, Angela Merkel’s predecessor as German Chancellor, simultaneously communicated to the Russians that NATO would not be expanded and to the Central and Eastern Europeans that it would, so I would say that at best Germany’s role has been complex and at worst mischievous.