In his latest Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead joins Emmanuel Macron in lamenting the state of NATO:
NATO is brain-dead. So said French President Emmanuel Macron in an interview published last week.
He’s not wholly wrong. A generation after the collapse of communism, the Western alliance that won the Cold War is adrift and confused. The trans-Atlantic gap is wider than ever, and the fissures between Brexit-minded Britain, Gaullist France and an increasingly powerful Germany seem to deepen and grow from year to year.
Mr. Macron’s description of Europe’s current predicament is brutally frank. With the U.S. losing interest in NATO (a shift Mr. Macron believes predates the Trump administration), Europe can no longer count on American protection as much as it did in the past. Intensifying U.S.-China competition leaves Europe high and dry; neither China nor the U.S. seems particularly interested in what Europe wants or thinks.
NATO’s problem is that it won a sweeping victory. This is what victory looks like. Now it’s time to move on. There are no permanent alliances.
But the Europeans have grown fat and lazy and they don’t want to take money away from their other pressing needs (like paying for health care) to build up their defense capabilities. We have never been part of “the West” because there is no “the West”. That was just a clever British propaganda ploy to encourage us to help them in the war against Germany. That war was concluded three generations ago. We have as much in common with Russia, as de Tocqueville pointed out, as we do with Germany and soon we may have very little in common with the England. The New World is the new world and like it or not we’re a part of it.
English (the language) and the common law means the US and the UK will always have outsized influence on each other.