The Need for NATO

IRVING Kristol recently found himself rendered “mute.” It happened at a dinner with a number of influential policy-makers who were discussing the future of NATO and its eastward expansion. The notion that there was any future for NATO, let alone an expanded NATO, was one after-dinner debate too far. Mr. Kristol summed up his incredulity by writing in the Wall Street Journal that he was “stunned by the irrelevance” of the topic. His column began with an aphorism ascribed to Churchill, that “memory was the enemy of policy,” and ended with the flat statement that NATO should politely slide into obsolescence. For him, it was time to turn to the problems of Mexico, Islamic fundamentalism, and China. Europe was last decade’s hemline.

As it happens, I was at the same dinner. As I listened to a number of Cold Warriors explain why it was time to pack up NATO and leave Europe to wallow in its own inadequacies, I wondered if we were seeing some shrewd repositioning here. Noticing that isolationism had strong appeal again in America, had our neoconservative intellectuals decided it was too important a policy position to be left to the populists? Or was it simply a case of the “restless intellectual” syndrome, the feeling that now that America was not being menaced in the gut by the Evil Empire, all the remaining loose ends in Europe were simply housekeeping, and this was the time to go down to Gramercy Park and discuss welfare mothers or the newest Islamic lunatic? This suspicion was reinforced as I re-read Mr. Kristol’s explanation of his anti-NATO position.

BA

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Barbara Amiel

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IRVING Kristol recently found himself rendered “mute.” It happened at a dinner with a number of influential policy-makers who were discussing the future of NATO and its eastward expansion. The notion that there was any future for NATO, let alone an expanded NATO, was one after-dinner debate too far. Mr. Kristol summed up his incredulity by writing in the Wall Street Journal that he was “stunned by the irrelevance” of the topic. His column began with an aphorism ascribed to Churchill, that “memory was the enemy of policy,” and ended with the flat statement that NATO should politely slide into obsolescence. For him, it was time to turn to the problems of Mexico, Islamic fundamentalism, and China. Europe was last decade’s hemline.

As it happens, I was at the same dinner. As I listened to a number of Cold Warriors explain why it was time to pack up NATO and leave Europe to wallow in its own inadequacies, I wondered if we were seeing some shrewd repositioning here. Noticing that isolationism had strong appeal again in America, had our neoconservative intellectuals decided it was too important a policy position to be left to the populists? Or was it simply a case of the “restless intellectual” syndrome, the feeling that now that America was not being menaced in the gut by the Evil Empire, all the remaining loose ends in Europe were simply housekeeping, and this was the time to go down to Gramercy Park and discuss welfare mothers or the newest Islamic lunatic? This suspicion was reinforced as I re-read Mr. Kristol’s explanation of his anti-NATO position.