Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has finally said publicly what everybody has assumed for a long time: NATO is dead. It's not dead in the sense that it doesn't exist anymore, but it is definitely moribund, and even if there continues to be an organization called "NATO," it will have no purpose other than the perpetuation of the disused bureaucracy that has been the sole reason for its existence in the last few decades.a
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Originally designed to bind the United States and Western Europe into a credible deterrent against a hostile Soviet Union, NATO's last useful gasp was in Bosnia, but that was almost two decades ago, and the Balkans had little to do with the Cold War anyway. With the demise of the Communist bloc, NATO lost much of its purpose. Under normal circumstances, there are only two things that make sense for such an organization: either find another use for it or dissolve it. We did neither.a
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Some have said that the existence of NATO after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact made an already paranoid and politically unsophisticated Russia almost as wary as the USSR had been, and we certainly drove the Russians crazy by planning to emplace missiles in their former satellite countries. In any event, NATO became a useless vestigal organ, costing us money and other resources but accomplishing nothing to the benefit of our allies or us. And because we are the chumps we are, we are paying most of the freight.a
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NATO's irrelevance goes beyond the lack of a central mission. Secretary Gates' complaint is that Europeans don't want to support it, and they don't. Like unsupervised adolescents, they have been busy experimenting with other things, such as coalescing into an ill-conceived economic union that had no chance of success as long as there was no sovereignty to control it. As a result, Europe got into its own economic mess all by itself, with Germany---full of grandiose, half-baked ideas as usual---now hoisted with its own petard and feeling the financial pain of having to support others in the EU. Germany is not alone among our allies who are happy to have NATO around---as long as the U.S. pays for it.a
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The organization has been the vehicle for getting involved in the Libyan civil war, but that mission was poorly and hastily conceived, it lacks military objectives, and it is being executed in the most muddled and discontinuous fashion. Meanwhile, the United States keeps begging for more NATO help in Afghanistan, but nevertheless our allies have been bailing out of Southwest Asia for some time. Not NATO's finest hour. a
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The alliance's disutility is also caused by other, more sweeping, changes, and they signal more than just the demise of some useless extra-governmental construct. NATO's leader, the United States, has been losing influence nearly everywhere, and our international reach, once very long indeed, is now dangerously short. With a rapidly growing economy and independent-minded leadership, our own NATO ally, Turkey, is wielding its strength in the region, and the majority party's religious bent may be emblematic of the gulf between us.a
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The United States is in a difficult position: we look weak whether NATO continues to wander aimlessly or we dissolve it. That should demonstrate as much as anything that, no matter how useless the organization is, it's not NATO's fault that things don't go our way, and we should heed Cassius's observation that the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves.a
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