Gates says NATO alliance in danger of breaking
WASHINGTON. June 15. KAZINFORM Robert Gates calls it "aging out." He's not referring to his imminent retirement as defense secretary. He's talking about a generational expiration date on the American embrace of Europe as a pillar of US defense strategy; Kazinform refers to China Daily.
Gates made a splash with a scathing speech last week in Brussels, home of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in which he said the 62-year-old alliance faces a "dim, if not dismal" future. He was not disowning NATO but warning that a years-long fraying of trans-Atlantic ties could eventually break the bond.
"I am worried," he said in an Associated Press interview in his Pentagon office on Monday.
Throughout the Cold War, beginning with NATO's founding in 1949 as a bulwark against the Soviet Union and its East European allies, a military and political partnership with Western Europe was fundamental to US defense policy.
But in the 20 years since the demise of the Soviet Union the security landscape has been reshaped. And for a growing number of Americans, NATO is an obscure relic of a bygone era.
It's not just the reluctance of most European governments to shoulder a bigger share of the financial burden of providing their own defense that bothers Gates, although he said this is at the core of the problem. What has added to his worry is what Gates sees as an emerging new view among younger Americans of the proper priorities for American foreign and defense policy.
"People like me who have an emotional stake in Europe and NATO are aging out," he said in the interview. "For a lot of these younger people," including newer members of Congress bent on cutting government budget deficits and trimming US commitments overseas, "they don't have these kinds of attachments."
Gates said he had no regrets about the blunt message he delivered in Brussels, which included an explicit warning that the European members of NATO face the very real possibility of "collective military irrelevance."
"I don't feel I went too far," he said. "I'll tell you one place I got pretty unanimous positive reaction, and that was in the United States of America - across the entire political spectrum."
Sean Kay, a professor of politics and government at Ohio Wesleyan University and a specialist in European and international security, said in a telephone interview that the US might get Europe to do more for its own defense if it began withdrawing troops and considered moving US European Command headquarters to US soil; Kazinform rcites China Daily.
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