Alliances

Ronald Asmus, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for European affairs, argues that the Bush Administration decision to take US troops out of Europe is wrong and destructive to US foreign policy. His argument is one that is common to the Democrats today - a knee-jerk reliance on and support for "alliances" and "multi-lateral institutions" for their own sake, rather than based on an evaluation of what these alliances can accomplish.

The planned withdrawal of U.S. troops from Europe and Asia that President Bush announced this week, if allowed to stand, could lead to the demise of the United States' key alliances across the globe, including the one that Truman considered his greatest foreign policy accomplishment: NATO.

NATO was created as a military alliance 60 years ago to counter the Soviet threat in Europe. The Soviet threat is gone, yet NATO remains. As a military alliance, NATO is pretty much worthless at this point. Beyond invoking the mutual defense clause of the alliance after the 9/11 attacks on the US, NATO did very little. Sure some NATO troops deployed to Afghanistan, but the numbers deployed were a joke and due to the decrepit nature of their militaries our allies couldn't even get their own troops to the war zone - the US had to airlift them there. Maybe its time to realize that an institution established in the 1940's has outlived its usefulness in today's world.

Asmus goes on to describe the objectives of NATO. The first one is:

help ensure that peace and stability on the continent would endure

I would have to say that this has been accomplished already. Europe has been peaceful and stable for quite a while and removing 100,000 soldiers from Germany is unlikely to alter this. The second objective is:

have the capacity to support NATO and European Union expansion and project the communities of democracies eastward

This has also been accomplished as virtually all of Eastern Europe is now part of the EU. And the final objective is:

provide the political and military glue to enable our allies to reorient themselves militarily and prepare, together with the United States, to address new conflicts beyond the continent's borders.

What does this mean? Is Asmus saying that keeping US soldiers in Germany will help modernize the European militaries? The troops have been there for quite a while, and this has contributed to a degradation of European armed forces, as the Europeans figured that since the US was protecting them there was no need to build up their own defense. More importantly, "address[ing] new conflicts beyond the continent's borders" is exactly a reason for moving the troops out of Europe. Given that the threat we are facing is coming from the Middle East and Central Asia, it makes a lot more sense to have troops there than in central Europe where they are doing nothing. Yes alliances are important, but in the words of Walter Lippman

An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.

something the Democrats, in their quest to be liked by all, don't understand.