David Warren says as much for The Ottawa Citizen here:
What use is NATO? This was the unexamined background question in Chicago, where the 28 member states and a couple dozen with “observer” status gathered for the summit ritual . . . the grand question of what NATO has been doing as the institutional face of western intervention, both realpolitik and humanitarian, in trouble spots far away from the North Atlantic. The U.S. has needed NATO as diplomatic cover for what otherwise might look like “American imperialism.” They’d use the UN if it wasn’t so full of vetoes; and “coalitions of the willing” are passé.
By increments, NATO has been transformed from a hard and necessary Eurocentric alliance against a pointed Soviet threat into a prism for political and diplomatic “optics.” ...
I have argued before that if we must have summits — and I have yet to see why — they should be held on cruise ships. (And may I recommend Costa Cruises.) ... NATO does not know what it is for. Its member governments are unable to formulate a common purpose. Its use as a flag of convenience, for exotic foreign adventures that may be popular for a brief time, subverts its function as a military alliance. It has lost the luxury of a common, public enemy.
