Does Europe still need NATO?

      The crisis in the Ukraine has called into question NATO's continuing role in Europe since the end of the Cold War, when it opposed the Warsaw Pact, now dissolved. Does it now heighten instead of lessen tension? A few years before his death in 2002, the late Professor John Erickson, for many years NATOs top adviser on Russia, consulted by US commanders and policy makers, and the West's leading authority on the Soviet Union for most of the Cold War, had himself questioned its post-Cold War role. "To question the utility and the viability of NATO is often construed as a form of heresy or unacceptable subversion. NATO did perform its Cold War functions admirably, as might be expected.....the issue is not simply that NATO has to define its mission, or even to consider that it may not have a future. There is the wider problem of delineating what must comprise Europe's defence interests, obligations and commitments, this time over a time span which will reach well into the next century."
        For the present, however, a 'bits and pieces' approach to European defence, in an arrangement which is part collaborative and part competitive, is plainly insufficient and no hiding behind NATO's ample bureaucratic skirts can conceal that. "NATO was only one bit of Europe," he said - a debate should now start on its new role. Which, in fact, it has. The latest issue of Peace News, one of the the main voices against nuclear weapons, carried the headline "Dissolve NATO to help Ukraine". Its editors write that Russian nationalism has popular support to a great extent "because of Western encirclement..... To help undo Russian imperialism, undo US/NATO imperialism and dissolve the military alliance that has advanced to the borders of Russia. Guarantee the neutrality of Ukraine. NATO is a machine for facilitating western domination. Dismantling it would be a step towards a more peaceful world and a valuable de-escalatory move in the current crisis."
        It's a view shared by many who are less extremely committed in their views than Peace News, thinking how the continued presence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, with its lavish headquarters and many jobs in Brussels, and its expansion into the states formerly under the Soviet Union, might be seen as threatening by Russia. NATO, founded in 1949 with the specific purpose of taking massive retaliation with nuclear weapons if there was any Soviet attack on Europe, has evolved, in its own words, into an organisation with different aims.
       In the 1950's it was there for defensive purposes, in the 1960's as a political instrument for détente, and in the 1990's as a tool for stability in Europe and central Asia through new partners and allies. Now its new mission, it claims, is "to extend peace through the strategic projection of security". Necessity has forced them to accept that violent extremism may be the "defining threat" of the first half of the 21st century, and that this needs a co-ordinated international response which could be the foundation stone of transatlantic peace. So why not change the name to the North Atlantic Peace Organisation and ask Russia to join? And make sure the many Ukrainian oligarchs join in. ends