Professor Stephen Walt made a compelling argument the other day for taking the disquiet of America’s NATO allies about Afghanistan with a grain of salt. It would have been more compelling if he had not been making the exact same argument about NATO for the past thirty years.
That he misstated in this essay the European Union’s cardinal phrase (‘ever deeper [sic] union’) and conflated the founding principles of the EU and NATO might suggest that he does not know much about this part of the world. Or that he wrote his column in a bit of a hurry, and so may be forgiven a slippage or two.
It’s harder to forgive his claim that the deep investment ‘of Europe’s ruling elites… in the liberal principles on which the EU was founded… explain[s] why European elites helped drive the decision to try to transform Afghanistan into a Western-style democracy.’
That’s interesting. Does he have any evidence to back it up?
Let’s consider a different reason. How about the fact that the European participation in the NATO mission derived from the invocation of Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty in 2001? And that in spite of a good deal of modification of that mission, most of the allies remained steadfast, deploying alongside the United States when, it’s safe to say, most European publics knew and cared little about the quality of governance or much else in Afghanistan?
Did these NATO allies deserve a fair say in how the mission ended? Did they get one? Perhaps that might have something to do with why they’re feeling a bit cross.
Now, there is a larger point here, which is important. Professor Walt may well get his wish and see NATO be tossed into the dustbin of history. But it won’t be because Americans or Europeans have different sets of interests or because their values no longer align. It will be because their ‘ruling elites’, some of them presumably taught at Harvard by Professor Walt, have forgot one or two lessons of history.
One is that, in the modern world, you usually can’t have it both ways. If you want to live in peace and prosperity anywhere besides utopia, looking only after your own won’t cut it. Far be it from an old diplomat to lecture a distinguished political scientist on a concept invented by his tribe, but there is something in this world called ‘interdependence’. It’s real.
Maybe someday the members of NATO will agree that, as was said about the British and the slave trade, the best part of creating the alliance was the sanctimonious pleasure they later took in dismantling it. But then the good professor, if he’s still around, will need to find a new cause. He may take comfort in the strong possibility that, as against his prediction about the tragedy we are now seeing in Afghanistan, the ‘agonizing’ after-effects of an end to NATO are unlikely to ‘dissipate’. There will be plenty of ink to spill over the ‘downside to everyone involved in this [multi]-year enterprise turning the page and moving on’.