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Cato Policy Report, March/April 1995

Time to Withdraw from Outmoded Nato Alliance

Taxpayers Could Save $90 Billion a Year

"Today, NATO is an alliance in search of a purpose," writes Ted Galen Carpenter, Cato's director of foreign policy studies, in his latest Cato book,Beyond NATO: Staying Out of Europe's Wars. The NATO alliance, he says, has become an expensive and dangerous anachronism in the post-Cold War era. But "instead of considering whether an alliance created to wage the Cold War is relevant in the vastly altered setting of post-Cold War Europe," Carpenter writes, "policymakers are debating whether NATO should enlarge its membership by incorporating some or all of the Central and East European nations."

Beyond NATO is a call for U.S. withdrawal from an alliance that costs American taxpayers some $90 billion a year. Carpenter writes that even more worrisome than the financial burden is the unhealthy attitude of dependence that U.S. dominance induces in the European allies. He warns that an eastward extension of NATO would almost certainly undermine democratic pro-Western Russians and give ultranationalist elements an ideal issue to exploit. It would also risk military confrontation with Moscow over a region in which Russia has long-standing political, economic, and security interests. Carpenter cautions that an enlarged NATO would entangle the United States in an assortment of parochial quarrels and ethnic conflicts among the Central and East European nations.

Carpenter proposes that the United States encourage the strengthening of "Europeans-only" military organizations such as the Western European Union. "An important initial step is to change the nature of the debate about NATO's future," Carpenter says. "Too often the debate has been a narrow and intellectually sterile discussion of when, how, and how far the alliance should expand. The more fundamental issue is whether the alliance should exist at all. A high-priority item on Washington's foreign policy agenda should be to move beyond a reflexive reverence for NATO toward a new European policy that better serves America's interests in the post-Cold War era."

Charles William Maynes, editor ofForeign Policy, says, "Ted Galen Carpenter's study of post-Cold War European security is the most penetrating I have yet seen," and Burt Pines of National Empowerment Television calls the book "essential reading for every American taxpayer who continues to underwrite NATO."

This article originally appeared in the March/April 1995 edition of Cato Policy Report.