Start with the locus classicus of American alliances, NATO. Several former heads of state and other policymakers from Central and Eastern European NATO members greeted the Obama administration six months into its term with a hectoring letter demanding Washington pay more attention to their region. The letter argues that these leaders' "ability to sustain public support at home for our contributions to Alliance missions abroad … depends on us being able to show that our own security concerns are being addressed in NATO and close cooperation with the United States."

In other words, these countries have options, and if Uncle Sam would like to continue receiving their contributions in places like Afghanistan, Washington had better pony up. The authors have several suggestions for us, one being to deploy military personnel on their territory. After all, they argue, "at a regional level and vis-à-vis our nations," Russia acts as a revisionist power.

It is easy to understand why these countries, given their experience with Russia, want increased American support. The trouble is that capitals across Central and Eastern Europe have shown precious little interest in carrying their own weight within the NATO alliance.

This past summer, for example, the Czech Defense Ministry announced it was cutting its defense budget by more than 10 percent. Other countries complaining of the looming threat from Russia, such as Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, all spend less than 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense, an anemic figure.

Note that the countries could afford a robust defense against Russia if they chose. In 2008, the combined GDP of the NATO members added after the Cold War was roughly equal to Russia's. Along with wealthier Western European countries, these nations could keep Russia from pushing them around.

The simplest explanation for these countries' low defense spending is that their leaders know that Washington will do the work for them. And why should they pay for a service that will be provided anyway? That was more or less how things went during the Cold War.

U.S. alliances in Asia are almost as perverse. During his recent visit to Japan and South Korea, Defense Secretary Robert Gates faced a plucky new Japanese prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama. After imploring Hatoyama to continue Japan's miniscule contribution to the war in Afghanistan and not to reconsider the deal to realign U.S. forces in Japan, Gates was asked whether the U.S. military role in Japan might be scaled back. Offering the obligatory reference to the countries' "shared interest" in regional security, Gates admitted that "the primary purpose of our alliance from a military standpoint is to provide for the security of Japan … It allows Japan to have a defense budget … of roughly 1 percent of GDP."

This is an excellent reason why the Japanese should support the alliance, but it raises the question of why U.S. taxpayers should want to pick up the tab for Japan's security.

The next day, Gates was in South Korea, where he reassured the South Koreans that the United States would continue to provide extended deterrence to Seoul, "including the nuclear umbrella." There is such a thing as too much reassurance, however. Gates' statement likely had two effects: one, to diminish Seoul's concerns about the threat posed by the North, and two, to diminish Chinese apprehension that a nuclear North Korea may ultimately lead to a U.S. departure from Japan and South Korea, possibly causing those countries to develop their own nuclear arsenals.

Given that Washington's current policy on North Korea would benefit from a greater, not lesser, concern about the future in both Seoul and Beijing, Gates' explicit promise of nuclear extended deterrence to Seoul likely dampened the admittedly low prospects for progress on the North Korean nuclear issue.

America's alliances are no longer considered responses to security challenges. Instead, they have become ends in themselves. In an era of record-breaking budget deficits and serious economic problems at home, the billions of dollars Uncle Sam pays each year to baby-sit Europe and East Asia ought to be coming in for scrutiny, not perpetual affirmation.

However, history has begun again. Russia may have no interest in conquering its neighbors, but last year in Georgia Moscow demonstrated that it would assert itself along its border. The Bush administration responded with words rather than bombs. Now the Obama administration has dropped missile-defense plans for the Czech Republic and Poland.

The result was predictable cries of betrayal abroad and capitulation at home. Disquiet was expressed by not only the Czech and Polish governments, but also other neighbors of Russia, such as Lithuania.

Former Polish President Lech Walesa even complained that "The Americans have always tended to their interest only and have taken advantage of everyone else." However, which European state does not pursue its interest? Including expecting Washington to risk American lives and treasure to defend countries unwilling to spend much on their own defense?

In any case, better relations between Washington and Moscow are likely to lower tensions between Russia and its neighbors. No one gains from two nuclear powers challenging one another while maneuvering military forces in close proximity, as in Georgia last year. Any U.S.-Russian conflict would likely engulf most of Moscow's vulnerable neighbors.

Moreover, the illusion that the United States would rush to the aid of distant, hard-to-defend states with little relevance to America's security could only mislead nations like Poland. John Bolton called the missile decision "a near catastrophe for American relations with Eastern European countries and many in NATO," but the real catastrophe would be for more countries to mimic Georgia in provoking Russian military action in the expectation of U.S. support. A heightened risk of war with Moscow is a high price to pay for better relations with dependent states.

Rather than bemoan the Obama administration's shift, nations in Central and Eastern Europe should act on the obvious wake-up call. No longer should they entrust their fates to a large, distant and (like them) self-interested power. In the end, they must rely on their own efforts. This is as it always has been. For centuries peoples in this region have lived uncomfortably in the shadow of neighboring great powers. The demise of the Soviet Union offered sudden liberation, but no permanent guarantees. Last year's Russo-Georgian war illustrated the uncertainties of even peaceful times.

During that conflict, said Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus: "Let's stand together united and victory will be on our side." But the Central and Eastern Europeans had little practical help to offer Georgia, the European Union made only symbolic gestures and Washington preferred to bluster. Some observers saw then and continue to see the problem as the lack of NATO membership for Tbilisi. Ron Asmus of the German Marshall Fund contends: "We must take real steps toward solving this problem by providing strategic reassurance to Central and Eastern Europe through the front door of NATO and not the back door of missile defense."

However, the problem is not membership in the club, but geopolitical interest — or lack thereof. Washington had reason to risk much during the Cold War to prevent Soviet domination of Western Europe. The United States is little affected by Russian influence in nations once belonging to the Warsaw Pact, or even part of the Soviet Union itself. "Old Europe" is similarly less interested in the fate of countries as they range further east. Where the United States and leading European states might draw the defense line against Russia is hard to say, but draw it they very well might, irrespective of the formalities of the transatlantic alliance.

Moscow understands the geopolitical disparity. A conflict along Russia's southern border matters much more to Russia than to America or Europe. Even had Georgia been part of NATO last year, Moscow likely would have struck and NATO likely would have temporized. The Baltic nations are equally distant and indefensible. Poland is better situated, but hardly secure. For all of these countries allied intervention would be anything but automatic. After all, in 1939 Britain and France guaranteed Poland's security and even declared war on Nazi Germany — but then did nothing as the latter conquered Poland. There would be no more enthusiasm today for risking a showdown with nuclear-armed Russia in its geopolitical backyard. Any state leaving its security up to outsiders in such circumstances risks catastrophic disappointment.

Vulnerable nations should adopt a different approach. First, they should forge better relations with Moscow. That does not mean sacrificing national independence, but it does mean taking the interests of other countries into account. Certainly it means not deliberately antagonizing more powerful neighbors.

Some might characterize this course as shameful appeasement, but it is really good sense. If you live next to a hungry bear, you should not provoke it. Former–Polish Defense Minister Alexsander Szczyglo complained of the Obama administration's missile decision: "The Russians will have a voice in the affairs of this part of Europe." But that seems inevitable, just as the United States has more than a little influence in Latin America. Just ask Honduras, under pressure from Washington for ousting its president in a constitutional dispute.

Yet prior to the victory of Donald Tusk in 2007, the Polish government seemed intent on offending both of its big neighbors. Georgia's determination to violently reassert control over Abkhazia and South Ossetia irrespective of the preferences of residents of those territories and the views of Russia made conflict in the Caucasus inevitable.

Adam Chmielewski of the University of Wroclaw in Poland argues that the missile decision "may only help Poles to understand that they have no other geopolitical choice but to make friends with Germans and Russians alike, and to abandon their own foolish policy of 'two enemies'." To some degree the Tusk government already has embarked on such a course, especially looking west. Accommodation between Georgia and Russia will be more difficult, but that is as much the fault of Tbilisi as Moscow. President Mikheil Saakashvili may posture as a democratic champion, but his aggressive and impulsive behavior serves his own people ill.

Of course, diplomacy is not always enough. Equally important is developing military assets and relationships sufficient to deter if not defeat Russia. None of Moscow's neighbors alone can match Russian military strength, even significantly attenuated after the Cold War. However, all could make themselves largely indigestible.

Ukraine already would be difficult for Moscow to intimidate, let along swallow. Kiev may be more vulnerable to an energy cut-off than military action. Confronting Poland should be no mean task for Moscow. Other countries could charge a high price for hostile Russian action.

Yet nations which claim to feel threatened by their big eastern neighbor (no one appears to be much concerned about Germany) spend surprisingly little on the military and place surprisingly small proportions of their populations under arms. The United States., facing no existential threat like that during the Cold War, devotes a much larger percentage of its GDP to the military. Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations contends that such countries "should double their military spending to make themselves into porcupine states that even the Russian bear can't swallow."

The issue is not just military budget but force structure. Washington has provided generous subsidies to NATO aspirants, but not to prepare for their own defense. Neil Barnett, an associate analyst at Center for European Policy Analysis, reports that the latter nations "are developing armies focused on the deployment of units from platoon to battalion strength to theatres like Iraq and Afghanistan." He instead advocates territorial defense, suggesting that Eastern and Central European countries emphasize "something like partisan or insurgent resistance to an invader."

Indeed, these states have been wasting scarce resources elsewhere with Washington's encouragement. Countries ranging from Albania to Georgia to Poland to Ukraine have deployed troops to Iraq; in fact, the United States had to rush Tbilisi's two thousand soldiers back home after the outbreak of hostilities last year. Many of the same countries have sent small units to Afghanistan. Politicians in affected nations have assumed that such aid — marginal for Washington irrespective of how significant a burden for them — entitled them to protection by the United States.

This resource diversion continues. U.S. Marines are training Georgian troops for deployment to Afghanistan. Yet Marine Corps Commandant General James Conway observed that counter-insurgency skills "aren't very helpful when it comes to main force-type units if there were to be engagement of nations."

Although the U.S. embassy in Tbilisi described the Georgian contingent as a "vital contribution," the one-hundred-seventy-man contingent obviously will make no difference to the U.S. war effort. The Georgians continue to hope to win Washington's favor, even though their earlier participation in Iraq failed to convince the Bush administration to intervene last year. Alexander Rondell of the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, lets hope trump experience in contending that the current training mission reinforces the two nations' strategic alliance: "It means Georgia continues to enjoy American protection."

The Central and Eastern Europeans also need to cooperate more intensively with each another. Before World War II, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia formed the "little entente." Its impact was limited, but there was little that could have restrained Nazi Germany's ambitions. Russia's objectives are far more limited.

A new "little entente" should seek to deter Russia by raising the cost of military action against any of its members. Toward this end states in the Caucasus, Baltic region, and Central and Eastern Europe should work together. Relatively wealthier nations to the west, such as the Czech Republic and Hungary, could assist weaker countries in weapons acquisition and force training. Larger nations, such as Poland, could consider providing more direct aid should conflict engulf smaller members.

Hopefully this is all idle theorizing. Absent the sort of provocation provided by Georgia's Mikheil Saakashvili last year, war between Russia and any of its neighbors seems unlikely.

Nevertheless, the possibility remains worrisome — for the latter as well as for the United States and "Old Europe," which are expected to ride to the rescue in any conflict. Another continental or global conflict, and especially one over such minimal geopolitical stakes, would be particularly tragic after Washington and Moscow avoided turning the Cold War into another Great War.

Administration critics prefer to simply ignore America's interest. For instance, Matthew Omolesky at the Laboratoire Europeen d'Anticipation Politique in Paris argues that backers of the missile system "have provided ample evidence of their good faith," but good faith should not be the criterion for an American decision to risk war.

Zbigniew Lewicki of Warsaw University was even harsher, contending that the missile decision indicated that "President Obama is ready to sacrifice the interests of Central European countries." To the contrary, the decision suggested that the administration was going to stop sacrificing U.S. interests for Central and Eastern Europe, which favored the missile system because they saw it as directed against Moscow. American security in Europe starts with peace with Russia.

History continues to run. The administration's decision should remind the Central and Eastern Europeans of an important lesson. In the event of a confrontation with Russia, they can rely on no one but themselves.

The Senate hearings this week on Afghanistan are displaying the increased skepticism among many top lawmakers toward a war that is rapidly losing public support. At a Senate Armed Service Committee hearing, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asked Mullen, "Do you understand you've got one more shot back home?" alluding to polls showing most Americans oppose the war and oppose sending more troops. "Do you understand that?"

Sadly, a common view among policymakers and defense officials is that if America pours in enough time and resources--possibly hundreds of thousands of troops for another 12 to 14 years--Washington could really turn Afghanistan around.

But while military leaders like Gen. Stanley McChrystal say a new strategy must be forged to "earn the support of the [Afghan] people," Washington does not even have the support of the American people. The U.S. does not have the patience, cultural knowledge or legitimacy to transform what is a deeply divided, poverty-stricken, tribal-based society into a self-sufficient, non-corrupt, and stable electoral democracy. And even if Americans did commit several hundred thousand troops and pursued decades of armed nation-building--in the middle of an economic downturn, no less--success would hardly be guaranteed, especially in a country notoriously suspicious of outsiders and largely devoid of central authority.

The U.S. and its allies must instead narrow their objectives. A long-term, large-scale presence is not necessary to disrupt al Qaeda, and going after the group does not require Washington to pacify the entire country. Denying a sanctuary to terrorists that seek to attack the U.S. can be done through aerial surveillance, retaining covert operatives for discrete operations against specific targets, and ongoing intelligence-sharing with countries in the region. Overall, remaining in Afghanistan is more likely to tarnish America's reputation and undermine U.S. security than would withdrawal.

Those who support this approach frequently point to the resolution of the Irish "troubles" via the Good Friday agreement. But even if that assessment of Northern Ireland is correct, it is not the only way such conflicts have ended. The Vietnam War ended when North Vietnam sent virtually its entire army into South Vietnam in 1975; achieving a decisive military victory that overturned the negotiated Paris Accords it had approved just a couple of years before. North Vietnam then proved that its military approach was no fluke by invading Cambodia and crushing the Khmer Rouge.

In short, sometimes there is a military solution. Some questions need to be addressed however, as the U.S. increases its military forces in Afghanistan to determine if that is the case in Afghanistan.

The first has to do with supply lines. Afghanistan is a land-locked country. Supplies have been transported through Pakistan, but those supply lines have been increasingly threatened. Accordingly, the U.S. has been seeking other routes. As General David Petraeus — the former military commander overseeing the war in Afghanistan — explained, "all roads do lead through Uzbekistan and into Afghanistan."

But Uzbekistan is also landlocked. A quick look at the map shows that any supply lines that use Uzbekistan will be dependent on cooperation from Russia; both politically and logistically.

Moscow has offered cooperation, but we should have no illusions: whatever Russia's weaknesses, they are immaterial so long as the U.S. and its NATO allies need its assistance in Afghanistan. With the safety of tens of thousands of troops at stake, risks need to be minimized.

The success the Taliban have had in interdicting supply lines also raises an interesting question: why hasn't it happened to their supply lines? It is extraordinary that an insurgency with no state sponsor is able to supply itself against the mightiest alliance in the world. Who is providing their ammunition? How does it get to their fighters?

Another set of questions grows out of the effort to accelerate the growth of Afghanistan's security forces. This is seen as imperative since any strategy for defending the population needs "boots on the ground," and there is simply no way that the United States and its allies can provide the requisite numbers. Moreover, it is the Afghans' country, and they have to assume the responsibility for protecting it.

But if the forces are expanded quickly, how could infiltration by enemies be prevented? In August 2008, a French unit was ambushed while patrolling near Kabul. According to Army chief of staff General Jean-Louis Georgelin, the French had entered "a well-organized trap." A French newspaper claimed the interpreter had disappeared shortly before the encounter, which would explain why the Taliban were able to organize such an effective ambush.

Additionally, the Taliban's ability to recruit effectively remains intact. According to public opinion polls, their popularity has declined. NATO forces have also been inflicting casualties on them. Yet they seem to have no difficulty replacing their losses, which is one reason NATO and the U.S. feel compelled to build up their forces.

Even if the Taliban can exploit a poor economic situation to attract new followers, the ability to thwart this strategy by building up the Afghan economy is extremely limited. Afghanistan is still an agricultural economy, and if it is to earn money from agriculture, it must be able to export (the poppy trade is lucrative because there are foreign purchasers). Yet Afghanistan's location and poor transportation infrastructure are not suited to export. Any economic improvement is bound to be gradual.

Finally, there is the question of training. As Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently acknowledged, the Taliban "has grown much more sophisticated in the last two or three years."

They are being trained somewhere — but where? Why is it so difficult to discover those locations and destroy them?

At the end of 2001, it all looked so easy. The United States has traveled a hard road since then. Americans, along with their NATO and regional allies, need to answer these questions - and others like them - to gain a better idea of how they got where they are, and where they are heading.

Not only is Afghanistan an extremely unpromising candidate for such a mission, given its pervasive poverty, its fractured clan-based and tribal-based social structure, and its weak national identity, U.S. and NATO officials should also be sobered by the disappointing outcomes of other nation-building ventures over the past two decades. An audit of the two most prominent missions, Bosnia and Iraq, ought to inoculate Americans against pursuing the same fool's errand in Afghanistan.

The Dayton Accords ended the Bosnian civil war nearly fourteen years ago. Yet as Washington Post correspondent Craig Whitlock discovered during a recent visit, Bosnia is no closer to being a viable country than it was in 1995. It still lacks a meaningful sense of nationhood or even the basic political cohesion and ethnic reconciliation to be an effective state. The reality is that if secession were allowed, the overwhelming majority of Bosnian Serbs would vote to detach their self-governing region (the Republika Srpska) from Bosnia and form an independent country or merge with Serbia. Most of the remaining Croats — who are already deserting the country in droves — would also likely choose to secede and join with Croatia. Bosnian Muslims constitute the only faction wishing to maintain Bosnia in its current incarnation.

Political paralysis continues to plague the country. To the extent that political power has been exercised by Bosnia's inhabitants at all, it has been at the subnational level, i.e., the Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat federation. The national government is weak to the point of impotence. Most real political power has been exercised by the UN high representative, an international potentate who rules like a colonial governor. High representatives have routinely removed elected officials from office, disqualified candidates for elections, and imposed various policies by decree.

The economic situation is not much better. Bosnia's economy is in terrible shape. Indeed, without the financial inputs from international aid agencies and the spending by the swarms of international bureaucrats in the country (which account for more than a third of its gross domestic product), Bosnia would scarcely have a functioning economy at all. Even with that assistance, the country's unemployment rate stands at a staggering 45 percent.

Although Bosnia verges on being a nation-building fiasco, it eventually may be less of a disaster than Iraq. Recent events there suggest that those Americans who cheered the success of the surge strategy were premature in their elation. Violence is again on the rise, and tensions are soaring, both between Sunnis and Shiites and between Arabs and Kurds.

Iraq has already ceased to be a unified state. The Baghdad government exercises no meaningful power in the Kurdish region in the north. Indeed, Iraqi Arabs who enter the territory are treated as foreigners — and not especially welcome foreigners. Although the Kurds have not proclaimed an independent country, in every sense that matters Iraq's Kurdistan region is de-facto independent, and the "Kurdish regional government" is the governing body of a sovereign state with its own flag, currency, and army. Moreover, it is a de facto sovereign state with far-reaching territorial ambitions. The Kurds claim the city of Kirkuk and its extensive oil deposits. There have also been nasty clashes with Iraqi Arab factions in the ethnically mixed province of Ninevah, where Kurds insist that several villages should be under the jurisdiction of the Kurdish region.

Kurdish-Arab tensions have grown so severe that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made an unexpected trip to Iraq in late July to urge both sides to back away from a dangerous confrontation. General Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, admits that the Arab-Kurdish feud — especially over the status of Kirkuk — is the "number one driver of instabilities" in the country. Tensions in both the area around Kirkuk and in Nineveh province are so palpable that Odierno has suggested that U.S. troops be deployed to establish a buffer between Kurds and Arabs to prevent an outbreak of open warfare.

There are also serious questions about the degree of stability in the rest of Iraq. True, the carnage that afflicted the country following the U.S. invasion, and which reached especially severe levels from early 2006 to mid 2007, has declined. Nevertheless, the casualty rates are still disturbingly high. Shiite-Sunni sectarian tensions simmer, and the massive bombings in Baghdad and other cities in mid-August suggest that they may soon again come to a boil.

Even the improvement in the casualty numbers should not be overstated. According to the Ministry of the Interior, there were 437 deaths in July. Since Iraq's population is only 25 million, the July toll would translate into an equivalent of more than 5,000 deaths from political violence in the United States — or an annual rate of more than 60,000. Iraq is still in the throes of a civil war, albeit a relatively low-intensity one. That does not bode well for unity or even stability going forward. There are already calls by American pundits to abandon — or at least delay — plans for the withdrawal of all U.S. combat forces by the end of 2011, lest Iraq again erupt into chaos.

Despite a fourteen-year effort and the expenditure of billions of dollars, the Bosnian nation-building mission is a failure. Despite a six-year effort (and counting), the expenditure of at least $700 billion, and the sacrifice of more than 4,300 American lives, the Iraq nation-building mission is failing. Yet, instead of learning from those bitter experiences, U.S. leaders seem intent on pursuing the same chimera in Afghanistan.

As Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass has suggested, we need to "define success down" in Afghanistan. That means abandoning any notion of making ethnically fractured, pre-industrial Afghanistan into a modern, cohesive nation state. It means even abandoning the goal of a definitive victory over al-Qaeda. Instead, we need to treat the terrorist threat that al-Qaeda poses as a chronic, but manageable, security problem. That requires a willingness to work with any Afghan faction prepared to oppose the organization, harass it, and keep it off balance. Such a modest approach would be an imperfect and unsatisfying strategy, but foreign policy, like domestic politics, is the art of the possible. Containing and weakening al Qaeda may be possible, but building Afghanistan into a modern, democratic country is not. The increasingly evident failures of nation-building in Bosnia and Iraq — which were both more promising candidates than Afghanistan — should have taught us that lesson.

That position has a certain nobility. It is, however, wildly unrealistic.

In the first place, spheres of influence exist, even if some choose to not recognise them. The power of a state is like gravity: it has its greatest influence on those objects closest to it. As a saying popular in this hemisphere goes: "Poor Mexico: so far from God, so close to the United States."

The most dangerous crisis of the cold war, the Soviet placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba, was settled on the basis of mutual acknowledgement of spheres of influence. Moscow agreed to remove its missiles from Cuba after the US provided assurances that it would remove similar missiles from Turkey. Even though Turkey was a member of Nato, the US in effect recognised that, at least for this purpose, it was within a Soviet sphere of influence.

If Georgia or Ukraine has a confrontation with Russia, there is not much the US can do. There are certain realities of geography that present military technology simply cannot overcome. They border Russia, and the US is far away.

American promises would be as valuable as the French assurances to Poland before the second world war. It is not well known, but France had pledged to launch an attack on Germany within 15 days of any German attack on Poland. Unfortunately for the Poles, the French promise was not serious. When Germany invaded, France declared war – and did nothing.

Placed in a similar circumstance, that is what the US would do – nothing. The US would do nothing because there is nothing it can do. Geography cannot be changed. In addition, American forces are now fully engaged. In order to increase troop numbers in Afghanistan, the US will have to reduce them in Iraq. Apparently, 200,000 American troops are now all that can be deployed in combat theatres at any one time.

For all the talk about the lone superpower, that number needs to be kept in mind. In Vietnam, the US deployed 500,000 in theatre at the peak, with a smaller population, and was not responding to an attack on its territory.

Today the US can deploy far fewer troops. Something has changed in American society. With defence spending increasing to fight wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, George Bush did not even propose a way to pay for the war, either through raising taxes or by cutting other expenditures. No war bonds were issued. The country just quietly accumulated debt.

A political judgment was made: the American people were told to go shopping. The war would not touch the general public. Only an honoured few would bear the burden.

The US did not take war seriously, but was not alone in underestimating the costs and complications of war. After 9/11, Nato invoked Article 5 to show its solidarity with the United States. Nato forces took increasing responsibility in Afghanistan. Thinking the war had been won, they focused on postwar reconstruction.

But as the fighting has intensified and their casualties have mounted, public support for the Afghanistan mission has sagged. "No one will say this publicly, but the true fact is that we are all talking about our exit strategy from Afghanistan," a senior European diplomat revealed during last April's Nato summit. "We are getting out. It may take a couple of years, but we are all looking to get out."

When the cold war ended, the US concluded that its power was overwhelming. The appearance of relatively easy victories in the first Gulf war and in the Balkans reinforced that conviction.

But those triumphs now seem the exception, rather than the rule. Americans thought all their enemies in the future would crumble the way enemies in the 1990s did. They were wrong.

And yet the US continues to make promises. And people will believe in them. And if they get in trouble, they will wonder why the US does not help them.

It is time to be honest – with Americans, and those that depend on their promises.

Throughout history, Great Britain has been America's closest military partner. The government recently announced a review of British defense policy, shortly after the Institute for Public Policy Research predicted significant cuts in London's defense budget of roughly $54 billion.

One potential target is the planned $124 billion replacement program for Britain's sea-based Trident nuclear-missile program. Earlier this year three top retired military officers proposed dropping Britain's independent nuclear deterrent. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has suggested reducing British nuclear weapons as part of international negotiations.

Also under scrutiny is London's contribution to the Afghanistan war. Rising casualties are taxing public patience. The economic crisis is increasing calls for cutbacks. The Royal United Services Institute recently proposed "a radical scaling back" of the British contingent. Britain can, explained the Institute:

plausibly argue it is contributing much more than any other US ally to the Afghanistan operation. Given this, the US 'surge' into Helmand and Kandahar provinces could be used to relieve the pressure for further increases in the UK's own forces.

Prime Minister Brown has resolved "to complete the work that we have started in Afghanistan and Pakistan." However, with elections due by mid-2010, even Brown's Labour Party might feel forced to retreat. In any case, the opposition Conservatives are likely to take power next year and what would happen then is unclear. One Tory MP says: "The death toll means we should do it properly or we shouldn't to it all."

The Financial Times reports that:

An increasingly heated British debate about its role in Afghanistan has sparked concern in Washington about the sustainability of the military strategy and the US public's own willingness to commit troops for the long term, senior officials and analysts say.

American officials say they wouldn't be surprised at such controversy in Germany, but Great Britain is different. Bruce Riedel, a Brookings Institute scholar who ran the Obama administration's review of Afghanistan policy, admitted: "The British are crucial to the NATO mission in Afghanistan" and that U.S. "public opinion will be affected negatively against the war if our key ally in Helmand starts to look for a path out."

A British withdrawal would be particularly bad news for Washington, since Britain is one of the few countries providing meaningful assistance in Afghanistan. Although many NATO members have contributed forces, only Britain, Canada and the Netherlands have not added "caveats" restricting the use of their contingents. Even under U.S. pressure, it took eighteen months to negotiate the total number of caveats down from eighty-three to seventy. Complains General John Craddock, the outgoing NATO SACEUR, or supreme commander in Europe: "There are restrictions at every level." No wonder American personnel joke that ISAF, officially the International Security Assistance Force, really stands for "I saw Americans fight."

Germany is one of the worst. It has insisted on sending its troops to the relatively secure north, in order to keep them out of combat. Reports the London Times: "Now Germany's battered military reputation has received a further humiliating blow. According to official reports the three thousand five hundred troops in northern Afghanistan drink too much and are too fat to fight." We can all be happy that Berlin's war-mongering past is over, but it is unfortunate that Europe's most populous and prosperous nation is unwilling to do more to promote international security.

None of this is likely to change, whether or not Irish voters ratify the Lisbon Treaty in October. "Old" Europe has pretensions of global leadership but is unwilling to devote the resources necessary to create a corresponding continental military. Most Europeans see no threats to justify such expenditures. "New" Europe is more concerned about military issues, principally containing Russia, but lacks the capacity to make a significant military contribution. Incorporating countries like Albania and Croatia has turned NATO expansion into a farce.

But both parts of Europe have one thing in common: They continue to look to the United States for a de facto bailout.

Washington's policy inevitably encourages European dependency. American officials have resisted creation of an independent continental military out of fear that it would encourage the Europeans to act separately from the United States. Washington typically offers verbal support for strengthening EU capabilities, but in practice expects any increase to be put to American ends. Some analysts fear any growth of European autonomy. For instance, Sally McNamara of the Heritage Foundation criticizes Ivo Daalder, America's new ambassador to NATO, for advocating a "Europe-first policy" which

would essentially create a back door for America's withdrawal from the European continent in figurative, and possibly, real terms. Neither the EU nor any single European nation is capable of stepping into the breach this withdrawal would create, leaving a dangerous power vacuum with unpredictable outcomes.

It's hard to imagine Daadler, who is well within the policy mainstream, pushing America's withdrawal from Europe, but Representatives Michael Turner and Jim Marshall appear to fear an imminent American retreat from the continent. They have introduced the NATO First Act, which would attempt to make permanent America's existing base structure across Europe. Although the secretary of defense could close a facility after determining that it was unnecessary (why else would he shut down a base?), he would have to report to Congress on the impact on NATO's Article V guarantee to the other twenty-seven alliance members.

The bill also would increase money for NATO members, further subsidize alliance applicants, fund missile defense and ban any reduction in nuclear forces in order to maintain extended deterrence. McNamara advocates going even further, having Congress "insert a one year's notification requirement for any base closure, troop withdrawals, or changes to U.S. forward-deployed nuclear forces," allowing legislators to block any adjustment to American military deployments.

Although Turner and Marshall want to put NATO first, Washington's principal goal should be protecting America, not Europe. True, the press release advancing the bill declared:

By building a robust, integrated U.S. and allied security framework in Europe, the NATO First Act will bolster common defenses, protect the United States homeland, and strengthen an alliance that has ensured peace and stability in Europe for over 60 years.

That all sounds nice, but NATO has little to do with America's defense these days. America protects Europe against largely phantom threats. European states play act as a global power while starving their militaries in order to maintain generous welfare states. The Europeans won't even do more to protect the eastern reaches of their own continent. Washington is supposed to do all the heavy lifting. Europe apparently believes its job is to help "supervise." Nothing will change until the U.S. stops allowing Europeans to enjoy a cheap if not quite free ride.

During the cold war America could ill afford to allow the Soviet Union to dominate Europe. NATO had a clear mission that warranted Washington's promise to go to war. Two decades ago aggressive, hegemonic communism disappeared as an international force. The principal purpose of the transatlantic alliance also disappeared.

No adequate substitute mission has emerged. McNamara contends that "Europe is not a sea of tranquility and faces geopolitical and asymmetric challenges, including a resurgent Russia, missile proliferation, and Islamist extremism." However, none of these offers anything akin to the Red Army backed by a huge nuclear missile arsenal poised along the Iron Curtain with the seeming threat to sweep to the Atlantic.

Moreover, McNamara ignores Europe's capabilities. The European Union's GDP is bigger than America's and exceeds Russia's by a factor of ten. Why Americans should continue subsidizing the defense of their richer trans-Atlantic neighbors is difficult to understand. After spending sixty years enjoying a cheap ride courtesy of Washington, it would seem fairer for Europe to start subsidizing America's defense.

Missile proliferation is a problem, but one that warrants cooperation rather than alliance commitments. The Europeans should decide on the defenses they desire and pay accordingly. There is no cause for the United States to lobby the continent to defend itself, offering financial benefits or additional security guarantees to win the Europeans' cooperation. Especially when Europe continues to presume that it enjoys the protection of America's nuclear umbrella, the continent should pay for its own missile defense.

As for Islamic extremism, there is precious little that a military alliance can do. Is anyone contemplating NATO air strikes against Paris suburbs dominated by Muslim immigrants from North Africa? The challenge facing Europe grows out of large-scale Islamic immigration mixed with limited social integration. On these issues America can't even offer good advice, since it has little relevant experience. There is much to be gained from cooperation against extremism and terrorism, but that cooperation would continue irrespective of the status of NATO.

While Nicolas Sarkozy wants a bigger European military to turn the continent into a Weltmacht of sorts, there is little popular support for any kind of military buildup. Europeans perceive few serious security threats and have even less interest in backing Washington's active global agenda. As a result, analysts like McNamara might dream of NATO as "an intergovernmental values-based alliance" that offers "America additional security options" and which operates "successfully in non-NATO theaters of war, such as Iraq." But such a program exists only in the realm of fantasy. Just look at NATO in Afghanistan to see what out-of-area transatlantic cooperation means in the best case.

Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace also believes in a faith-based foreign policy. He makes the astonishing claim that slowing America's increase in military spending—up three-quarters after inflation since 2001—

would make it harder to press allies to do more. The Obama administration rightly plans to encourage European allies to increase defense capabilities so they can more equitably share the burden of global commitments. This will be a tough sell if the United States is cutting its own defense budget.

Kagan must be an incurable optimist. The Europeans resisted U.S. pressure to expand their defense capabilities even during the cold war and routinely violated specific pledges to increase military outlays. British Defense Secretary John Hutton has spoken of "A legacy of underinvestment by some European member states in their armed forces, significant variance in political commitment to the campaign, and underneath it all a continued overreliance on the U.S. to do the heavy lifting." As long as America does, the Europeans will not do.

The worst idea is to foster continued enlargement of the alliance, which the "NATO First Act" would do by subsidizing countries that want to join. NATO may be the first club which pays people to apply rather than vice versa. Most arguments for doing so have essentially nothing to do with augmenting U.S. security.

For instance, McNamara writes of "America's long-standing bipartisan policy of promoting the democratization and integration of former Soviet satellite countries into the Euro-Atlantic community." That's a worthy objective, but democratic integration is something far more appropriate for the European Union.

In her view this process advances American security by "increasing the number of partners and their capacity and abilities to partner with NATO on alliance missions such as Kosovo and Afghanistan." However, the former, undertaken in a region of no strategic interest to the United States, was of no security benefit to America. Indeed, Washington's attempt to dictate boundaries in the Balkans has created greater regional instability, made Washington directly responsible for human rights abuses against ethnic Serbs, and soured relations with Russia.

In Afghanistan (and Iraq) the military value of the limited contributions—ranging from a couple score, such as from Estonia, to a couple thousand, such as from Georgia—of the new and potential new members of NATO has been negligible, and no where worth the cost of all the aid pumped into those same nations. McNamara also writes of "building interpersonal relationships between the militaries and commanders of partner countries," as if Washington had much to gain from such relationships with countries that possess far more potential adversaries than military resources.

In any case, even the most fantastic claims of security benefits come in well below the cost and risk of guaranteeing the security of politically unstable, economically weak, and strategically vulnerable states. Even a science fiction writer would have trouble concocting a scenario under which the United States would be vitally affected by a contingency involving Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria or Georgia, to name a few new NATO members or aspirants.

There obviously are reasons to wish them well, but it cannot be America's purpose—assuming preserving U.S. security remains the American government's most important duty—to willy-nilly promise to defend everyone from everyone, especially from a nuclear-armed power like Russia. That small nations next to a larger state ready to play the bully desire protection is understandable. But that does not warrant America risking war.

Indeed, irrespective of NATO membership, it is hard to imagine France, Germany and Italy, in particular, declaring war on Russia to save Estonia or Georgia. As "Old Europe" has seen NATO expansion prepare to incorporate countries seriously at odds with Moscow, enthusiasm for enlarging the alliance has flagged. Even if Washington is able to force the accession of Georgia and Ukraine, America's most important allies are likely to prove no more enthusiastic in backing up the new commitments in the event of a crisis. Fighting with recalcitrant allies would be almost as bad as fighting without allies.

Some enlargement advocates assume that Washington need only whisper its support to a friendly state and potential adversaries will assume the fetal position. If only that were true. But the United States is not the only nation that is concerned with security, worries about its borders, and is willing to use force to advance its interests. Nor is America the only country with nuclear weapons. Advocates of American military intervention endlessly denounce the slightest hesitation to intervene and threaten war as "appeasement." Facing aggressively expansionistic U.S. policy, Russian policymakers are likely to speak in similar terms when dealing with Washington. And if it comes to securing the border, they may not back down.

It is hard to know what Europe will become. McNamara is right to point to "the European project's serious lack of legitimacy and credibility."

Attempting to force through continental in Brussels by preventing everyone except the Irish from voting—and forcing the Irish to continue voting until they say yes—is not likely to yield anything equivalent to a real country. For the very same reason, however, McNamara need not worry about the EU being "a counterweight in the making." Europe does not speak with one voice, and is unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future; it almost certainly will not have a military commensurate with its economic influence for an even longer time.

If Europe is to play a more important security role, something in America's and Europe's interests, it will do so only because of necessity. That is, the Europeans will not do more until Americans do less. Even then Europe might not rally behind the vision of Nicolas Sarkozy and others of turning the continent into a global power. There is, however, no chance of them much of anything serious until Washington stops subsidizing their security dependence.

Today, however, Washington hands out security guarantees the way hotels provide chocolates: one on every pillow, with an extra candy for anyone who asks. The commitments are viewed as costless. Indeed, the common assumption is that alliance guarantees automatically prevent war, and thus never need be implemented. It's a wonder that alliance advocates have not suggested that the United States promise to defend every nation against attack by every other nation, since, given the prevailing theory, doing so should inaugurate an era of perpetual peace.

NATO expansion is promoted with the greatest enthusiasm. It also is one of the most critical disputes between America and Russia. Moscow held war games in the Caucasus shortly after NATO's military exercises in Georgia. During President Barack Obama's summit visit to Moscow the two governments reached agreement over reductions in nuclear armaments, not Georgia's entry into NATO.

The argument for incorporating Tbilisi into the alliance reflects fear of Russian domination of the region, yet it is striking how ineffective Moscow has been in intimidating members of the "near abroad." If anything, the war with Georgia appears to have reduced Russia's clout. Observes Ellen Barry in the New York Times: "Rather than being cowed into obedience, as most Western observers feared, the former republics seem to have grown even more protective of their sovereignty."

In any case, expanding NATO into the Caucasus is no solution. Washington has nothing to gain from antagonizing Russia and much to lose. Moscow has agreed to open its airspace for the United States to supply the latter's forces in Afghanistan. America is seeking Russian cooperation against Iran and North Korea. Arms control and energy supplies also are on the agenda. Most important, the United States wants to forge a stable relationship with the world's second biggest nuclear power to reduce the potential for war. Further expanding NATO would make all of these objectives harder to achieve.

The North Atlantic Treaty Alliance, now more than sixty years old, was created with a specific purpose: to protect Western Europe from Soviet aggression. Although it played a political role, its core mission was military. Having just fought Nazi Germany to liberate Europe, the United States was not prepared to accept Soviet domination of the continent.

NATO's mission disappeared two decades ago when the Berlin wall fell, the Warsaw Pact dissolved and the Soviet Union collapsed. For a time policy makers actually questioned the alliance's future. What, pray tell, would the anti-Soviet alliance do without a Soviet Union?

But NATO quickly found new tasks. First, it became a parallel European Union, serving as an organization to unite the old Soviet empire with "old" Europe. Second, it became a tool to conduct "out of area" military actions.

Neither role makes much sense from America's standpoint. The EU always was far better equipped to promote the development of democratic capitalism in the former communist countries. "Out of area" operations in Europe, such as Kosovo, served European rather than American interests. Moreover, most alliance members have proved unwilling to provide meaningful backing for U.S. operations elsewhere, such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

In short, whatever the continuing value of NATO for Europe, it has ceased to serve a serious security role for the United States.

Yet rather than reduce America's continental military commitments, Washington has been promising to go to war for ever more countries. Albania and Croatia have just joined NATO—Americans are now on the hook to defend these two from threats unknown. So, too, with the Baltic nations, formerly part of both the Soviet Union and imperial Russia. The Bush administration vigorously pushed NATO to move even further east, advocating the addition of Georgia and Ukraine. How are Georgia and Ukraine related to American security? Not at all. There's an obvious reason to wish them well as independent states. Neither lives up to the images cultivated in the West; moreover, evidence abounds that Tbilisi shares the blame for the war last August. But even if these two countries were paragons of democratic virtue, Washington should not threaten to go to war on their behalf.

Don't worry, say NATO expansion advocates. The United States would never have to make good on its promises. After all, Russia would never dare challenge America.

More specifically, if only in April 2008 NATO had moved Tbilisi closer to membership, Russia would never have risked going to war. Sally McNamara of the Heritage Foundation writes: "Although it is completely un-testable, it is worth pondering whether Russia would've invaded Georgia if Germany and France hadn't colluded with Moscow to deny Georgia NATO's Membership Action Plan at the Bucharest Summit in April 2008."

Even more so, if NATO invited Georgia to join, runs the argument, Moscow would never consider challenging the alliance. Issue the Article V guarantee, and all opponents—in this case Russia—would shrink back in fear and horror. Faced with the threat of allied—in this case really meaning American—intervention, Moscow would never act against Georgia, irrespective of circumstance.

Neither argument withstands scrutiny.

Precious little is known about decision making in the Putin-Medvedev government. Nevertheless, Moscow has demonstrated that it views border security as worth war. It would not be enough for Washington to threaten war to defend Georgia. Russia would have to believe the threat, that it lacks the ability to deter Washington from carrying out the threat and that it would not prevail in whatever confrontation might occur. How likely would a Membership Action Plan (MAP) or full NATO membership be to convince Moscow?

First, the United States and Europe have spent more than a decade expanding their relationship with Georgia. Tbilisi joined the NATO-run North Atlantic Cooperation Council in 1992 and the Partnership for Peace in 1996. Two years later Georgia submitted its first Individual Partnership Plan. In 1997, Georgia approved a status of forces agreement and a year later established official ambassadorial relations with the alliance. The first joint military action was held in 2001. Tbilisi began its efforts to join NATO in 2005. In June 2008, the NATO Trust Fund Project, designed to pay for eliminating old missile stockpiles, was established. Two weeks before the Georgia-Russia war, a NATO Maritime Group visited Batumi, Georgia. (After the war with Russia, the NATO-Georgia Commission was established, according to NATO, to "serve as a forum for both political consultations and practical cooperation to help Georgia achieve its goal of membership in NATO.")

The United States has been particularly solicitous of Tbilisi. Total financial assistance for Georgia so far approaches $2 billion. Military aid began in 2002. Three years later, Washington initiated the Georgia Sustainment and Stability Operations Program. In 2007 Georgia contributed troops, flown home by America after the Russian invasion last year, to the Iraqi occupation. Washington then promised an additional $1 billion in assistance through next year. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice all visited Georgia. Last January, Washington signed an agreement with Georgia to establish a "strategic partnership." In short, by all evidence last August Georgia remained on the road to NATO despite the April detour. Moreover, the United States had done everything possible to suggest that Tbilisi was a close geopolitical and even military ally.

Would adding MAP make any difference? MAP neither carries a security commitment nor even guarantees NATO membership. Ironically, to the extent that Moscow feared the prospect of NATO membership for Georgia, establishing MAP might have accelerated war. Then Russia would have had an incentive to attack before Tbilisi enjoyed the benefits of an Article 5 security guarantee.

No more effective would be other measures recently suggested to bolster Tbilisi, including reiterating the West's commitment to Georgian sovereignty and increasing nonmilitary ties with the Georgian government. What about NATO membership, carrying Washington's promise to go to war? Maybe, but history is replete with examples of alliances that fail to stop conflict. And when deterrence fails, they become transmission belts of war.

The worst war of human history, World War II, began despite the extension of security guarantees designed to deter conflict. Both France and Great Britain promised to go to war if Germany attacked Poland. Germany attacked Poland and both France and Great Britain ended up at war with Germany. One can argue about whether the commitments to Poland were prudent. But they obviously failed to deter war.

Japan entered the war by attacking British and Dutch colonies in East Asia. Tokyo simultaneously attacked the Philippines and Pearl Harbor, guaranteed to bring the United States into the war as well. Japan was not deterred.

World War I provided an even more dramatic example of alliances expanding rather than restricting conflict. The Entente squared off against the Central Powers. Both sides believed the other one would back down and, if not, that war was both necessary and winnable. So much for the deterrent value of security guarantees.

The phenomenon of deterrence failing to prevent war is not limited to the twentieth century. Alliances have been common throughout history and conflicts with and between alliances have been almost as common. The causes of war are complex and some alliances were created for offensive rather than defensive purposes.

Nevertheless, nations have routinely ignored security guarantees issued by third and fourth countries and gone to war nonetheless. The Peloponnesian War, which occurred in the fifth century BC, featured opposing alliances: the Delian League, led by Athens, and the Peloponnesian League, led by Sparta. The respective groupings expanded, intensified, and prolonged conflict rather than preventing it.

The Roman Republic was part of and fought against alliances. Countervailing agreements and confederations did not deter it from conducting the Samnite Wars and the Latin War. The First Punic War grew out of intervention on behalf of allies against states backed by the other power. Carthage invaded Italy in the Second Punic War despite Rome's alliance with nearby states.

The Thirty Years' War featured the League of Evangelical Union versus the Catholic League (and more territories as the conflict developed). In the Anglo-Dutch wars, both the English and Dutch possessed allies. French King Louis XIV's aggressive empire-building spawned a broad alliance against him, but did little to curb his ambitions, leading to the Nine Years' War. The eighteenth century featured a series of conflicts among a kaleidoscope constantly changing coalitions. Every government was aware that initiating war likely would entail conflict with several states, yet that did not prevent the War of the Spanish Succession, War of the Quadruple Alliance, Austro-Russo-Turkish War, Russo-Turkish War, War of the Polish Succession, Seven Years' War and Crimean War.

Although France was the dominant single power during the Napoleonic wars, there were alliances and coalitions on both sides. Paris could assume that any continental military action would bring it against an alliance including Great Britain, France's constant opponent—but Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte rarely hesitated in acting militarily, including invading (most disastrously) Russia. Before World War I, the members of the anti-Ottoman coalition in the First Balkan War had a falling out, leading Bulgaria to turn on its erstwhile allies.

Most of these conflicts were extraordinarily complex and assessing the exact role of alliances in restraining or promoting war is difficult. Noteworthy, however, is how often alliance memberships and security guarantees did not prevent conflict.

In many cases, contending parties either discount the likelihood of countries acting on their promises or believe the stakes warrant risking war. Both likely apply to Russia in Georgia. Moscow has far greater interests in the region, diminishing the likelihood of U.S. intervention. Moreover, in the event of war, Russia can more easily intervene initially and counter American action, forcing Washington to take the greater risk of escalating. If an outsider had to bet on which country would back down in a crisis, the odds would have to be on the United States.

Georgia is located in a bad geopolitical neighborhood. Even so, Moscow seems unlikely to attempt to conquer its southern neighbor; the price of occupation would be excessive and perpetual. (The far larger Ukraine would be even less digestible.) However, Russia undoubtedly hopes to reestablish predominant influence in the region and secure its border.

There's good reason for Americans to be sympathetic to the Georgian people, who have been ill-served by their own government as well as mistreated by Russian military forces. But that does not warrant extending security guarantees to Tbilisi. In fact, bringing Georgia into NATO defeats the original purpose of the alliance: enhancing American security.

It won't be easy for Washington to climb down from its advocacy of NATO membership. Indeed, in advance of the U.S.-Russian summit, White House aide Michael McFaul declared: "We're not going to reassure or give or trade . . . anything with the Russians regarding NATO expansion." But no public deal is necessary. The Obama administration could simply stop pressuring the Europeans to extend an invitation to Tbilisi.

Doing so would not indicate any sympathy for Russia's more authoritarian direction. But doing so would put American security first. The United States managed to get through the entire cold war without the conflict turning hot. It makes no sense to unnecessarily risk war with Russia today. Or, to put it more crudely, to risk Washington for Tbilisi.

Contrary to the claims of NATO expansion advocates, alliance membership does not provide a free lunch. Throughout history, many alliances have acted as transmission belts of war rather than as firebreaks for war. There is no reason to expect NATO to be any different.

NATO has become the worst example of America's junior-high foreign policy. Washington and its more traditional allies have welcomed a succession of new members which are security black holes, bringing with them geopolitical conflicts rather than security assets. Little pretense could be made that expanding NATO to Albania, Romania and similar states enhanced American security.

Even worse are proposals to add Georgia and Ukraine to the alliance. Both border Russia, have unresolved or potential territorial disputes with their nuclear-armed neighbor, and are politically immature. Bringing them into NATO would directly challenge Moscow's border security and turn American foreign policy over to smaller powers of dubious reliability.

In fact, a new European Union report highlights the danger of extending U.S. protection to Georgia. Washington continues to press for NATO membership and in the interim has declared Tbilisi to be a "strategic partner." The Georgian government had high hopes for the agreement; incoming Georgian Ambassador Batu Kutelia said that "cooperation with our strategic partner is almost the only assurance of our security."

But what of American security?

Obviously, Georgia is geopolitically peripheral to the United States. Georgia was not only part of the Soviet Union. It was part of the Russian Empire. And the status of the territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia has varied over time — they enjoyed special autonomy even during the Soviet era. Who rules which of these lands matters to the people there, not to Americans. The presence of energy pipelines in Georgia changes little. Caspian Basin energy is useful, not critical, to the United States and the West's access is not likely to be impeded short of war. Americans should be sympathetic to the Georgian people, given misgovernment at home and threats from abroad. But friendly feelings do not warrant promises of military intervention.

Some alliance advocates believe that no harm would come from guaranteeing Georgian security, since Moscow would not dare test America's promise. However, history is littered with defense commitments that failed to deter. The major World War I alliances proved to be transmission belts of — rather than firebreaks to — war. The British and French guarantees to Poland in 1939 did not stop Germany from attacking; instead, they pulled the two countries into a conflict for which they were not prepared.

Moreover, Russia already has demonstrated that it views its border security as worth war. Further, geopolitics in the Caucasus matters far more to it than to America. Moscow is likely to discount U.S. threats, figuring that American policy makers are unlikely to risk Washington to protect Tbilisi. Exactly how the United States would defend Georgia against Russia isn't clear, and how the United States would prevent any conflict from quickly escalating is even less clear. Think of the Cuban missile crisis: Washington was able to stare down Moscow for a number of reasons, including the fact that the United States had far more at stake and could bring far more force to bear near its border. The situation in Georgia is reversed.

Formalizing a security guarantee for Tbilisi also would make conflict more likely by insulating the Georgian government from the consequences of its own provocative actions. Here, too, history is replete with disastrous examples. In the summer of 1914, both Serbia and Austria-Hungary acted more provocatively because they could count on their allies' support; Germany's famous "blank check" to the latter made war a virtual certainty. More recently, former Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian spent eight years challenging China in the belief that the United States would come to his aid in any conflict. Washington's attempt to moderate Chen's behavior proved unavailing. Yet Beijing seemed to downplay the threat of American intervention. Similar irresponsibility was evident last August in Georgia. There was plenty of evidence of President Mikheil Saakashvili's aggressive intentions in winning back the separatist territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia with force. His own officials indicated that they discounted the likelihood of Russian intervention and expected U.S. support.

Georgia's role in triggering the crisis has been affirmed by an investigative commission established by the European Union after the war. Reports Spiegel online: "a majority of members tend to arrive at the assessment that Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili started the war by attacking South Ossetia on August 7, 2008. The facts assembled . . . refute Saakashvili's claim that his country became the innocent victim of 'Russian aggression' on that day." Retired British Colonel Christopher Langton said: "Georgia's dream is shattered, but the country can only blame itself for that." The office of Heidi Tagliavini, who heads the inquiry, countered that her work "is continuing" and that she had "the sole and exclusive responsibility" for final report. However, the apparent opinions of her panel's experts are not new. Spiegel online had earlier reported:

One thing was already clear to the officers at NATO headquarters in Brussels: They thought that the Georgians had started the conflict and that their actions were more calculated than pure self-defense or a response to Russian provocation. In fact, the NATO officers believed that the Georgian attack was a calculated offensive against South Ossetian positions to create the facts on the ground."

OSCE observers on the ground drew much the same conclusion. Although commission members apparently criticize both nations' conduct of the war, they reportedly have compiled evidence that President Saakashvili long considered a military solution. Indeed, the panel is said to have found no evidence that, as he claimed, Russian tanks entered on August 7, initiating hostilities. These judgments are consistent with the testimony of Erosi Kitsmarishvili, Georgia's former ambassador to Moscow, to the Georgian parliament that "Saakashvili wanted that war, he has been bracing for that during the last four years."

The point is not that Russia was blameless, but that Georgia contributed greatly to its own plight. Added Kitsmarishvili: "Georgia broke out the war in South Ossetia, and Russia provoked it." Unfortunately, it apparently didn't take that much provoking. Despite subsequent claims of Russian aggression made by his government, Ambassador Kutelia, then-deputy defense minister, said Tbilisi hadn't expected Moscow to respond with force: "We did not prepare for this kind of eventuality."

Moreover, some commission members reportedly were suspicious about the American role. They wished they could ask what U.S. Ambassador to Georgia John Tefft knew and when he knew it. The panel also pointed to a remark by then-Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried that President Saakashvili "went out of control." It seems unlikely that Washington promoted a Georgian attack. However, the Bush administration's extravagant gestures of support and rhetorical backing for Tbilisi could have been misinterpreted by the impulsive, authoritarian and erratic Saakashvili.

Indeed, while some friends of Georgia portray Saakashvili as a great liberal, human-rights groups tell a different story. For instance, Human Rights Watch reported that his policies seemed "to fuel rather than reduce abuses." He has used force to put down opposition demonstrations. Investigative journalist Nino Zuriashvili complained that "there was more media freedom before the Rose Revolution," which propelled Saakashvili to power. NATO membership likely would make him more repressive and irresponsible. In particular, a formal defense guarantee would encourage Saakashvili to adopt more confrontational policies towards Moscow. For the alliance then to abandon Tbilisi in a crisis would wreck NATO's credibility. However, a proposal for armed intervention would divide the alliance, with the older core members likely unwilling to initiate war against Russia. And large-scale conflict with Moscow — avoided during the entire cold war — would be a catastrophe for all concerned.

The Georgian people deserve our sympathy. But they are not entitled to Americans' blood and treasure. It would extremely foolish to put the full military faith and credit of the United States on the line in the Caucasus. The way to make the United States more secure is to reduce, not increase, its security commitments.

Yet while the trend is unmistakably in the direction of more, not fewer, nuclear powers, the arms-control community is devoting ever more time and resources to the goal of "global zero"—the abolition of nuclear weapons. That obsession is a fascinating and maddening detachment from reality.

It is not even clear that abolishing nuclear weapons would produce an unambiguously beneficial result. Perhaps it is only a coincidence, but the six and a half decades since the dawn of the atomic age constitute the first extended period since the emergence of the modern state system in the seventeenth century that no major wars have occurred between great powers. Many historians conclude that the principal reason the cold war did not turn hot was because both Moscow and Washington feared that a conventional conflict could easily spiral out of control into a nuclear conflagration. It is at least a worrisome possibility that the elimination of nuclear weapons could inadvertently make the world safe for new great-power wars. And given the destructive capacity of twenty-first-century conventional weapons, such wars would be even more horrific than the two bloodbaths in the twentieth.

But even if global zero did not produce such a perverse outcome, the goal is simply unattainable. It is improbable enough that the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China would be willing to relinquish their arsenals. It is a much bigger stretch to believe that such countries as Israel, India and Pakistan would do so. And it is bordering on fantasy to expect such wannabe nuclear powers as North Korea and Iran to abandon their aspirations.

All of those countries embarked on nuclear programs because of acute regional and extra-regional security concerns. Israel worries about the huge demographic edge enjoyed by its Islamic neighbors, and the prospect that the Jewish state's edge in conventional military capabilities will gradually erode. Pakistan worries about the growing economic and military power of its larger neighbor, India. New Delhi, for its part, not only distrusts Pakistan, but frets about China's geostrategic ambitions. All of those countries regard their nuclear arsenals as their ace in the hole, guaranteeing not only their regional status, but in some cases their very existence. They are highly unlikely to relinquish such a tangible insurance policy in exchange for paper security promises from the United Nations or any other source.

The incentives are at least as strong for Iran and North Korea to join the ranks of nuclear-weapons powers. As a Shiite country, Iran is surrounded by hostile Sunni neighbors—as well as its arch-nemesis, Israel. Tehran also has reason to fear the United States. Iranian leaders see how Washington has treated nonnuclear adversaries since the end of the cold war. If the U.S. mugging of Serbia didn't convey the message sufficiently, Iran had a ringside seat to the ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime. It was not a manifestation of paranoia for the Iranian leadership to conclude that the only way to prevent Iran becoming the next item on Washington's regime-change agenda was to develop a nuclear deterrent. North Korea appears to have reached a similar conclusion.

Of course, other factors—including national pride and prestige—have played relevant roles in the decision of various countries to become, or seek to become, nuclear powers. But the security concerns appeared to be paramount.

Unfortunately, the emergence of even one nuclear-weapons state in a region creates a greater likelihood that others will follow suit. India's nuclear program made it inevitable that Pakistan would go down the same path. Israel's arsenal likely figured in Tehran's calculations. If Iran continues its nuclear ambitions, it is highly probable that Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other countries in that region will decide on a similar course. North Korea's de facto nuclear status creates pressures on Japan, South Korea and Taiwan to abandon their own commitment to remain nonnuclear. The promise of the U.S. nuclear shield may restrain those ambitions for a time, but it requires considerable optimism to believe that it will do so over the long term.

Instead of pursuing the chimera of global zero, the arms control community needs to focus on attainable goals in a world in which proliferation is becoming an unpleasant reality. Getting the United States and Russia to drastically cut their bloated nuclear arsenals is one such goal. So, too, is an effort to induce India and Pakistan to adopt more explicitly defensive nuclear doctrines, and in the case of Pakistan, to improve the security of its arsenal. It may be possible—although it is more of a long shot—to persuade Iran to refrain from weaponizing its nuclear program, thereby reducing the incentive of its worried neighbors to build their own deterrents. An effort to reduce Pyongyang's temptation to become the global supermarket for the sale of nuclear technology has at least some prospect of success.

Even those more limited and practical goals will require patient, creative diplomacy by the United States and other countries. We are entering a more dangerous era, and there is no policy panacea.

Mr Obama deserves credit for leading the meeting. Unlike his predecessor, he fully appreciates the seriousness of America's top foreign-policy challenge. The US public, however, must separate the man from the policy. Pakistan's frontier region along the Afghan border stands fully "Talebanised". Pakistan's military, for whatever reasons, has ceded state sovereignty, police and education to militants in areas of the north. And Afghan President Hamid Karzai is widely perceived within Afghanistan as being thoroughly corrupt.

It's an open secret that elements of Pakistan's military-dominated national intelligence agency assist the jihadist insurgency which US and Nato troops are fighting in Afghanistan. If the strategic chasm persists between Islamabad and Washington, the military campaign in Afghanistan will fail.

In eastern and southern Afghanistan, the insurgency has some indigenous support, but the commanders ensconce themselves across the border in Pakistan.

Hawks within Pakistan's military and intelligence services use the insurgency to blunt the rising influence of their rapidly growing nemesis, India, which strongly supports Mr Karzai's regime.

While high-level Pakistani commanders have their own agenda, security forces on the ground could have their own. Pakistan's paramilitary force, the 80,000-strong Frontier Corps is charged with law enforcement in the Federally Administered Tribal Area and the adjoining Northwest Frontier Province and Baluchistan.

Last October, the US approved the Security Development Programme to "train the trainers" and improve security along the 2,600km border with Afghanistan. But most soldiers are recruited locally from the Pashtun-dominated provinces and may be unwilling to fight Pashtun militants.

Because Pakistan's security forces have proved unable – and, at times, unwilling – to uproot militant havens, Washington has decided to tackle the problem itself. Mr Obama has continued his predecessor's policy of Predator drone missile strikes, which have exacerbated radicalism and pushed militants deeper into Pakistan.

Aerial strikes and other stop-gap measures will do little to close the strategic drift between Washington and Islamabad. Unless Mr Obama can reassure hawks in Pakistan's military and intelligence apparatus that India no longer poses a threat to their country (a promise impossible to guarantee) then the stalemate in Afghanistan will persist. Mr Obama must accept the reality that, if the US and Nato want to win in Afghanistan, they need a partner that fights its enemies, not friends.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus routinely offends Europe's governing elite by speaking unpleasant truths. Like when he recently lectured the European Parliament — delivering a "blistering diatribe," reported one publication — about the danger of concentrating ever more power in Brussels.

The European Union grew out of the wreckage of World War II. European economic cooperation became a means, in addition to NATO, to link Germany to its neighbors. The organization started as the European Coal and Steel Community, turned into the European Economic Community (or "Common Market"), and became the European Union in 1993.

Further strengthening the EU has become the premier project of Europe's elite, an amalgam of supra-national politicians, continental bureaucrats, deracinated intellectuals, and borderless businessmen. The original benefits of intra-European trade were obvious: a continental market promoted European trade and prosperity, while the prospect of joining the most prosperous states of Europe spurred economic and political reform in the new nations formed out of the Soviet empire.

But the EU's goal of ever-expanding continental markets is running into rising nationalism. The Czech Republic, which holds the rotating EU presidency, is battling France over the latter's plan to bail out the French auto industry. Denmark and Germany fear further EU expansion if workers are free to move throughout Europe.

Moreover, the EU increasingly micro-manages economic activity, from mandating use of metric measurements to banning "defective" vegetables. To improve people's health, the Commission is proposing to limit the salt content of bread. "What the EU is doing amounts to stupid interference," complained Matthias Wiemers, chairman of the Central Association of German Bakeries.

Yet the Eurocrats dream of turning Brussels into more than a giant OSHA. They want to harness Europe's population of a half billion and GDP of $19 trillion in order to compete with the U.S. for global influence. For that they have proposed creating a stronger government structure with greater authority to develop a continental foreign policy. Hence the Lisbon Treaty.

In 2001 the Europeans began negotiating a constitution of formidable length and incomprehensible verbiage. It created a president and foreign minister, dropped the requirement of a commissioner per country, limited national vetoes, and reshuffled EU institutional responsibilities (the European Parliament continues to debate the exact apportionment of duties). Whether the treaty is a good let alone necessary is for the Europeans to decide. But which Europeans get to decide?

Signed in 2004, the constitution had to be approved by popular referendum and was quickly rejected by both Dutch and French voters. European consolidation looked dead, but the Eurocrats changed a couple of commas and reissued the constitution as the Treaty of Lisbon in 2007 — which, conveniently, didn't require popular approval. French President Nicolas Sarkozy admitted: "There will be no treaty at all if we had a referendum in France." Then the carefully prepared railroad unexpectedly ran off the rails. In June 2008 Ireland held a referendum, as required by its constitution, and the voters said no.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth could be heard across the continent. The collective reaction was: How dare they! Under the rules the treaty was dead, but the Eurocrats write the rules, and they agreed that the treaty must be ratified, irrespective of the rules. Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, announced: "I believe the treaty is alive and we should now try to find a solution."

Much was said of democracy and majority rights by elites which were doing their best to prevent the people from having any say on their form of government. Britain's Lord Mark Malloch-Brown complained: "I am not sure whether the voters of Ireland should have a right of veto over the aspirations of all the other people of Europe. I am not sure whether that is, or is not, democracy." Similarly, German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said: "a few million Irish cannot decide on behalf of 495 million Europeans."

Of course not. Only a few thousand people — the Eurocrats — are supposed to decide on behalf of 495 million Europeans.

The problem, argued Czech President Klaus, is that "There is no European demos — and no European nation," which intensifies the problem of "the democratic deficit, the loss of democratic accountability, the decision-making of the unelected." Klaus warned of "a situation where the citizens of member countries would live their lives with a resigned feeling that the EU project is not their own." He was particularly scathing of the EU's attempt to suppress popular sentiments: "Not so long ago, in our part of Europe, we lived in a political system that permitted no alternatives and therefore also no parliamentary opposition. We learned the bitter lesson that with no opposition, there is no freedom."

Although British Member of the European Parliament Graham Watson acknowledged "some kernels of truth" in Klaus' description of "the distance between the voters and the [European Parliament]," the Eurocrats are prepared to increase that distance in order to push through the Lisbon Treaty. One option is turning Dublin into a second class EU member; another possibility is tossing the Irish out of the EU. But the preferred result is having Ireland hold a second poll — so long as voters make the right decision. As Mats Persson of the think tank Open Europe observed: "Ever since the Irish voted No to the Lisbon Treaty in June, politicians in Ireland and across Europe have tried to find ways to force this unwanted document through — against the clear will of the people."

After winning some theoretical concessions, essentially promises to make future changes, on issues of interest to Irish voters, the government in Dublin announced plans to hold a revote later this year. Current polls have the "ayes" ahead and the EU is spending more than $2 million to lobby the Irish public. But the apparent upsurge in support may be temporary, reflecting economic fears, and groups like Declan Ganley's Libertas, which played a key role in defeating the treaty in the first Irish vote, plan to keep fighting.

If the Lisbon Treaty passes, then what? European policies will be further internationalized. European nations' sovereignty will be further eroded. European traditions will be further submerged. European peoples will be less free.

Which explains Vaclav Klaus' sharp critique. "Are you really convinced that every time you take a vote, you are deciding something that must be decided here in this hall and not closer to the citizens, i.e. inside the individual European states," he asked the European Parliament. Unfortunately, most of them are: His talk elicited "boos and catcalls and a walk-out by some members," explained New Europe.

Yet even if the Eurocrats win, they aren't likely to create a new nation state capable of challenging Washington for global influence. Rather, the EU will just create a slightly more pretentious political hollow shell.

In his valedictory address as European President, Nicolas Sarkozy said: "the world needs a strong Europe and that Europe cannot be strong if it is not united." But the Lisbon Treaty does not unite Europe. The wealthier West has rejected a plea by the East for a financial bailout. In a January poll barely one quarter of Europeans knew that parliamentary elections were even scheduled this year. The percentage likely to vote is down from the last election. And the governing establishment is afraid to let the people vote on the Lisbon Treaty. If the only way to strengthen the EU structure is to limit popular participation, then Europe must not be united. Would anyone, other than Belgians (and maybe not even them), today die for Brussels? Passing Lisbon won't create a continental identity now absent.

What the Sarkozys of Europe desire is greater international influence, but European unity or not, Europeans lack the desire and their governments lack the ability to take the necessary politically tough, financially expensive, and militarily risky steps. Even Sarkozy's supposedly successful EU presidency last year mostly reflected his stature as the hyperactive president of France. And European disunity quickly followed such ephemeral successes as confronting the Russia-Georgia war and economic crisis, for instance.

Washington is seen, for better or worse, as speaking on behalf of Americans as well as America. They consider the U.S. to be their country; they elect the head of government as well as the legislature; they finance and serve in a military actually capable of combat; they back their government (too enthusiastically too often, in my view) when it uses that military. None of these conditions apply to Europe today; none would be changed by Lisbon.

Some younger pan-Europeans exist, but most Europeans remain loyal first to their national government. Lisbon builds a higher appointed structure, not a broader elected structure.

Moreover, few European governments have militaries with meaningful combat capabilities, and even fewer are ready to use their militaries in real war. French President Sarkozy claimed that had Ireland not rejected the treaty Lisbon would have "guaranteed Europe's security for many years" by an "obligation of solidarity," whatever that is. However, former French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine admitted: "At no point have the Europeans shown an appetite for a truly European defense. They don't want to devote more money to defense." Indeed, Bastian Biegerich of the International Institute for Strategic Studies observed: "The majority of EU member states appear unable to deploy formations of even battalion size (500-800 troops) on a single mission." To the extent there is any European will for military action, it involves low-risk "peace-keeping" missions, not real wars. From such does not spring an influential nation state.

A surge of continental nationalism might eventually sweep Europe. But attempting to force recalcitrant peoples into a new political order is more likely to build resistance than support for Brussels. Vaclav Klaus, who says he will not approve the treaty's ratification until after the Irish vote, may not be popular with the European Parliament, but he, far more than the EU's official leaders, represents the European people.

From that perspective, Obama's recent trip to Europe, in which he addressed the G-20 and NATO summits and the Turkish Parliament, as well as his participation in the Summit of the Americas, have been regarded by most of the American media as foreign policy "successes." He has won praise for meeting with top world leaders and for his television appearances aimed at audiences in the Middle East, including the Iranian people.

But in reality, Obama can claim no concrete diplomatic accomplishments. Europe's public and elites have been mesmerized by Obama's personal charisma and multilateralist rhetoric; but NATO remains a relic of the Cold War and its leading members have been reluctant to send more of their troops to help the United States fight in Afghanistan. The "resetting" of Russian-American relationship may have symbolic value but has yet to produce any major policy changes. Residents of the Middle East may have been impressed by Obama's peaceful intentions, but there has been no sign of progress on resolving the Iranian nuclear crisis or in dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And notwithstanding all the anticipation for a change in US policy toward Cuba, the US economic embargo that was imposed in 1962 still remains in place.

Indeed, as they to grade the new White House occupant's first 100 days in office, observers will find it difficult to conclude whether Obama's first foreign policy's steps have really strengthened American power in the world. On the progressive left, commentators and activists have been disappointed that Obama's commitments to reverse Bush's foreign policy have not been carried out. Meanwhile, critics on the right argue that, if anything, the efforts by Obama and his aides to project a less confrontational approach, like the one embraced by former President George W. Bush, reflects a sense of weakness or even defeatism.

But these critics are wrong. The Bush administration's belligerent style of managing American relations with both friends and foes, so full of empty bravado and a crusading militaristic spirit, has been one of the reasons for the erosion in US global prestige in the last eight years. Obama's emphasis on quiet diplomacy and international engagement that is backed by a genuine sense of confidence and a strong military should prove to be more effective in promoting US interests abroad.

One could imagine, for example, Obama's predecessor responding to the recent pirate attack off the coast of Somalia by labeling the pirates as "Islamofascists," adding them to the list of members of Axis of Evil, and threatening tough American military retaliation. By contrast, Obama's measured response followed by a low-key but precise military action is the kind of cool approach one expects from American presidents. That the leader of the most powerful country in the world should be willing to listen to, and treat with respect, foreign critics of American policy is a sign of self-assurance — not timidity — that Americans should welcome.

But style and media management aside, it is too early to conclude whether Obama will press ahead in transforming foreign policy pseudo-events into real events. His continuing preoccupation with the economic crisis clearly limits his ability to launch dramatic diplomatic initiatives. Doing away with the embargo with Cuba or reassessing US policy in the Middle East would require costly fights with powerful forces in Washington. For now, Obama is expending his political capital elsewhere.

There is no doubt that through his personality and life-story, coupled with the manufactured media events, friendly gestures and cool style, Obama has been provided with an opportunity to change America's global brand name. But the expectations created by the new president's media image and style of foreign policy need to be matched to specific policy. Such new initiatives in the foreign policy arena will force Obama to use his political capital.

Without a speedy end to the recession, it is more likely that Obama will continue muddling through in the global arena and refrain from enunciating any coherent grand strategy. The danger is that political players at home and abroad will attempt to advance their policy agendas that may conflict with Obama's. If their efforts ignite a global crisis, that would test more than the new president's style and public relations skills.

The original goal of NATO, articulated by Lord Hastings Ismay, the alliance's first Secretary General, was to keep the Russians out, the Germans down, and the Americans in. The first objective was firmly achieved two decades ago when the Berlin Wall fell, the Eastern European satellites spun out of Moscow's orbit, and the Soviet Union collapsed.

Russia's oil-based rise has changed nothing: Moscow might be able to impose its will on neighboring Georgia, which was part of Imperial Russia as well as the USSR. But there will be no Red Army romp to the Atlantic. With ten times Russia's GDP and nearly four times Russia's population, Europe is more than capable of defending itself.

Meeting the second goal arose naturally out of the rubble of World War II. A few neo-Nazis might still meet furtively to discuss the coming of the Fourth Reich, but most Germans have run far from their past. Today the Bundeswehr is primarily a recruiting mechanism for social service agencies; indeed, when drafted two-thirds of young men choose alternative civilian work. The once feared German warriors are a memory.

The problem is not a lack of individual bravery. As of March, 34 German soldiers and policemen had been killed in Afghanistan. But Berlin insists on deploying military units to the north, where they aren't needed. And they no longer are combat-worthy. Reinhold Robbe, the parliamentary commissioner for the military, observed: "Plainly put, the soldiers are too fat, exercise too little, and take little care of their diet." London's Daily Mail headlined one story: "German soldiers are 'too fat to fight' Taliban because they drink so much (while our boys go dry)." Europe can breathe a sigh of relief — no one need worry about German soldiers singing Deutschland Uber Alles and goose-stepping down their own, let alone someone else's, streets.

Which leaves keeping America in, but to what end? The U.S. isn't needed to protect Europe from the Russians or Germans. Instead, Washington provides prosperous and populous allies, whose collective economy and population are larger than that of the United States, with a defense insurance policy at American expense. If the Balkans get messy, Washington sends in real military forces. If something should go terribly wrong with Russia, we know who the Europeans would expect to save the day. Hint: It wouldn't be the overweight and well-lubricated Bundeswehr.

Other members of NATO want the U.S. to believe that it gets something out of the alliance. But it's hard to see what. Albania and Croatia joined the organization this year. They added geopolitical liabilities rather than military assets to NATO. Proposals to bring in Georgia and Ukraine, which are involved in complex geopolitical disputes with Russia, risk another confrontation with nuclear-armed Moscow, this one in the latter's rather than America's backyard, and over conflicts in which America has no stake.

The U.S. isn't even getting much out of its allies for its number one geopolitical objective of the present, Afghanistan. The British, Danes, French, and Australians have fought. So have the Canadians and Dutch, who, unfortunately, will be going home over the next year or two.

But most of the nearly two score countries (NATO members plus other states) have followed the German model — modest detachments deployed in regions and under conditions, called "caveats," designed to ensure that they are never shot at. Indeed, American commanders say that ISAF stands for "I Saw America Fight" rather than "International Security Assistance Force."

Consider the record of the Czech contingent. The Herald Sun (Australia) reported that "When asked by the Britons to attack Afghan rebels, the commander of a special operations unit (SOG) said 'we're not going to, it's dangerous,' then ordered his men to get in trucks and return to the base." At another point the SOG commander rejected a British request for aid by noting that his 35-member unit was on vacation. This is "help" that Washington doesn't need.

The Obama administration is having no more luck in enlisting additional European assistance than did its predecessor. So far the response to the president's plea, writes William Pfaff, is "65 men with two F-16s promised by Belgium; 12 trainers and a small troop contingent (probably from the gendarmerie) for the election in Afghanistan next month, with a larger French contribution to the new, combined European Gendarmerie Force that has already dispatched 300 to 400 men and women, all to improve Afghanistan's own national police, so far without conspicuous success." The Europeans also are promising a "civilian surge."

It comes as no surprise that the Europeans see little cause for fighting in Afghanistan, but NATO invoked Article 5 in 2001 with great fanfare for the first time as a show of support for the U.S. If the alliance is not needed to defend Europe and won't aid America elsewhere, then, really, what is its purpose?

Some alliance members recognize that NATO is failing its Afghanistan test. Warned British Defense Secretary John Hutton: "Success in Afghanistan is fast emerging as the test of NATO's relevance in this new post-cold war age." If the alliance can't act there, then "NATO will risk being irrelevant, a talking shop where process is everything," he adds.

In fact, that's all NATO has become.

It's time to give NATO, at least an American-dominated NATO, a decent burial. The U.S. should pull out, leaving the Europeans to construct whatever continental security architecture seems best. If they want to sort out the Balkans, guard the Caucasus, or engage in some other far-flung mission, they should be free to do so. Without American forces.

At the same time, Washington could work out agreements with any European nations with real militaries that see the value of continued security cooperation. That likely would include Britain and France. And maybe Germany, if its soldiers would lay off the sausages and beer.

Yet Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton wants Congress to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty, the ultimate in paper guarantees. LOST, which essentially creates a second United Nations, is an artifact of the collectivist New International Economic Order popular in the 1970s, but it is being resold as a guarantor of freedom of the seas.

The convention obviously doesn't do anything to prevent piracy. Moreover, the recent contretemps between the U.S. and Chinese navies demonstrates that LOST's navigational guarantees are no more certain.

The USNS Impeccable, an unarmed spy ship, was operating 75 miles from China's Hainan Island. Chinese vessels harassed the U.S. vessel and ordered it to leave, causing the U.S. Navy to send in a supporting destroyer.

Territorial waters extend just 12 nautical miles, but LOST empowers nations to exercise control over resources in the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone. Washington contends that U.S. ships are allowed to conduct activities "in waters beyond the territorial sea of another state without prior notification or consent," according to Defense Department spokesman Stewart Upton. Beijing disagrees.

Washington would seem to have the better argument, though China's contention that peaceful uses of the ocean do not include spying is plausible. Alas, LOST fails to offer the clear, unambiguous protection of navigational freedom as claimed by its proponents.

LOST largely codifies customary international law, which favors free transit. However, the treaty only offers a paper guarantee. Even if LOST recognizes the Impeccable's right to spy, it offers no practical protection of that right.

If China - or Brazil, Malaysia or Pakistan, which also purport to forbid intelligence gathering within their exclusive zones - believes it to be in its interest and ability to prevent foreign passage, it won't spend a lot of time parsing ambiguous LOST provisions before acting. Geopolitical interest and military capability, not juridical technicalities, will triumph.

The problem is likely to grow as Beijing develops a blue-water navy. Last month, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair told the Senate Armed Services Committee: "In the past several years, they have become more aggressive in asserting claims for the [exclusive zones] which are excessive under almost any international code." Despite China's adherence to LOST.

Although the treaty's navigational benefits are more theoretical than real, LOST has significant downsides. Most important, the so-called Part XI governing seabed mining was amended in 1994, but the result is only less bad.

LOST was crafted to redistribute wealth from First World democracies to Third World autocracies. The International Seabed Authority would regulate private ocean development, mine the seabed itself through an entity called the Enterprise, and pay off favored nations and groups. Those objectives remain unchanged.

Moreover, treaty proponents talk excitedly about new litigation opportunities created by LOST. Professor William C.G. Burns of the Monterey Institute of International Studies wrote that the convention "may prove to be one of the primary battlegrounds for climate change issues in the future." He dismissed the argument that the document does not authorize such litigation: "While very few of the drafters of [the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea] may have contemplated that it would one day become a mechanism to confront climate change, it clearly may play this role in the future."

Environmental activists also look forward to using LOST Article 207, which directs countries to "adopt laws and regulations to prevent, reduce and control pollution of the marine environment from land-based sources." Treaty advocates publicly claim the provision is merely hortatory.

Yet the mandate already has sparked litigation between Ireland and Britain. Moreover, Citizens for Global Solutions and the World Wildlife Federation argue that the convention will stop Russia from polluting the Arctic. They have yet to explain how LOST would bind Russia but not America.

No wonder Bernard H. Oxman of the University of Miami warned LOST backers to shut up about their plans. He explained: "Experienced international lawyers know where many of the sensitive nerve endings of governments are. Where possible, they should try to avoid irritating them."

Finally, the United Nations proclaims that LOST is not "a static instrument, but rather a dynamic and evolving body of law that must be vigorously safeguarded and its implementation aggressively advanced." If you like activist judges at the national level, imagine what you will get at the international level.

Before the Senate approves the Law of the Sea Treaty, members should consider the tradeoff they would be making. The convention offers paper benefits but imposes real costs. It's a deal only a pirate could love.

Not surprisingly, the United Nations has just jumped on President Obama's hybrid bandwagon, demanding yet another trillion dollars (coming mostly from you-know-who) to fund "A Global Green New Deal for Sustainable Development." Translation: The U.S. will provide funds to poorer nations so that they, too, can tell their private companies what to make, whom to employ, and how much to pay them. The U.N. wants your money pronto, by the end of next year.

The U.N.'s "deal" really amounts to drastic interference in the development of other nations that are neither recipients of nor contributors to the cool Trillion. India's Tata Motors has just unveiled a $2,000 mini-car, which could be a hit in a lot of poor countries. China's Cherry is poised for a global pounce as soon as liquidity reappears. But the U.N. proposes to spend our money fighting "automobiles, which are environmentally harmful," promoting instead a "shift to clean public transport" which they then call "clean fuel buses."

Huh? So the UN is hoping to close developing markets in poor countries to developing producers in countries a tier or two up the economic ladder, and then substitute a nonexistent technology?

Our researchers are still busy at work trying to figure out what a "clean fuel bus" is. It can't be one run on ethanol, because that takes more energy to produce than we currently get out of it. If it's run on electricity produced by solar panels, the physics become daunting. An array required to run just one bus for 100 miles per day would stretch over ten miles. And where would the energy come from at night?

Like Obama's initiatives, the U.N.'s purpose is to provide "green jobs." Nothing new here. Germany put in a similar program a few years ago, sending out an army of people otherwise employed or not employed to install solar panels. German taxpayers subsidized each of these 35,000 jobs at $170,000 apiece. Now the UN wants to do the same with your money — all over the world.

Worse still, the "Green New Deal" wants energy subsidies from you — called global "feed-in tariffs" — to boost inefficient energy sources. This reverse tariff would "overcome" the "difficulty" of noncompetitive energy, providing guaranteed purchase prices to producers in developing countries for a period of 20 years. The electricity would then be sold to final consumers at a lower price.

What's the difference between a "feed-in" tariff and a real one? There isn't one. It basically says that anyone who has cheaper electricity for sale across national borders need not apply. As is the case with Obama's cap-and-trade energy taxes here in the States, the U.N. says their tax on us is "desirable on climate-related grounds."

Nothing is new here. The U.N. is hoping for more green stimulus from an already overstimulating and intrusive president, and returning more of the same: higher taxes, and technologies that won't work and that will cost a fortune.

The reality is far less reassuring. In fact, Obama failed in his effort to get the European members of NATO to commit significant numbers of additional combat forces to Afghanistan. Instead, what he got was a commitment to send a mere five thousand additional personnel. Even worse, virtually all of them are police officers or military trainers who will be stationed in areas of Afghanistan that experience little, if any, fighting. The European allies steadfastly refused to dispatch any more combat troops. In fact, some NATO members (most notably the Netherlands) plan to withdraw some of the forces they had previously sent to Afghanistan.

Contrary to the Obama administration's official cover story, the outcome of the Strasbourg summit was disappointing. It was little more than a European diplomatic sop to Washington. America's allies seem determined to persist in their policy of making symbolic rather than meaningful military deployments in Afghanistan. Germany and other countries have placed so many restrictions on the use of the forces they have already committed that U.S. generals express frustration bordering on fury. Several NATO governments insist that their troops be stationed far away from the principal combat areas in southern Afghanistan, or confined to noncombat roles entirely.

Allied pledges of "strong and unanimous support" at Strasbourg are simply more of the same. Michael Mandelbaum once skewered the Clinton administration's approach to world affairs as tending toward "foreign policy as social work." NATO's European members have gone one step farther, apparently viewing military policy as social work. With the partial exception of the British, their contribution to the mission in Afghanistan is increasingly focused on vague "stabilization" efforts and barely disguised nation-building fantasies.

Washington needs far more than cheerleading and symbolic military deployments from its supposed NATO partners. The willingness of the European allies to wave their pompoms and express diplomatic support for the Obama administration's new approach in Afghanistan will do precious little to defeat al-Qaeda fighters.

The outcome at Strasbourg ought to increase skepticism in the United States about the military utility of NATO going forward–and not just with respect to the Afghan mission. Even some perceptive European officials had previously warned against the kind of feckless behavior evident at the summit. In January 2009, British Defense Secretary John Hutton blasted European governments for failing to bear their fair share of the collective defense burden, particularly in Afghanistan. He issued an especially pointed rebuke to Germany and other allies who seemed to believe that humanitarian and nation-building tasks were an adequate substitute for combat responsibilities. "It isn't good enough to always look to the U.S." to assume dominant security responsibilities, Hutton admonished. "And this imbalance will not be addressed by parcelling up NATO tasks–the 'hard' military ones for the U.S. and a few others and the 'soft' diplomatic ones for the majority of Europeans."

Hutton was right, but if the results at Strasbourg are any indication, his warnings have been ignored. America now has an alliance with nations that apparently believe that posturing and symbolism are adequate substitutes for meaningful military measures. That is a very bad bargain indeed for America, and it is high time that our leaders make a fundamental reassessment of our relationship with such irresponsible security partners.

As a memorial, I give you the names and ages of the dead children, as provided by the rebel Darfur Justice and Equality Movement (Sudan Tribune, March 24): Abdel-Latif Hassan Gar El-Nabi, 7 months old; Ahmed Musa, 7 months old; Munir Mohamed Ibrahim, 9 months old; Esam Babiker Yacoub, 3 years old.

At another camp, Otash, after the mother of a 10-year-old, weak from dehydration after vomiting all night long, took him to a clinic, the door was locked. Said a relative of the boy: "The white people used to come every day. Now the clinic is closed." It had been a service of the International Rescue Committee, one of the organizations thrown out of Sudan by Gen. al-Bashir (New York Times, March 23).

The next day, John Holmes, the United Nations' humanitarian coordinator, reported that water programs run by the expelled agencies could be out of funds by the end of April.

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama said the mass rapes and killings orchestrated by Gen. al-Bashir had left a "stain on our souls." And, with a heavy heart, he promised "never again." Yet, during Mr. Obama's widely publicized March 24 press conference, he didn't say a word about Darfur. And not a single one of the high-level reporters asked him about the further annihilation - by starvation, dehydration and ghastly epidemics - in the sovereign state of Sudan.

Meanwhile, the ghoulish head of that sovereign state - a member in good standing of the United Nations - is presumably a wanted man around the world after the International Criminal Court (ICC) last month issued warrants for his arrest on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. But, in regal contempt of the ICC, Gen. al-Bashir has since traveled to - and has been warmly received by - Eritrea, Egypt and Libya.

He has also appeared triumphantly at a summit meeting of Arab states in Qatar.

In Egypt - such a firm ally of the United States that the CIA, in its rendition program, sent terrorism suspects to be tortured there - Gen. al-Bashir was even privileged to be met at the airport by President Hosni Mubarak. The prime minister of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Jassem bin Jabor al Thani, anticipating the visit of the genocidaire-in-chief, told Associated Press (March 25): "We respect international law, and we respect the attendance of President al-Bashir and welcome him."

This could be called diplomatic prestidigitation, and it's disgusting, as is the utterly cold disregard by the Arab nations, supporting Gen. al-Bashir, their fellow sovereign, of the fact that the mountains of the dead and dying in Darfur are Muslims.

It's not in the least surprising that Iran and Hamas ardently support Sudan's Master Mortician. According to the speaker of Iran's parliament, Ali Larijani, the global arrest warrant for Gen. al-Bashir is an "insult to all Muslims." (Minneapolis Star Tribune, March 27).

Mr. Larijani, what do you call the starving deaths of those four black Muslim children at the Shangil Tobaya refugee camp?

As repellent as the nonfugitive war criminal is, there is his even more notorious supporter, Ayman al-Zawahri, al Qaeda's second-in-command, who recently (the New York Times, March 25) urged the Sudanese to wage jihad against the wicked West's "crusade" to have an excuse to invade yet another Islamic land.

Still alive, Ibrahim Safi, one of 75,000 displaced targets of al-Bashir at the Zamzam camp, says (the New York Times, March 23): "After God, we only have the [humanitarian] organizations." And all of them will soon be gone.

Gen. al-Bashir kicked them out, he says, because they were cooperating with the International Criminal Court. Actually, it has long been the genocide general's plan to remove the international embarrassment caused by these aid workers in his land trying to keep alive the survivors of his war crimes. As one health worker still there says (Reuters, March 5): "We're very concerned that the witness effect that these organizations have on the ground will also disappear."

The only information they gave the ICC was their just being in Darfur. Eric Reeves, the ceaselessly accurate historian of this African holocaust, says (Sudan Tribune, March 26) Gen. al-Bashir's expulsions of these humanitarians "have as a primary motive the regime's desire to remove the eyes of the world from Darfur."

On the border of Darfur, Brad Phillips has long been heading a multiple resourceful ministry (PersecutionProject.org) for the ever-increasing refugees in his community. Since he has never asked permission of Gen. al-Bashir to serve there, Mr. Philips says he is not going anywhere. I'm on his mailing list. The last report from his Persecution Project Foundation just arrived. It's title: "The People the World Has Forgotten."

Next week: How can "the final solution" be prevented?

In April 1949 Europe was only slowly recovering from the most ruinous war in human history. Communist parties were bidding for electoral power in France and Italy. In Athens an authoritarian regime was struggling to defeat a communist insurgency. The Red Army stood triumphant behind the "Iron Curtain." Communism would soon conquer the Chinese mainland.

To avoid losing Western Europe to the Soviet Union Washington created NATO — formally the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but in reality North America and the Others. Yet in promoting NATO Secretary of State Dean Acheson assured Congress that the U.S. troop presence would be only temporary.

In 1951 Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the alliance's first supreme commander, argued that Washington should "set clear limits" on the length of time America would garrison the continent. A decade later he complained that "permanent troop establishments abroad" would "discourage the development of the necessary military strength Western European countries should provide themselves."

However, Washington policymakers grew to love America's role as Defense Dominatrix to a dependent Europe. Throughout the Cold War the allies constantly repeated a bit of Kabuki Theater. U.S. policymakers would demand, urge, and beg — sometimes simultaneously — the Europeans to do more militarily. European policymakers would agree and often promise specific spending increases. Then the Europeans would welch, blaming domestic social needs and/or political opposition. And the process would begin anew.

Just as Europe cheerfully enjoyed a cheap if not quite free ride on the U.S. military, Europe equally cheerfully ignored Washington's strategic priorities on the continent and elsewhere. European states decided to build a natural gas pipeline straight to the Evil Empire over America's objections. The Europeans subsidized the Sandinista regime that the Reagan administration was attempting to oust. France refused to grant overflight rights to American aircraft to attack Libya. And so on.

The point is not that the U.S. was always right, but that the U.S. got little out of the trans–Atlantic alliance, whose members went their own way whenever they felt like it. During the Cold War American policymakers might tell themselves that they had no choice but to defend the feckless Europeans. However, this argument for the alliance disappeared along with the Cold War.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union, termination of the Warsaw Pact, and withdrawal of the Red Army left even the most devoted NATO backer in a desperate search for alternative missions. Not that any offered much substitute for deterring a Soviet invasion.

But U.S. troops remain on station throughout the continent. Whatever they are doing, it is not protecting America.

First, Russia poses no serious military threat to the U.S. or Europe. Moscow is acting like a traditional great power, concerned about protecting its border security and raising its international status, not waging an ideological contest or launching a war of conquest.

Moreover, America spends several times as much as Russia on defense, possesses a superior nuclear force and vastly better conventional military, and enjoys a GDP a dozen times that of Russia. The Europeans have an even greater economic advantage and also outspend Moscow militarily. The Russian Humpty Dumpty has fallen off of the wall and Moscow can't put it back together without spending money it doesn't have.

Second, the Europeans are capable of containing Moscow if the latter should threaten the continent. The Europeans do so little to create effective military forces because they don't see any reason to do so. Notes my Cato Institute colleague Ted Galen Carpenter: "The gap between America's military capabilities and those of its European partners has grown to be a chasm." Joint missions might soon become practically impossible. Despite the fears of Russia's immediate neighbors, the "old" Europeans know that the prospect of a Russian invasion is a paranoid fantasy. Moreover, they figure America would save them if Russian tanks ever did head down the Unter den Linden and Champs–Elysées. So why do more?

The Europeans certainly won't do more unless America does less. Today only four European countries, including Greece, which primarily arms itself against Turkey, meet NATO's minimum of two percent of GDP — half of America's spending level. Although Washington has been making a vastly larger military effort for decades, Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argues that slowing U.S. military spending — which accounts for roughly half of global military outlays — "would make it harder to press allies to do more." Since when have the allies spent more because the U.S. spent even more?

The incentives are precisely the reverse. The Europeans will never do more unless they have to do more. Without America's comforting presence, the European countries, both individually and collectively, would have to take a colder and harder look at the geopolitical environment and make military decisions accordingly.

Third, the expansion of NATO is creating a more rather than less dangerous world for America. Since the end of the Cold War the alliance has drawn the U.S. into conflict rather than protected Americans from conflict. For instance, civil war in the Balkans, though terrible, never threatened U.S. interests. Europe, in contrast, had much more at stake. American policymakers apparently believed that NATO, then celebrating its 50th anniversary, had to initiate an unprovoked, aggressive war against Serbia to save the decrepit alliance.

Alas, the risks to America are growing. In the main, the newest members of the alliance, such as Albania and Croatia, have negligible military capabilities but significant political liabilities. Prospective members Georgia and Ukraine, which face instability at home and threats from abroad, are military sinkholes.

If Moscow believes the U.S. would go to war over states that were part of Imperial Russia as well as the Soviet Union, NATO membership might limit Russian action. But Moscow understandably doubts American willingness to fight over what are, in truth, peripheral geopolitical interests for Washington. And attempting to coerce Russia, in contrast to bombing Serbia and invading Iraq, would risk a nuclear confrontation. By multiplying its security guarantees the U.S. is becoming less secure.

Yet at least most alliance aficionados believe that NATO should remain theoretically connected to Europe. Not so Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute, who advocates "offering NATO membership to some stable, non–Western democracies" such as Brazil, India, Japan, and South Africa. Doing so, he explains, "would give the international community a more powerful tool for carrying out vital tasks ranging from peacekeeping to emergency relief around the world." Yet almost by definition these tasks do not affect basic U.S. security and are not vital. Moreover, both peacekeeping and relief operations are routinely carried out through existing international organizations. Differences among NATO members today often are dramatic; Marshall's prospective membership could agree on even less.

Fourth, Washington gets little out–of–area benefits in return for its continental security guarantee and military garrison. This doesn't mean that the Europeans do nothing elsewhere. Michael Ruehle, deputy head of NATO's Policy Planning Section, proudly declares that "NATO is busier than ever before and increasingly acting in concert with the wider international community" and involved in "an ever–broader spectrum of missions."

Yet most of these activities are irrelevant to U.S. security, have been performed poorly, or could be handled outside of NATO. The only alliance military mission that really matters, Afghanistan, verges on failure. European peoples see little to gain from risking their troops in Afghanistan, limiting the commitment of all but the most stalwart European governments. Moreover, many of the NATO contingents, out of combat and out of shape, are well nigh useless.

Neither U.S. pressure nor European embarrassment has improved alliance performance. British defense secretary John Hutton has warned: "Success in Afghanistan is fast emerging as the test of NATO's relevance in this new post–cold war age." Otherwise, "NATO will risk being irrelevant, a talking shop where process is everything." But the alliance became that long ago. NATO's inability and unwillingness to do more in a conflict that really matters to America demonstrate just how little Washington gets for its efforts in Europe. Better for the U.S. to bring its troops home and seek allied support on an ad hoc basis than maintain the pretense that NATO substantially advances America's interests around in the world.

The U.S. and Europe continue to have much in common and could forge new, more effective forms of cooperation for the 21st century. Washington could replace American membership in NATO with a more flexible system of regular if informal consultation and cooperation in and out of Europe, backed by agreements for intelligence sharing, emergency base access, and joint training exercises.

A couple of weeks ago Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that he wasn't going to NATO's upcoming anniversary celebration in order to spend the time reviewing the Pentagon budget. The best reason for Secretary Gates to stay home would be to revamp American defense policy to better reflect American interests. Which would include taking the moribund trans–Atlantic alliance off of life support.

Although NATO has added numerous new members during the past decade, most of them possess minuscule military capabilities. Some of them also have murky political systems and contentious relations with neighboring states, including (and most troubling) a nuclear-armed Russia. Thus, NATO's new members are weak, vulnerable, and provocative — an especially dangerous combination for the United States in its role as NATO's leader.

There are also growing fissures in the alliance about how to deal with Russia. The older, West European powers tend to favor a cautious, conciliatory policy, whereas the Central and East European countries advocate a more confrontational, hard-line approach. The United States is caught in the middle of that intra-alliance squabble.

Perhaps most worrisome, the defense spending levels and military capabilities of NATO's principal European members have plunged in recent years. The decay of those military forces has reached the point that American leaders now worry that joint operations with U.S. forces are becoming difficult, if not impossible. The ineffectiveness of the European militaries is apparent in NATO's stumbling performance in Afghanistan.

NATO has outlived whatever usefulness it had. Superficially, it remains an impressive institution, but it has become a hollow shell — far more a political honor society than a meaningful security organization. Yet, while the alliance exists, it is a vehicle for European countries to free ride on the U.S.military commitment instead of spending adequately on their own defenses and taking responsibility for the security of their own region. American calls for greater burden-sharing are even more futile today than they have been over the past 60 years. Until the United States changes the incentives by withdrawing its troops from Europe and phasing out its NATO commitment, the Europeans will happily continue to evade their responsibilities.

Today's NATO is a bad bargain for the United States. We have security obligations to countries that add little to our own military power. Even worse, some of those countries could easily entangle America in dangerous parochial disputes. It is time to terminate this increasingly dysfunctional alliance.

For safety's sake, however, says an aide (Sudan Tribune, March 11), his plans "will be surrounded by as much secrecy as possible." Gen. Bashir's most recent crime against humanity was expelling the most vital foreign aid organizations providing food, water and medicine to the survivors of Darfur.

Because Sudan is a sovereign state, the U.N. Security Council, while verbally reprimanding Africa's Hitler, will not intervene with force, although Gen. al-Bashir - whose charges include murder, extermination, forcible transfer (of civilian populations), torture and rape - is now condemning even more of the black Muslims in Darfur to death.

For years, I've reported on this slow-motion genocide, and the only realistic way I see to ending these horrors came from a March 5 column in The Washington Post ("Grounding Sudan's killers"), by former Air Force Chief of Staff (1990-94) Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, who co-chaired Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

With co-author Kurt Bassuener, a senior associate of the Democratization Policy Council, Gen. McPeak strongly advocates creating a no-fly zone over Gen. al-Bashir's killing grounds. This decisive humanitarian intervention was proposed last year by our current vice president, Joe Biden, and Susan Rice, now U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Since he has become part of the Obama team, there has been no further word from Mr. Biden on actually doing something to end the genocide. And Ms. Rice, a once-passionate advocate of international intervention, now prefers to first fully strengthen the U.N.-African Union (UNAMID) peacekeeping force on the ground there. However, she adds (National Public Radio, March 6), "If that does not succeed, then we'll need to take a look at all the levers at our disposal." While we wait, more abandoned Darfurians will die.

Gen. McPeak and Mr. Bassuener emphasize that "air power plays a central role in al-Bashir's military strategy." His helicopter gunships clear the way for Gen. al-Bashir's Janjaweed's murders, mass rapes and razings of villages. And the Sudan Air Force bombs both rebel sites and the camps of brutally displaced black Muslims in Darfur.

Getting control of Gen. al-Bashir's airspace means being able to shoot down his planes that violate the no-fly zone. This must involve, the two current no-fly zone advocates make clear, "NATO and European Union allies, in particular France, which has a suitable airfield at Abeche, in eastern Chad."

Of all European leaders, France's President Nicolas Sarkozy has shown the degree of deep-seated indignation at other countries' war crimes against their own people to very likely be an active participant in this no-fly zone policy. And on March 11, he declared that France will become a full member of NATO, including its integrated military command, more than 40 years after Gen. Charles de Gaulle pulled out in anger over American influence in Europe. (France has continued to contribute funds and troops to NATO, but now it's a major force).

What about American involvement in the no-fly zone? During his presidential campaign, President Obama urged an end to the atrocities in Darfur. And on March 10, the Sudan Tribune reported that after a meeting with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Mr. Obama "urges a strong, unified stand against Sudan's expulsion last week of 13 humanitarian agencies that had provided the majority of aid in Darfur."

However, if President Obama is expecting real-time, real-life U.N. involvement - aside from clouds of words - to end the genocide, he is, as old-time labor organizers used to say, talking pie in the sky. Four days before Mr. Obama and Mr. Ki-moon solemnly conferred, "the U.N. Security Council failed to agree on even a nonbinding statement about the expulsion of the aid groups." (March 10, Sudan Tribune).

But if NATO and other European forces supplied fighter aircraft for the proposed no-fly zone, Gen. McPeak and Mr. Bassuener insist that an American contribution would be essential, "especially of aerial refuelers and command-and-control aircraft. About a squadron of each type of aircraft would be more than enough to end the impunity Sudanese military aviation now enjoy."

They recognize that a political solution will still be necessary for Sudan to rejoin civilization, but "by taking away the Sudanese government's freedom to use air power to terrorize its population, the West would finally get enough leverage with Khartoum to negotiate the entry of a stronger U.N. ground force."

Furthermore, notes Nicholas Kristof, who has actually been on much of the ravaged ground in Darfur (The New York Times, March 8): "Sudan cares deeply about maintaining its air force, partly because it is preparing for renewed war against South Sudan." And inside the government in Khartoum, there is growing dissent against Gen. al-Bashir's added disgrace of Sudan by the expulsion of humanitarian agencies that had been keeping millions of Darfurians alive.

What, if anything, do you have to say, President Obama, about helping to energize the creation of a no-fly zone so that, on your watch, we can finally say "never again" - and mean it? Gen. McPeak, who strongly advocates a no-fly zone, having been co-chairman of Mr. Obama's presidential campaign, should speak directly to the president about the plan.

The United States and its Nato allies do not have the responsibility, the qualifications or the capital to be Afghanistan's caretaker. But what the coalition does need, yet unfortunately still lacks, is a clearly stated objective of what they hope to achieve in Afghanistan.

Bringing stability is an obvious goal in the short term. But the long-term prospect of defeating the Taliban and rebuilding the country is an issue that needs to be addressed, yet is seldom raised.

Only months after the initial invasion of Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance and a very small number of US special forces achieved their original goal. The Taliban was ousted from power and al-Qaida lost its sanctuary. Nevertheless, the Bonn Agreement of December 2001 — which called for a commission to reconstitute the country's judicial system in accordance with its 1964 constitution — put Washington on a perilous course of building infrastructure, establishing a rule of law and engaging in counternarcotics.

These more ambitious and less achievable goals diverted attention from ensuring the Taliban would not come back to power, and provided the group the opportunity to stage their comeback. Since 2007 and steadily through 2008, improvised explosive devices, suicide bombs and roadside ambushes have increased across the country, particularly in the Pashtun-dominated east and south. In Logar province — a Taliban and Haqqani network stronghold just south of the capital, Kabul — militants have created a parallel judiciary.

Ambassador Jawad's larger point of promises made long ago that today remain unfulfilled is correct. Yet the complex nature of the region and its people — many of whom have a stronger allegiance to proximate tribes and warlords than to far-away leaders in Kabul — make assisting this destitute and war-ravaged country next to impossible. Indeed, rather than re-building, the United States and Nato would be building much of the country, such as erecting infrastructure, tailoring a judicial system to make it compatible with local customs and undertaking such a monumental enterprise in a country awash with weapons, notoriously suspicious of outsiders, and largely absent of central authority. These were conditions not fully considered under the previous administration.

Afghanistan under the tutelage of the Taliban was the clearest case of a foreign threat emanating from a categorical failed state. Its leaders provided shelter to the al-Qaida organisation directly responsible for the 9/11 attack. What is less clear is why waging a war against today's Taliban advances US national security and whether pouring in billions of taxpayer dollars for years to come, given the global financial crisis, is what's best for the citizens of the US and Nato countries. There's a reason why Afghanistan has been described as the "graveyard of empires".

Throughout its long and turbulent history, the country has looked more like a tribal confederacy than a cohesive nation-state. Nine-tenths of Afghanistan's population lives outside of cities and towns. The situation is exacerbated by low literacy levels and poor-to-nonexistent infrastructure.

At least on foreign policy, President Obama sees himself as a pragmatist, as someone prepared to listen to ideas from anybody and willing to consider anything he thinks might work. Therefore, rather than "surge" into this volatile region, the president should consider the strategic and political significance of Afghanistan's surrounding neighbours and engage in regional efforts to broker dialogue among Saudi Arabia, Iran, India, Pakistan and the members of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and, most important, Russia.

Throughout the 1990s, Iran, Russia, India, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan supported Afghanistan's Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance against the pro-Wahhabist Pashtun-dominated Taliban backed by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. These dynamics have changed. For example, Saudi Arabia broke ties with the Taliban shortly after 9/11. However, many of these countries still have lingering historical rivalries that are influencing Afghanistan's present trajectory. US intelligence officials suspect Pakistan and India are engaged in a deadly proxy struggle playing out in Afghanistan.

In the weeks leading up to this April's Nato summit meeting, the Obama administration must make some tough choices in potential direct talks with the Taliban. Is Nato ready to let them share power if they agree not to shelter al-Qaida? What if some elements want to keep their fringe beliefs and draconian practices?

Bringing stability to Afghanistan, especially on the local and provincial levels, is an obvious goal in the short term. But from a wider strategic and economic perspective, no tangible gains will outweigh the risky and costly strategy of a prolonged military presence in this dangerous part of the world. The US and Nato cannot afford to view Afghanistan within a vacuum. Its leaders must do their best to improve conflicting regional alliances. Most importantly, the coalition should accept that eliminating threats to its interests should not be conflated with fixing state failure.

As a result, Bashir halted the work of relief organizations operating primarily in Darfur, leaving more than 1 million people without food, medical care or drinking water.

For many Sudanese, the relief agencies are their only source of protection and provisions; millions are now in an extremely vulnerable state. Without the supplies the relief organizations bring in, the camps are about to start failing. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote March 8:

"The camps will quickly run out of clean water because generator-operated pumps bring the water to the surface from wells and boreholes. Fuel supplies to operate the pumps may last a couple of weeks, and then the water disappears.

"Health clinics have already closed, and diarrhea is spreading in Zam Zam camp and meningitis in Kalma camp. These are huge camps — Kalma has perhaps 90,000 people — and diseases can spread rapidly. Children will be the first to die."

If any place calls out for peace and stability, it is Darfur. Now consider that for years private military and security contractors have been saying they could bring exactly that, if only they were allowed to. Back in 2006, J. Cofer Black, then vice chairman of Blackwater USA, said that Blackwater could provide forces for Sudan's Darfur province. He said the company could bolster existing peacekeeping forces from the African Union.

In the past few years, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and the U.S. Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute have been working on something called the Mass Atrocity Response Operations project. The idea is to equip the United States, other states and regional and international actors with the credible military planning tools to prevent or halt genocide or mass atrocity. It would do so by harnessing the professional expertise of retired and active U.S. military planners, who have extensive experience in planning responses to a broad range of complex contingencies. The response would, by design, include numerous private contractors. Indeed, one of the contributors to the project is Chris Taylor, a former vice president of Blackwater who is now with Mission Essential Personnel.

On MARO's Web site, one can download the Annotated Planning Framework, a step-by-step guide intended primarily for use by military planners to quickly develop response options for developing genocide or mass-atrocity situations. Its first sample scenario is for "Mass Atrocity in Country X: A Land-Locked Country in Sub-Saharan Africa." The first and only mention of contractors, "Protect contractor and NGO stabilization personnel and resources," is at the end of Stage I, which presumes direct military intervention to stop ongoing genocide. So much for contractors operating instead of military forces. Talk is cheap.

Notwithstanding excellent work that PAE Group and DynCorp, under Defense Department contract, have been doing for years in Sudan supporting the African Union force, the fact is that just like regular military forces, they cannot be used unless political authorities give them permission.

So, what next? That brings us to Brent M. Jorgensen. He is an Army major who wrote a paper, "Outsourcing Small Wars: Expanding the Role of Private Military Companies in U.S. Military Operations," published in 2005. In it, he outlines a Special Forces-led PMC model that could be used in Darfur.

Keep in mind that despite all the hand-wringing about the disaster, there are no nations — other than those of the AU — that are going to deploy troops there. And you can forget about the United States. If it did not do it when Colin L. Powell, as the U.S. secretary of state, called the conflict genocide, it is not going to do it now, at a time when the United States is sending more troops to Afghanistan.

Jorgensen postulates that the current situation in Darfur gets to the point where the United Nations labels it genocide. With memories of Rwanda, the Security Council authorizes an intervention to protect the non-Arab Sudanese. The United States does not want to commit any troops but does want to help the people of Darfur for various reasons.

The situation becomes a "small war," which would "involve a wide range of military operations in conflicts involving states or nontraditional actors," according to the Marine Corps Small Wars Manual.

The United States "supplies a very small contingent of U.S. soldiers backed by several PMCs to not only support the operation but also to provide security for the people of Darfur," Jorgensen wrote. "This mission would consist of providing security for medical assistance, food relief, water purification and all other manners of aid. Also within this plan would be a security training effort by the United States' contribution for the victimized Darfur residents. The Special Forces-led (private military force) could operate in this situation."

In Jorgensen's model, a Special Forces Operational Detachment essentially acts as contracting officer representatives over a group of PMCs to conduct an operation. Special Forces are chosen because their core mission includes managing surrogate forces in a small war — or unconventional warfare, to use the official jargon. The total number of U.S. troops would be 15; each one, with the exception of a judge advocate general, would act as COR for one to three PMCs. A SFOD is designed to manage a battalion size element of indigenous force — usually around 600 personnel. That means the total force would be around 615.

This is not a perfect solution, if for no other reason than contractors are not used to working directly under military command. But it is better than the alternative of doing nothing. And if private security and military contractors are not willing to consider this, then they should at least be honest enough to stop calling themselves the peace and stability industry.

US and Nato leaders need to understand that they can wage the war against radical Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan or wage a war on narcotics — but they can't do both with any prospect of success. The opium trade is a huge part — better than one-third — of the country's economy. Attempts to suppress it will provoke fierce opposition. Worse yet, opium grows best in the southern provinces populated by Pashtuns, a people traditionally hostile to a strong central government and any foreign troop presence. These same provinces produced the Taliban and more easily revert to supporting fundamentalist militias than their Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara neighbours to the north.

Alternatives to opium offer little hope. More than 90% of the world's opium comes from Afghanistan. Taking on opium in Afghanistan means taking on the world's demand for opium. Opium purchases for medicinal uses and substitute crop programmes with wheat, saffron and pomegranates will not stanch the demand for illicit drug production. In fact, reducing the illegal harvest with these efforts only makes the black-market prices rise and encourages farmers to grow more. If the Cold War taught us anything, it is that you cannot fight economics.

Proponents of a crackdown argue that a vigorous eradication effort is needed to dry up the funds flowing to the Taliban and al-Qaida. Those groups do benefit from the drug trade, but they are hardly the only ones. A UN report estimates that more than 500,000 Afghan families are involved in drug commerce. Given the network of extended families and clans in Afghanistan, it is likely that at least 35% of the country's population has a stake in the drug trade. Furthermore, Nato forces rely on opium-poppy farmers to provide information on the movement of enemy forces. Escalating the counter-narcotics effort risks alienating these crucial intelligence sources.

Equally important, many of President Hamid Karzai's key political allies also profit from trafficking. These allies include regional warlords who backed the Taliban when that faction was in power, switching sides only when it was clear that the US-led military offensive in late 2001 was going to succeed. Targeting such traffickers is virtually guaranteed to cause them to switch sides yet again.

Targeting drug traffickers also makes it impossible to achieve any "awakening" on par with the American success in Sunni areas of Iraq. We cannot fund local militias to keep the Taliban out. These militias already pay themselves from drug profits. These same drug profits will keep them loyal to Nato's enemies as long as the alliance remains committed to destroying their livelihood.

Nato leaders need to keep their priorities straight. The principal objective is to defeat radical Islamic terrorists. The drug war is a dangerous distraction from that goal.

Recognising that security interests sometimes trump other objectives would hardly be unprecedented. For example, US officials eased their pressure on Peru's government regarding the drug-eradication issue in the early 1990s, when Lima concluded it was more important to induce farmers involved in the cocaine trade to abandon their alliance with the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas.

The Obama administration should adopt a similarly pragmatic policy in Afghanistan and look the other way regarding drug trafficking. Alienating crucial Afghan factions in a vain attempt to disrupt the flow of drug revenues to the Taliban and al-Qaida is a strategy that is far too dangerous. This war is too important to sacrifice on the altar of drug-war orthodoxy.

Even more embarrassing, Russia cynically used the Kosovo precedent to justify its war with Georgia in support of South Ossetia. Who was Washington to whine about the violation of Georgia's territorial integrity?

Unfortunately, with Hillary Clinton at the State Department, little change is expected in U.S. attempts to micromanage Balkan affairs. Indeed, Secretary Clinton is set to meet with Kosovo's "president" and "prime minister" on Thursday "in order to reassure them of the U.S. promise of friendship and support for Kosovo," according to the State Department.

U.S. policy desperately needs a change.

After years of repressive local (Albanian) rule from Pristina succeeded by equally abusive national (Serbian) rule from Belgrade, a nasty guerrilla war broke out in Kosovo. Much blame fell on the Milosevic regime, but the Kosovo Liberation Army committed its own atrocities in return. U.S. diplomats even termed the KLA as "terrorist."

The U.S. should have ignored the conflict, but President Bill Clinton saw the Balkans as an opportunity to turn U.S. foreign policy into a form of international social work, as Michael Mandelbaum of SAIS termed it. Once NATO drove Serbian security forces from Kosovo, the final disposition of the territory was obvious. Although UN Resolution 1244 assumed continued Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo, providing for "a political process designed to determine Kosovo's future status," the allies never intended serious negotiations. Rather, ethnic Albanians understood that independence would be the final result. Negotiations were simply for show to disguise Serbia's expected surrender. Thus, the ethnic Albanians never considered settling for anything short of independence.

They did offer to respect the rights of ethnic Serbs — respect, however, not demonstrated when ethnic Albanians kicked out nearly a quarter of a million Serbs and other minorities, including Roma and Jews, after the war, and destroyed Serb homes, churches, and monasteries in another round of violence five years ago. Nevertheless, the ethnic Albanians expected to rule even in the northern areas heavily populated by Serbs.

The newly elected democratic government in Belgrade responded by offering a number of approaches with largely unrestricted autonomy. Nevertheless, the U.S. and leading European states declared Serbia to be the intransigent party, "obstructing" and "stonewalling" a settlement. In short, the "negotiations" were a sham designed to grant Kosovo independence.

Obviously, there was no perfect solution that would satisfy both sides. The Milosevic government had behaved brutally and the ethnic Albanians saw no reason to again recognize Belgrade's sovereignty.

But minority Serbs had no more reason to believe Pristina's promise of protection or the West's promise to maintain outside oversight. After all, both spasms of ethnic Albanian violence occurred during the allied occupation. In mid-1999, even as tens of thousands of ethnic Serbs were fleeing Kosovo, Secretary Albright was telling the Council of Foreign Relations that the allied occupation force "takes seriously its mandate to protect Kosovars, including Serbs." The territory seemed no closer to ethnic reconciliation in 2004, when thousands more ethnic Serbs were killed, injured, and displaced. Derek Chappell, spokesman for the UN military force, UNMIK, observed: "some in the Kosovo Albanian leadership believe that by cleansing all remaining Serbs from the area...and destroying Serbian cultural sites, they can present the international community with a fait accompli."

Kosovo's record is at best disappointing after years of supposed tutelage in democracy by the "international community." The ethnic Albanian leadership has been implicated in the explosion of organized crime, including drug dealing, money laundering, and sex trafficking. Some have referred to Kosovo as the "black hole" of Europe.

At a 2006 congressional hearing, Charles English of the State Department stated: "Discrimination remains a serious problem. Access to public services is uneven. Incidents of harassment still occur. Freedom of movement is limited. And too many minorities still feel unsafe in Kosovo." Similarly, Joseph Grieboski of the Institute on Religion and Public Policy argued that "the present record of rule of law, protection of the rights of religious and ethnic minorities, and the return/resettlement of internally displaced people by the Provisional Authority of Kosovo — all of which are indispensable for democratic governance — have been gravely unsatisfactory."

In November 2007 the European Commission released a report that concluded "some progress was made in consolidating government," but "working tools for an efficient government" still had "to be enhanced and fully applied." Moreover, explained the commission, "Overall, little progress has been made in the promotion and enforcement of human rights. The administration is not able to ensure the full implementation of human rights standards." Finally, the commission concluded, "Religious freedom is not fully respected."

Kosovo hardly sounded ready for prime-time.

Compromises were possible — overlapping EU, Kosovo, and Serbian citizenship and partition north of the Ibar River were two leading candidates — which might have won grudging agreement on both sides. No one would have been happy with the result, but both sides could have acquiesced. Rather than encourage genuine negotiations, however, the U.S. insisted that the ethnic Albanians win everything.

But what was supposed to be a pleasant bit of Kabuki theater, with everyone playing their assigned role to reach the predetermined outcome, quickly fell apart. Both the Serbs and Russians balked. Washington and like-minded European states eventually decided to make another end-run around the United Nations (which had not authorized NATO's aggressive war in 1999) and back Kosovo's unilateral independence.

The current number of recognitions is 55, only a few more than which recognize the Western Sahara (claimed by Morocco). Washington's claim that Kosovo's status is "unique" and thus not a precedent is too self-serving to take seriously. Serbia vows continued resistance and Russia insists that Kosovo will never join the UN. If the World Court rules for Belgrade, some nations might even reverse their recognitions of Pristina.

But Washington policymakers have had no apparent second thoughts. Some of their arguments verge on the ridiculous.

For instance, if self-determination is the essential principle, then ethnic Serbs in Kosovo have an obvious right to break from the new state and remain with democratic Serbia. Last year Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns contended: "Kosovo is going to be a vastly majority Muslim state…. And we think it is a very positive step that this Muslim state, Muslim majority state, has been created today." Muslims have the same right of self-determination as do everyone else, but why should America's goal be establishing a Muslim government any more than establishing a Serbian government?

Moreover, last year President George W. Bush opined that "our position is that its status must be resolved in order for the Balkans to be stable." While an independence deal accepted by Kosovo and Serbia, as well as the U.S., Europe, and Russia would encourage stability, Kosovo's unilateral declaration has destabilized the region. Serbia has drifted towards Russia as even centrist politicians in Serbia affirmed their opposition to Western policy. Serbia's politics has grown more fractious and nationalistic. Any attempt to coerce Serbs within Kosovo to submit to Pristina is likely to generate violent resistance. The divide between Russia and the U.S. and EU has grown. Indeed, applying the West's "Kosovo principle" to the Caucasus resulted in more war.

U.S. policy retains an otherworldly quality. American officials seem genuinely bewildered as to why Serbs are so angry. While explaining last year how the U.S. was working to strip Serbia of 15 percent of its territory, Secretary Rice asserted: "The United States takes this opportunity to reaffirm our friendship with Serbia." Without apparent irony, President Bush claimed: "the Serbian people can know that they have a friend in America." That dismembering their nation would be viewed as an unfriendly act by Serbs apparently never occurred to Secretary Rice or President Bush.

Now the future of Kosovo is up to the Obama administration.

For more than a decade Washington has led the bungling in the Balkans. The U.S. torpedoed one of the early attempts to settle the Bosnian crisis, the Lisbon Plan. Years of war and tens of thousands of dead resulted: much of that blood was on the hands of Washington policymakers. But the U.S. government continues to put ideology before reality.

Returning to the status quo in Kosovo might not be a viable option, but neither is pretending that Kosovo's independence claim has yielded regional stability. The U.S. and EU could still convene a conference, harkening back to the Congress of Berlin and similar international gatherings, to conduct genuine negotiations with the goal of achieving an acceptable compromise. Otherwise, Kosovo's declaration of independence is likely to prove to be just another step in continuing regional strife.

With the partial exceptions of Britain and France, the military budgets—to say nothing of crucial spending on force modernization—of the European allies have been in virtual free fall for nearly two decades. The spending and force levels of Germany, Italy, and Spain illustrate the problem. Spain devoted 1.85 percent of its gross domestic product to defense in 1989 and deployed more than 274,000 troops and 244 combat aircraft. By 2008, those figures were down to 0.73 percent of GDP, fewer than 222,000 troops, and 197 aircraft. The plunge in spending and military capabilities for Italy has been equally dramatic. In 1989, Italy spent 1.94 percent of GDP on its military, and the country had nearly 390,000 troops and 425 combat aircraft. In 2008, the figures were 0.96 percent, 293,000 troops, and 266 aircraft.

Berlin's free fall in military spending and force levels is perhaps the most disheartening. During the cold war, West Germany was the frontline state and a crucial military partner in containing the USSR. Berlin's military spending in 1989 was 2.27 percent of GDP, and the Bundeswehr had 469,000 active-duty military personnel and 621 combat aircraft. By 2008, spending had shrunk to 1.19 percent of GDP, and the active-duty force was down to fewer than 245,000 troops and 310 combat aircraft. Germany's navy had also shrunk by nearly 50 percent, declining from 208 vessels to 111.

The slippage in Britain and France is also worrisome, although spending levels were higher to begin with and remain at marginally more respectable levels than do those of other NATO allies. Yet, Paris, which devoted a modest 2.98 percent of GDP to the military in 1989 and fielded 461,000 troops and 697 combat aircraft, is now spending only 1.54 percent, while force levels are only 353,000 troops and 351 aircraft. For Britain, the figures in 1989 were 3.98 percent, 306,000 troops and 583 aircraft. In 2008, the figures were 2.33 percent, fewer than 161,000 troops and only 356 aircraft. Even the vaunted British navy had shrunk from 206 vessels to 109. Only four European members meet the meager goal set by alliance leaders to spend at least two percent of GDP on defense. By contrast, U.S. military spending (including the expenditures for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan) is nearly 5 percent of GDP.

NATO's principal European members have gone from countries that somewhat underinvested in defense during the cold war to countries whose defense spending levels now fail to meet even the straight-face test. It is no wonder that U.S. military leaders no longer consider most of those allies to be credible partners for joint war-fighting scenarios.

Yet, astonishingly, some American policy experts insist that only by spending even more than the vast sums it already spends on the military will Washington have meaningful influence to get the European countries to increase their paltry efforts. Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, denounces the possibility that the Obama administration might slow the surge in U.S. military spending that has occurred since 9/11. Such a move, he contends,

would make it harder to press allies to do more. The Obama administration rightly plans to encourage European allies to increase defense capabilities so they can more equitably share the burden of global commitments. This will be a tough sell if the United States is cutting its own defense budget.

The notion that the European members of NATO are interested in boosting their anemic military budgets—especially to help the United States handle global burdens, most of which would be outside Europe—is naive. Moreover, Kagan's argument is a classic case of the triumph of hope over experience. Washington has been encouraging (indeed, often badgering or begging) the European allies to engage in greater burden-sharing since NATO's inception in 1949—without much success. That was true even during the height of the cold war when the United States and the European powers faced a dangerous common adversary.

That historical record suggests that Kagan's thesis turns the role of incentives on its head. The more likely scenario is that if the United States continues to overspend on the military and implicitly subsidize the security of the European allies, they will be perfectly content to continue that arrangement. Indeed, that is what they have done for nearly six decades. The current economic constraints actually increase the tendency to free ride. Given the scope of the European safety nets, domestic political constituencies are likely to pressure their governments to divert even more revenues to welfare programs. There certainly will be few constituencies clamoring to boost military spending—especially when the United States is obligingly taking care of the continent's security needs at its own expense.

If Washington wants to maximize the prospects that the NATO members will increase their military spending, U.S. officials need to adopt the opposite course: significantly cut spending and implement a phased withdrawal of American troops from Europe. That would drastically alter the incentive structure. Especially with Russia beginning to flex its muscles, prudence would dictate that the European powers take security issues more seriously and create at least respectable military capabilities as basic insurance. To do otherwise would be to risk being vulnerable to escalating pressure from Moscow on a variety of issues.

But existing U.S. defense policy, to say nothing of the policy Kagan and others are promoting, short-circuits the incentive for the European powers to do more for their own defense. Washington needs, at long last, to stop enabling the irresponsible behavior of its NATO allies.

But early on, doubts arose about how serious the European allies were about their military commitments. Indeed, most of the NATO governments seemed to view their troop deployments as personnel for humanitarian relief and nation-building tasks rather than for combat operations. The military heavy lifting was by and large left to U.S. forces and those of a few other countries, primarily Canada, Britain and the Netherlands.

Most NATO members have placed various caveats on the use of their military personnel. Some are prohibited from night operations (which are inherently more dangerous). Others are prohibited from being deployed in certain areas of the country—specifically, those areas where significant combat is occurring and additional troops might actually prove useful.

Germany is one of the worst offenders in that regard. Berlin has restricted its troops to the northern regions of Afghanistan, where virtually no fighting is taking place. Despite Washington’s repeated requests, the German government has refused to lift that restriction. That might be just as well. A December 2008 German parliamentary report concluded that the country’s troops in Afghanistan spent most of their time lounging around and drinking beer, and that many were now too fat and out of condition to be of any use in combat operations.

The desire of U.S. allies to keep their troops out of harm’s way is not confined to the Afghanistan theater—or for that matter to the NATO allies. A similar pattern emerged with the deployments of both South Korean and Japanese forces in Iraq. Seoul insisted that its troops be stationed only in Iraqi Kurdistan, by far the safest area of the country. But the South Korean government was a profile in courage compared to the Japanese government. Although Tokyo sent units of its Self-Defense Force (SDF) to Iraq, it insisted that those forces must be confined to noncombat roles. Indeed, the SDF units had to be protected by the troops of other coalition countries. Thus, from a military standpoint, the Japanese contribution was not an asset to the occupation effort—it was a liability.

Such episodes indicate that many of America’s supposed military partners are more interested in engaging in tokenism and security symbolism than they are with playing a meaningful military role. The governments of those countries want to show that they are good allies and willing participants in U.S.-led missions, while incurring few, if any, battlefield risks. That sort of conduct may salve the consciences of political leaders in allied capitals, and it may appeal to U.S. policymakers for whom symbolism is more important than substance. It may even gull an otherwise suspicious American public. But it provides little useful addition to America’s own military power.

One wonders at times if U.S. leaders believe that this country should have allies for the sake of having allies, even if those military partners bring little of value to the table. Why else would American officials tolerate the tokenism evident with the allied contributions in both Iraq and Afghanistan? And why would those same officials be so enthusiastic about the addition of tiny, militarily insignificant members to the NATO alliance?

The last round of NATO expansion brought on board such military powerhouses as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovenia. According to the 2008 edition of the widely respected publication The Military Balance, Estonia’s annual defense budget is $386 million, and the country fields 4,100 active-duty troops. The figures for Latvia are $471 million and 5,996 troops; Lithuania, $470 million and 13,850 troops; and Slovenia, $750 million and 5,973 troops. At NATO’s summit last year in Bucharest, alliance leaders gave the green light to membership for Croatia and Albania. Croatia’s accession would add $875 million and 17,660 troops, while Albania’s would add $208 million and 11,020 military personnel.

Collectively, such members spend less on their militaries in a year than the United States spends in Iraq in two weeks. How adding such military pygmies to NATO is supposed to enhance the security of the United States is a mystery. Indeed, since several of those countries have serious tensions with their neighbors, they are not just militarily irrelevant, but are outright security liabilities that could drag the United States into needless conflicts.

U.S. policymakers ought to be far more realistic about the utility of alliances. Allies are neither good nor bad, per se. But American officials should not pretend that allies are making meaningful military contributions when the evidence indicates otherwise. Security symbolism and tokenism is of little practical use, yet that is the level of assistance that has become all too common from America’s alliance partners.

Many Muslims here and elsewhere want that partnership; but some, jihadists in the name of Islam, disagree violently. In its address to our new president, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (which has permanent status at the United Nations) made no mention of its own strategic skills that resulted, on Dec. 18, in the passage by the U.N. General Assembly of a nonbinding resolution (with strong advice to its members) that condemns "defamation of religion," especially Islam.

In a 83-to-53 vote, with 42 abstentions, the U.N. General Assembly urges nations to provide "adequate protections" in their laws or constitutions against "acts of hatred, discrimination, intimidation and coercion resulting from defamation of religions and incitement to religious hatred in general."

Only Islam and Muslims are specifically named in this resolution against religious defamation sponsored by Uganda -- on behalf of the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference -- with co-sponsors Belarus and Venezuela. In the opposition were the United States, a majority of European countries, Japan, India and a number of other nations.

Those voting in favor say they do not want to limit free speech but do intend to stop such expressions as the 2005 Danish cartoons disrespecting the Prophet Muhammad that ignited violent protests by Muslims around the world.

Among the opponents, including myself, of this U.N. move to have its members legislate, with penalties -- against such very broadly designated "religious defamation" -- is Floyd Abrams, this country's leading protector of the First Amendment in the Supreme Court and in his writings. In his Dec. 9, lecture on Global Communications Issues at the United Nations itself in New York, he cited a recent study by the European Center for Law and Justice finding "that laws based on the concept of 'defamation of religion' actually help to create a climate of violence."

"Violators of these laws, as applied in most Muslim countries, are subject to the death penalty," Abrams continued. He cited from the study a 22-year-old Hindu in Pakistan "was beaten to death by co-workers at a factory for allegedly committing the crime of blasphemy, which is a crime punishable by death in the country." The three workers were "charged not with murder but with 'failure to inform the police that blasphemy was under way.'"

Also in an article, The Freedom to Criticize by Floyd Abrams (The American Jewish Congress Monthly, 2008), he emphasizes, and I fully agree, that the effect of what the United Nations voted for on Dec. 18 "would be just as dangerous if this did not (originally) come from the Islamic states, but came from any other group of states representing or purporting to speak for any other religion."

Another of America's leading First Amendment lawyers, Marc Stern, co-executive director of the American Jewish Congress, makes a crucial point that if this approach to "defamation of religion" were to become a crime under international law (under the impetus of the U.N. resolution): "nations would be able to seek extradition and trial abroad of persons who make statements critical or offensive to one or all faiths anywhere in the world."

Already, for example, as Reuters reported last June 4 ("Jordan Summons Danish Cartoonist on Blasphemy Charges"), that country's prosecutor, Hassan Abdullat, subpoenaed "11 Danes for drawing and reprinting" cartoons that offend Islam. The Danes were charged -- in Jordan -- for "threatening the national peace."

Under Jordanian law, Reuters reported, "reproducing images of the Prophet Muhammad inside -- or even outside the country -- is illegal under the Jordanian Justice Act."

One of the Danes summoned to Jordan was Kurt Westergaard, who, for years, has been subject to death threats for his cartoon, among others, of the Prophet Muhammad wearing a turban in the shape of a bomb.

When the riots and deaths following those Danish cartoons were reported in American newspapers, none of the offending cartoons were published accompanying the stories in The New York Times, the Washington Post and other major dailies, except the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Sun. But, at the Village Voice, where I then had a column, I ran the story, with the cartoon of Prophet Muhammad wearing the bomb-shaped turban.

I was damned if I'd be intimidated for doing my job as a reporter. For a couple of weeks, I was more vigilant than usual walking the streets, but I'm still here. What most stays in my mind is that long before the Dec. 18, 2008, resolution on defamation of religions, so much of the American free press refused to run even one of the cartoons at the core of the story, and hardly anything about the United Nations' Dec. 18 resolution.

Did they not want to offend certain readers? Were they afraid? If the U.N. resolution became international law, the First Amendment would still protect opponents here, but think of the bloody impact on "defamers" around the world.

Once again, the outgoing president demonstrates his talent for using the bravery of the U.S. military to deflect attention from his own disastrous policies, beginning with Iraq and ending with Afghanistan.

The president has been hammering incessantly for years about how much "safer" we are since 9/11, thanks to his leadership. But senior intelligence, diplomatic, and military experts agree that President Bush's fixation on Iraq has not made us safer.

Despite whatever gains we've reaped from the "surge," the war in Iraq has shaped a new generation of terrorist operatives, increasing both the number and geographic dispersion of global jihadists. It also has deepened mistrust of America around the world, even as our leaders complacently view themselves as being benevolent. Osama bin Laden's objective was to provoke the United States into an excessive and ill-defined retaliatory attack against the Islamic world. The Bush administration's Iraq policy played into his hands.

Even worse than Bush's uniting of our enemies was his division of our friends. Abroad, the commander-in-chief's penchant for us-versus-them rhetoric led him to snub potential allies and ignore voices of caution. Days after 9/11, NATO and Russia issued an unprecedented joint statement of support for America's fight against Islamic radicalism. Even Iran offered to provide search-and-rescue help if U.S. pilots were shot down over Afghanistan. Today, in the waning days of his administration, even America's NATO allies are divided over troop commitments to a mission they consider Bush has mismanaged. Experts warn about the emergence of a 21st century cold war with Russia. Worst of all, the influence of Tehran's clerical leadership has spread throughout the Middle East, thanks in part to Bush's removal of that country's primary strategic counterweight, Saddam Hussein.

Another aspect of Bush's "safer since 9/11" claim was undermined by former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace. In 2007 Pace confirmed, in a classified report to Congress, that the strains of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan may prevent America from fully responding to another international crisis. With a thinly stretched military, a shortage of first responders here at home, and a weakened ability to counter international threats, it's easy to see why only 27% of Americans approve Bush's handling of foreign policy, according to a December 2008 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.

The Iraq invasion will certainly be remembered for many things, not the least of which includes falsified documents regarding Nigerian yellow-cake uranium and erroneous claims about Saddam's links to al Qaeda. But more damning than the details was Bush's big picture blunder: his refusal to consider the costs of diverting our attention and military resources into Iraq and away from Afghanistan. As a result, the Afghan mission is now in peril as security conditions in that region continue to deteriorate. The full adverse impact of Bush's decision may not be felt for years to come.

2008 was the deadliest year for U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. The Taliban, despite being rife with internal divisions, now has a dominant presence in many of the country's southern and eastern provinces. Some of those are now "no go" areas for coalition forces. Due to force constraints, the 70,000 U.S. and NATO troops are not enough to keep insurgents from infiltrating previously cleared areas.

Even worse, militants operating across the border in nuclear-armed Pakistan have begun attacking NATO supply trucks bound for land-locked Afghanistan. Last month, gunmen torched more than 160 vehicles intended for coalition troops near Peshawar, Pakistan, the administrative center for the tribal areas and the capital of North-West Frontier Province. This worsening environment along the Afghan-Pakistan border creates an ideal setting for al Qaeda and the Taliban to thrive. The al Qaeda threat, which seemed so close to defeat in 2002, has now revived to an alarming extent. That development certainly has not made America "safer."

President Bush deserves to be remembered for the profound strategic miscalculation of diverting our military campaign away from those who attacked us on 9/11 to invade a country that did not, and, in doing so, leaving the country no safer than before.

No one should be surprised that missile strikes have been launched under the new president's watch. President Obama was unequivocal in his commitment to go after al Qaeda hiding in the hills between Afghanistan and Pakistan. But is there a better approach?

Over the past several months, U.S. forces in Afghanistan have stepped up attacks against militant sanctuaries in the vast unpoliced region of western Pakistan known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Militants use FATA to slip in and out of Afghanistan and attack U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops. Because Pakistan's Army has proven unable -- and at times unwilling -- to uproot FATA's militant safe havens, U.S. policymakers have grown increasingly vocal about the need to exercise greater latitude and eliminate the havens themselves.

Many of the U.S.-led attacks have been conducted with missiles fired from unmanned aerial drones. But after speaking with tribesmen in Peshawar, FATA's administrative center and the capital of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, one quickly grasps how the collateral damage unleashed by such heavy-handed measures may be adding more fuel to violent religious extremism in this nuclear-armed Muslim-majority country.

During a recent visit to the frontier region, I spoke with several tribesmen from FATA's South Waziristan Agency. They recounted how U.S. missile strikes allow the local Taliban to appear to be a force against injustice and exploit popular resentment. While I was in country, the Pakistan Army was launching a string of military operations in FATA's Bajaur Agency.

In many areas of FATA, relentless Taliban incursions have already led to the complete collapse of civilian and tribal administration. Military strikes appear to be the only viable recourse against the region's shadowy insurgents. U.S. officials point to the successful killing of top al Qaeda militants such as Abu Laith al-Libi last January and chemical weapons expert Abu Khabab al-Masri in July.

While U.S. and NATO forces have the right to respond to threats on its combat forces based in Afghanistan, policymakers must recognize that the fallout from U.S. missile strikes prove tactically problematic for three reasons. First, missile strikes undermine the authority of sitting Pakistani leaders. The August 19th resignation of former army general Pervez Musharraf demonstrated how the burden of assuming a pro-American stance can prove a political liability for "war on terror" allies. Aligning with pro-U.S. policies is one reason why Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan's new president, is reviled by many of his countrymen, while opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, who has been openly critical of U.S. actions across the border in Afghanistan, has seen his popularity soar.

A second reason to be skeptical of relying almost exclusively on missile strikes is that they encourage FATA's militants to lash out against their closer enemy, Pakistan, causing disastrous ripple effects that further damage the already weakened country. Suicide bombers are striking Pakistan's large urban centers with increasing frequency and are signals of the spreading insurgency engulfing the Islamic Republic.

The final, and most important, reason to be circumspect about escalating military force in the tribal areas is that it will almost certainly fail. The clans, subclans, and extended families that weave the complex fabric of Pashtun tribal society have endured hundreds of years of foreign invasions. Time and again, Persian, Greek, Turk, Mughal, British and Soviet invaders have discovered these peoples to be virtually unconquerable. Pashtun social values include loyalty (wafa), honor (nang), and badal, the Pashto word for taking revenge. Vendettas, personal and collective, have been known to last for generations. While U.S. missile strikes can certainly extinguish high-value targets, they also trigger collective armed action throughout the tribal agencies.

The dilemma for President Obama is that as long as militants continue to infiltrate the hundreds of unguarded checkpoints along the Afghan-Pakistan border, the security environment in Afghanistan will continue to decline. While Obama is correct to argue that we have no choice but to attack militants inside FATA as long as we remain in Afghanistan, a more judicious approach would be to employ low-level "clear and hold" operations along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier in order to limit cross-border movement and respond aggressively to attacks against troops and civilians. Prying Pashtun tribal support away from extremists will require a concerted military and political campaign that looks more like the strategy the U.S. military belatedly used in Iraq's al Anbar province in late summer 2007. To split Iraqi Sunnis from al Qaeda, U.S. forces employed proven counterinsurgency techniques, such as recruiting indigenous allies, cultivating legitimacy from the local population, and employing minimal use of force. U.S. forces in Afghanistan, working in coordination with Pakistani security forces more familiar with the region's inhospitable terrain and the cultural and linguistic aspects of tribal society, can offer the U.S.-NATO mission a higher likelihood of succeeding.

Obama's national security team must understand that the struggle for FATA would best be waged by bolstering Islamabad's ability to compete with militants for political authority in FATA. If his administration simply increases attacks from pilotless drones, it will only push more wavering tribes further into the Taliban camp.

Since 2007, the war in Afghanistan has undergone a dramatic shift, from large-scale attacks to more asymmetric terrorist assaults and roadside ambushes. Pro-Taliban militants attack those perceived to be in support of the Afghan government -- namely, U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces and humanitarian aid workers. The Taliban's aim is not direct confrontation, but rather a protracted war of attrition that will gradually expand their political and economic influence. Defeating the spreading Islamist insurgency depends on the coalition's commitment to increase the Afghan government's ability to improve security, deliver basic services and expand development for economic opportunity.

But the biggest challenge here will be to reconcile the imbalance between what Afghanistan is -- a complex tapestry of traditional tribal structures -- and what we want it to be -- a burgeoning nation-state governed centrally from Kabul. Containing the insurgency will require working with local leaders to ferret out militants. Unfortunately, these local leaders in far-flung provinces have limited contact with the central government institutions in which the coalition has invested the most time and resources. Overall, the coalition must move away from focusing solely on the country's national institutions, such as the Afghan National Army, and devote more to increasing security at the district and provincial levels.

One way would be for U.S. and NATO forces, in cooperation with the Afghan government, to provide tribal councils with more opportunities for economic development and greater autonomy in running local affairs. In exchange, tribes would be encouraged to recruit men for Afghan local security forces and to evict insurgents rather than provide them shelter.

Such an approach gradually pries the loyalties of indigenous people away from extremists, helping to weaken the Taliban's ability to exploit tribal rivalries. It will also involve negotiating with at least some groups that oppose the coalition's presence. This approach might work by separating militants who fight for money -- what U.S. Central Command Chief General David Petraeus referred to as "reconcilables" -- from the more intractable Islamist elements of the insurgency.

There will certainly be risks in adopting this new approach. Dialogue with rank-and-file insurgents is unlikely to persuade senior Taliban leadership to renounce violence or stop recruiting. It will also be difficult to distinguish the "reconcilables" from others. Afghanistan's tribal networks are complex and in some areas (mainly along the eastern border with Pakistan) constantly shifting. U.S. and NATO forces are already having difficulty telling ordinary tribesmen from militant operatives. But if the coalition is to make further progress securing the country, there is little alternative but to try.

Success in Afghanistan also depends on how the war on opium poppies (the source of heroin) is conducted. Drug trafficking accounts for some 60% of the country's economy. Crop eradication and the destruction of drug processing facilities was a high priority of the Bush administration and may continue to be under President Obama. The United Nations estimates that 500,000 families are involved directly and indirectly in the drug trade -- about 35% of the population. This figure includes both enemies and allies of the coalition.

Unfortunately, the war on drugs is interfering with the U.S. effort to neutralize the spreading insurgency. Policy makers must recognize that the Taliban exploits popular resentment against eradication efforts, and should target large-scale traffickers affiliated with al Qaeda and the Taliban instead of poor peasant farmers.

Nor can the coalition afford to ignore Pakistan and India. If the Pashtun and Baluchi areas of Pakistan did not act as de facto sanctuaries for the senior leadership of al Qaeda and the Taliban, the war in Afghanistan would have a very different character. In the short-term, a small number of U.S. Special Forces personnel could support local Pakistani security forces in the implementation of low-level "clear and hold" operations along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier to limit cross-border movement. In the long-term solution, India and Pakistan need to broker a more permanent peace settlement.

The coalition has made great strides in Afghanistan since October 2001, not least in ousting the Taliban from central power. National-level progress such as an improving Afghan army can pave the way for peace. But these steps will not be enough on their own. It's up to a fresh administration in Washington to bring fresh thinking to bear in Afghanistan.