On the flight to Lisbon, Portugal, I happened to read an essay by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, reviewing new books by William Pfaff and Peter Beinart. I'm travelling to Lisbon to cover the summit of NATO leaders who will adopt a new “strategic concept”, one that sets out the new political and military objectives of the alliance but will do so, I suspect, with a mind to each country's significantly diminished capacity — both financially and politically — for grand, new military missions.
Though Wheatcroft is not writing specifically about NATO, he does have a summary paragraph which seem to me to be some reasonable starting points for discussion for the country NATO depends most heavily on, the United States:
When the present wars are “wound up”, Americans may also begin to ask other questions. Does China actually represent a military threat, as well as economic competition, to the United States? Was the eastward expansion of NATO necessary or wise? For all the neocon saber-rattling during the brief Russian-Georgian crisis two summers ago, did anyone really think Americans were going to die for South Ossetia? Does the US Navy still require 11 large carrier battle groups, “structured,” as the military theorist William Lind puts it, “to fight the Imperial Japanese Navy”? Do American troops need to serve, as they do today, in more than 1,000 bases, on the soil of 175 of the 192 member states of the United Nations?