The official line of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO command in Afghanistan, is that the war against Afghan insurgents is vital to the security of all the countries providing troops there. In fact, however, NATO was given a central role in...
To adapt to secular use a phrase from medieval mysticism, "the cloud of unknowing" deepens as the war-waging countries of North America and Western Europe approach their NATO "summit," beginning Friday in Lisbon. The phrase is appropriate because in the past it spoke...
President Barack Obama has promised a fundamental review of American policy towards Afghanistan this December. In the meantime, his decision seems compromised by the continuing military and civilian "surge" to Afghanistan ordered soon after Obama took office in...
President Barack Obama's speech to the West Point graduating class last Saturday was meant to convey a "new" American national security strategy, less evident in his words than in the manner in which the White House pitched the speech to the press, the press following...
The European Union doesn't know where it stands at this moment. NATO thinks it knows and is gambling. Has the EU a future, or has disintegration set in? The behavior of the Germans under the conservative Merkel government is taken by many to signal that the end, if...
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recently led a panel of experts in coming up with a report, "NATO 2020," which will be used to draft a replacement for NATO's current strategic concept, adopted in 1999. The report [.pdf] essentially advocates a...
Large and firmly implanted bureaucratic organizations are almost impossible to kill, even when they have no reason to continue to exist, as NATO has not since the Soviet Union, communism, and the Warsaw Pact all collapsed. There is no equivalent to driving a stake...
Last Friday five NATO governments made it known that they want American nuclear weapons removed from their territory. They include the Benelux three, together with Germany and Norway. The five reportedly will ask that all the European NATO governments endorse their...
President Obama will announce his big decision about Afghanistan on Tuesday. The sanctioned leaks about what he'll say are coming fast and furious. According to various reports, he'll commit somewhere between 30,000 and 34,000 extra U.S. troops to the region. When he...
Tom Shanker of the New York Times tells us that NATO defense ministers have given their "broad endorsement" to Gen. Stanley McChrystal's plan to escalate the Afghanistan war into a full-Monty counter insurgency effort. NATO defense ministers love...
