Free-Rider Redux: NATO Needs to Project Power (And Europe Can Help)

The alliance that won the Cold War has lost its way. Contented summit photos cannot hide the fact that NATO no longer defends its members' vital interests.

With the Soviet Union gone and regional threats on the rise, the proper object of strategy is to protect more distant interests -- Persian Gulf oil, for instance -- not Western Europe's borders. The United States has executed this strategic U?turn more or less gracefully by refocusing its defense plans on "major regional contingencies." Its European partners, however, have not. NATO does not figure into current American strategy, while the strategy of America's NATO allies is a mystery altogether.

As the only nation able to project military power, the United States is giving its best friends a free ride. This new inequity is worse than the lopsided burden?sharing of Cold War days. It need not continue. Using NATO as the vehicle for organizing the defense of the West's interests -- an old idea with a new focus -- the United States can get its allies to become partners in power projection. Doing so would improve security in key theaters (the Persian Gulf and Eastern Europe), rejuvenate the alliance, reduce the U.S. defense budget, and avoid a revolt by the American people against international duties that fall too heavily on them alone.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE ALLIES GONE?

When Saddam Hussein menaced Kuwait last October, the force assembled to scare him away consisted of 40,000 U.S. troops, an American fleet, 600 U.S. aircraft, and a thousand or so Brits. Had it come to war, the American public would have demanded to know why, yet again, they were shouldering nearly all the burden of defending interests -- oil, in this case -- dearer to our rich friends than to us.

In the 1991 Gulf War, the United States provided 90 percent of Western "coalition" forces. As Americans debated whether to back President Bush's plan to liberate Kuwait, supporters and opponents alike complained that the United States should not have to fight such a war alone. After all, Western Europe and Japan together import four times as much oil from the gulf as we do. Moreover, it is not as if only the United States has the wealth to field forces able to protect oil and other shared interests. Western Europe's economy is 120 percent of ours, and Japan's is 60 percent.