A Seven-Step Plan to Save NATO

First story:

Senator John McCain, a Republican contender for the White House in 2008, chastised Europe on Saturday for failing to supply the troops and money to win in Afghanistan and said NATO’s future was at stake.

In tough comments that singled out specific countries, McCain told NATO allies to move beyond the “false debate” over security and development priorities in Afghanistan — a dispute that dominated a defense ministers’ meeting earlier this week.  [Reuters]

Second story:

An Italian judge on Friday indicted 26 Americans and five Italians in the first criminal trial over the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program.

The judge set a trial date for June 8, although the Americans, who have all left the country, almost certainly will not be returned to Italy.

Prosecutors allege that five Italian intelligence officials worked with the Americans to seize Muslim cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr on Feb. 17, 2003.  [AP]

The failure of European judicial systems or militaries to deal with terrorism in a remotely adequate way suggests that the issue is not merely one of the CIA’s  procedural rudeness.   There is a substantive problem, too:  Europe is  simply not alarmed about  people who conspire to  kill Americans.  In a way, it’s understandable when you consider how much greater Europe’s ideological differences are than ours.  There aren’t a lot of issues around which you can build a majority coalition from anarcho-syndicalists,  angry  old falangists, Moroccan hash dealers, skinheads in bleak East German factory towns, and old French whores who are still embittered at  Communist maquisards who shaved their heads in ’45  for sleeping with Nazis.  Hating Jews, hating America, and upping social welfare payments are about the only three things all those groups would not necessarily  reject.

The ugly collapse of our alliance with  Korea vividly illustrates how quickly an alliance without reciprocity, shared interests,  and shared values  becomes meaningless.   NATO must evolve into something that possesses those essential attributes, or its failure to meet its own expectations will become a persistent irritant in  broader relations between the “allied” nations.  NATO’s basic structure is sound, but its members have not adopted to the expiration of the threat on which it was founded, and the new threats that have replaced it, at an equal pace.  I propose to make NATO relevant again, before it goes the way of the U.S.-Korea alliance:

1.   Make membership strictly  contingent on the provision of minimum  deployable force levels, adjusted for each member state’s population and economy, and on an extraordinarily cooperative extradition system, enforced by the police force of each state on its own territory.  (I can see why Italians don’t like us plucking people off their streets; I cannot  see why the Italians let terrorists roam free on them.)

2.  Link alliance membership with trade on highly favorable terms — such as a customs union —  but do not link it so closely that alliance accession becomes enmeshed in domestic protectionist politics.  Trade benefits should be an inducement, not a political headache.

3.  Take the words “North” and  “Atlantic” out of the name.

4.  Invite more non-European democracies and republics:  Singapore, Japan,  Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Iraq, Afghanistan,  and especially India. 

5.  Do what the League of Nations and the U.N. couldn’t:  make the standards stick.  When parasitic states like  France, Germany, and  the  other chocolate-makers on the left bank of the  Danube fail to pony up deployable troops or let terrorists shelter and preach in their cities, expel them and let them fend for themselves.  Ditto Turkey.  Better yet, make those provisions self-executing.   In extraordinarily urgent cases only,  return to Plan B (“mullah plucking”), or Plan C. 

6.  Move the headquarters out of Brussels.  Have you ever seen Prague? 

7.  Gradually shift funds that are wasted on the United Nations to this new alliance.