The alliance once had its purpose, but now it keeps Europe weak and makes it too easy for Washington to intervene in foolish overseas wars. […]
Nearly sixty years after Eisenhower spoke those words, and thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, over sixty thousand U.S. troops remain in Europe. As MIT’s Barry Posen recently noted, those troops not only enable Europeans the luxury of not paying for their own defense, they also enable America’s worst interventionist impulses by providing a network of bases and logistical hubs to project power into the Middle East and Africa, regions of diminishing strategic importance. […]
Furthermore, America is made less safe by remaining in NATO. The opportunity costs of the United States’ counter-productive commitment to European security imperil real national-security interests, especially in Asia. Giving Europe a few years to get its house in order before an American pullout is a reasonable hedge against miscalculation and escalation. That prudence aside, the United States should withdraw from the alliance as quickly as possible. NATO at seventy is decades past its retirement age. Läs artikel