Gordon Chang notes that observers and analysts across the political spectrum are dismayed by Obama’s human-rights approach regarding China — a crouch more than an approach, actually. He writes:
What Obama and Clinton fail to comprehend is that America derives its security because of its values. Peoples around the world support our policies precisely because they share our beliefs. And with the Chinese there is another dimension: Beijing’s ruthlessly pragmatic leaders see our failure to press human rights as a sign that we think we are weak. And if they think we are weak, they see little reason to cooperate. So promoting human rights is protecting American security.
And like so many other ill-conceived Obama foreign-policy gambits (e.g., the Middle East, Honduras, Iran), the end result is to set back American interests and embolden our adversaries. As Chang writes, the Chinese were delighted when Clinton declared earlier in the year that we can’t let human rights “interfere” with other matters. The predictable result is that China’s human-rights behavior gets worse and we weaken our own bargaining position on other matters:
Since [Clinton's remarks in February], they have been noticeably less cooperative on the great issues of the day. And in March, just one month after her statement, they felt bold enough to order their vessels to harass two of our unarmed ships in international waters in the South China and Yellow Seas. The Chinese even attempted to sever a towed sonar array from one of the Navy vessels. That hostile act constituted an attack on the United States.
It is unclear why, in the face of such uniform criticism and such dismal results, the Obama team shows no sign of reversing course. They believe what they believe, it seems, and no amount of real-world evidence is going to get in the way of their desire to throw human rights under the bus for the sake of ingratiating themselves with the world’s despots.
NATO, serving no further purpose, should have been dissolved when the Wall fell and Germany was reunified. Instead, notwithstanding commitments to Russia, it was expanded.
It remains an alliance without a purpose. No surprise that it is ineffectual.
Let’s have done with it.
As Churchill said, the Hun is either at your feet, or at your throat.
Another failure by George W. Bush.
GOM has a point here. Though I haven’t done my due diligence on either the cited report or the larger topic of NATO’s utility and viability, there does seem to be a huge and fundamental problem that is not soluble. NATO was established as a defensive alliance with a geographic definition in response to a perceived common threat. With that threat long gone, and the “alliance” asked to perform missions outside its defining geographic scope, little wonder that things don’t work out.
Of course there’s far more to it than the essential overtaken-by-events nature of NATO itself. The “allies” – many of whom never really pulled their weight even in the old days – simply lack the political will to prosecute the missions in question. Furthermore, this lack of political will with regard to military affairs generally, married to a well-developed malignant dependency on US resolve, resources, and blood to secure international order, has led to a decline in the already modest capabilities of most forces.
It’s not entirely a lost cause – British, Polish, Italian, and Spanish contributions in Iraq were modest but useful – but it’s mostly a lost cause. And in any case, notwithstanding that the most eager NATO members are the newest, former Soviet satellite states, “NATO” really has nothing to do with it. It is a coalition of the willing, plain and simple.
The “structural” fixes noted in the post are all unobjectionable, but how relevant are they? NATO forces in Afghanistan aren’t of limited use because of “caveats” – they’re that way because the “caveats” reflect lack of political will in the respective countries to pull their weight in the world, and often because the countries have DECIDED to have mediocre military capabilities.
Fixing NATO’s out-of-area structural glitches seems unlikely to make much difference. Only “allies” with the will to participate in security operations, and to maintain useful capacity to do so, will help. Coalitions of the willing (and capable) are the only likely coalitions we will see. No cookie-cutter solutions for that – but could it be a waste of time and energy trying to fix NATO? There’s gigantic inertial and bureaucratic impetus to tinker with NATO, but it’s hard to see such activity as urgent or important.