Michael Desch, professor of political science and director of the Notre Dame International Security Center, believes the North Atlantic Trade Organization has outlived its original purpose to defeat the Soviet Union and should be put to rest. He explains, “This is the corpse of an international institution that’s become zombie-fied. It’s dead! But it continues to exist and chase after the living.” According to Desch, NATO’s confounding factors are the amount of resources the United States spends on the alliance and the “moral hazard” of maintaining a permanent attachment to European countries that may no longer share our interests…
Richard Betts from Columbia University takes a different tack on the usefulness of NATO. “NATO can be useful without being activist,” he claims. “The problem with NATO was the assumption that it had to do something after the Cold War, rather than stay on ice in case at some point in the future it … needed to be reactivated.” The University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer agreed, calling the sentiment a “grow or die” perspective. In reality, says Mearsheimer, NATO expansion made the alliance worse off by antagonizing Russia. “It’s actually very strange,” added Eugene Gholz of The University of Texas at Austin. Policymakers “who in some circumstances say they don’t believe in deterrence anymore … really fundamentally believ[ed] that NATO would deter all bad behavior from Russia.” Läs artikel