PBS – Joshua Foust: Memo to NATO: Stay out of Syrian conflict
In his column for PBS Need to Know, ASP fellow Joshua Foust recommends that NATO should take caution over pondering whether to intervene in Syria.
At its most basic level, NATO is increasingly becoming more of a paper tiger. During the Cold War, the U.S. accounted for about 50 percent of NATO’s defense spending; now, it is well over 75 percent. The use of so-called “National Caveats,” a standard practice in NATO deployments that limited what certain NATO members would allow their soldiers to do (a curious stipulation for a war, but required by domestic European politics), hobbled the war in Afghanistan for years until the U.S. surged tens of thousands of troops to try to break the strategic impasse there. And in Libya, NATO’s refusal to get involved in the regime it brought to power through the destruction of Gaddafi’s government has led to many arguments that the intervention itself was a mistake.
Every country in Europe is cutting its defense budget – and even the U.S. defense budget’s growth is no longer a given. It would be madness to enter a period of decreased budgets, decreased capability, and decreased resources with the ambition to intervene in many small wars around the Mediterranean – but that is precisely what Erdogan seems to want.
The sad reality is NATO talks a big game when it comes to global security, but its ability to affect war and peace outside of Europe is limited. Its two big projects of the last decade – Afghanistan and Libya – are not the successes their boosters desperately want them to be, and its last major project, Kosovo, remains insecure and unsettled after 13 years of continuous occupation.
