Opinion: A Bigger, Not Better, NATO

[CHIMO]

A year ago NATO underwent the largest expansion in the organization's history, when on March 29, seven eastern and south-eastern European countries joined the alliance. NATO may have grown in size, but not in importance.

NATO suffered the biggest set-back, however, with the Iraq War. The alliance split over whether the body of evidence against Saddam Hussein was sufficient to justify military intervention. And although the fissure between the war coalition partners and the war's opponents has been passably cemented together, the United States no longer sees NATO as a hard and fast alliance but as a list of potential partners.

That also has to do with the fact that many European countries -- and especially the new members -- use NATO as a guarantee of protection but contribute very little to it. For, the United States is militarily still stronger than all the other alliance members put together. All of Washington's appeals to the Europeans to increase their military expenditures have so far been in vain.

Despite last year's expansion, NATO risks degenerating into a transatlantic talking shop. In that respect, the idea of intervention troops that can be quickly deployed, which NATO is now pursuing, hasn't changed much, since that is not where the problems in cooperating lay.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1533158,00.html