NATO’s Waterloo?

Haiti is sinking, but Africa is taking off, with a few exceptions, which are the “three Zs”: Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo, country of the great forgotten war), Zimbabwe (in which the old tyrant destructor continues to the point of absurdity) and Zambia (where the miners’ revolt rumbles on against Chinese neocolonialism) …

South America? It’s pulled itself together behind economic leaders such as Chile and Brazil, and stands up, proud, without eying the North too much.

Booming Asia? Increasingly, it looks down on a disoriented West. And what is the West doing? Among other things, it is pouring itself into military adventures around the world, supposedly to guarantee security, but they deplete the West and sully its reputation.

Afghanistan was therefore the main topic of conversation at the NATO summit this weekend in Lisbon. But behind the words “handover,” “transition” and “training,” what we talked about in reality is a stampede with minimal damage, and without which the shop is looking at bankruptcy.

In addition to encouraging themselves in Afghanistan, the leaders gathered in Lisbon talked about new cooperation with Russia, missile defense, the fight against cyber crime, etc. A pretty ambitious program that, if implemented, would make this organization the primary guarantor of international security and peace among nations.

Nothing is further from the truth, however, than the leftist analysis that from this summit in Lisbon there will emerge new conquering, imperialistic maneuvers to “control the world.” To attack Iran. To defeat al-Qaida. To encircle Russia with a network of missile launchers, while saying it is “our friend, our partner.” To control Central Asia’s gas pipelines. To appropriate the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea waterways, where NATO is involved in the fight against maritime piracy.

All things, in fact, that the West has become almost incapable of doing.

Despite a multitasking speech that is very enterprising in appearance, in 2010 NATO practices more autosuggestion (“Yes, yes, it’s good!”) and forward flight. It is on the defensive, in a conceptual and identity crisis that is trying to hide a beautiful catalog, named “Strategic Concept” and “Plan of Action for the Twenty-First Century.”

Since 1991, the year of the demise of the USSR, NATO has been looking but can no longer find itself. Once a decade, it overhauls its catechism to find things to do in life … But its most visible and best-known practical interventions (Kosovo, Afghanistan) did not, let’s say, yield brilliant results.

In the Balkans, the war of the 1990s has been “frozen,” but with no real solution. Under the supervision of 9,000 NATO troops, the Kosovo Navy handles small trade and high levels of poverty. While in Afghanistan, the organization with 50,000 combatants stakes its reputation, cohesion and even its very existence.

The year 2014, officially announced by NATO, is supposed to be the date by which, for the most part, the Afghan government and army will be able to defend themselves (with no more than foreign “backup”) against the insurgency that plagues the country. It is nothing less than a big wish, with nothing to prove that this can hold up in reality.

A desire wrapped in optimistic rhetoric. The Lisbon summit was to simultaneously maintain the facade of a “determined” intervention in Afghanistan, outlining a release schedule, while public opinion impatiently paws the ground and lowers European defense budgets, and pretends without any proof that this schedule is making progress toward certain “goals” in the field. In short, to make the stampede look like anything other than a stampede.

Maybe, deep down, NATO has never recovered from the demise of the USSR in 1991, an enemy that gave it meaning and cohesion. Today, between Kosovo, Afghanistan and the war on terror, it is at its moment of truth. On the margins of financial crises and economic wars, the rise of the South and the East, an armed Afghan may be just another manifestation of the decline of the West in the twenty-first century world.