Thomas Friedman: The End of NATO? “The United States has become so much more technologically advanced than any of its NATO allies that America increasingly doesn’t need them to fight a distant war.” And Brussels knows it. “In part this is because European defense industries are not as sophisticated as America’s today. But in part it’s because the Europeans, deep down, don’t feel threatened by America’s enemies, particularly by the ‘axis of evil’ (Iran, Iraq and North Korea) that Mr. Bush identified. Therefore, they don’t want to spend much on defense. If President Bush gets the defense budget increase he asked for in his State of the Union address, U.S. defense spending will equal the defense budgets of the next 15 highest countries — combined.” Since the Cold War, tensions with Western European allies have often revolved around their parting company with our demonization of the enemy-of-the-day (as well, perhaps, as we perfected sanitized war-fighting without endangering American ground forces, as questioning whether we would truly be willing to lose lives over a threat to Europe). Friedman’s column here revolves around his alarm that we may not have European help in fighting wars now that these differences are surfacing, unless we’re sensitive to preserving the alliances. But the real focus ought to be the twin trends of letting a bloated military-industrial complex (a term dating from Eisenhower’s era but more germane now than ever) determine foreign policy and the perennial American lack of insight into the paranoid delusional flavor of our geopolitical analysis.

NY Times op-ed