In recent weeks, there has been renewed discussion of the future of NATO as a guarantor of security on the European mainland.

The recently published U.S. National Defense Strategy has made it clear that it is for European States to manage the risk of future military conflict with Russia, to allow America to focus its efforts on its competition with China in the Pacific.

America has reintroduced the concept of gunboat diplomacy, threatening to invade Greenland and to attack Iran, while also kidnapping the leader of a sovereign nation in Venezuela. And while only the first has induced genuine horror in European capitals, other developments, most notably the gunning down of two protestors in Minnesota, have made European citizens, if not its leaders, increasingly anxious about ties with the Americans.

Times have changed since the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington DC on 4 April 1949.

Then, America was the nation that had provided enormous military support and troops to Britain and the Commonwealth, to take on Hitler’s Germany on the western front of World War II, as the Soviet Union drove the Nazis out, having halted their advance in Stalingrad.

Wartime allies became adversaries following the war, as Winston Churchill raised the spectre of Communism’s spread across Europe.

Yet the Soviet Union no longer exists as an epochal threat the freedom and democracy of European States emerging from the devastation of World War II.

European states have largely all achieved a level of prosperity, peace and stability unseen in centuries, on a continent that was historically dominated by war and conquest by the largest powers.

Russia is now a functioning market democracy, albeit one that does not wish........

© Eurasia Review