The Alliance Illusion: NATO’s Blind Spots In An Unsettled World – OpEd |
For decades, NATO was treated less like an alliance and more like a law of nature — something permanent, automatic, and immune to political gravity. Article 5 became a kind of secular scripture: if one member was attacked, all would respond. The belief was so deeply embedded that few bothered to ask the obvious question: What if the politics change?
History is full of alliances that looked eternal until the moment they weren’t. The Triple Alliance collapsed in 1914 when Italy refused to fight alongside Germany. The League of Nations disintegrated because its members wouldn’t enforce its guarantees. Even the Warsaw Pact, which once seemed ironclad, unraveled almost overnight. Alliances endure only as long as the political will behind them does.
NATO is no exception.
The cracks didn’t appear suddenly. They widened slowly while Western governments convinced themselves that the post–Cold War order was a permanent condition rather than a fleeting moment. NATO expanded eastward, the European Union deepened its institutions, and Washington assumed that prosperity and deterrence would keep revisionist powers in check. Meanwhile, China built influence with loans and infrastructure instead of tanks, and Russia rebuilt its military while nursing its grievances. By the time Russian forces crossed into Ukraine in 2022, the West’s strategic comfort zone had evaporated.
The war didn’t just redraw borders. It exposed how........