The Council on Foreign Relations’ publication Foreign Affairs published a column today by one Michael Kimmage, calling the NATO alliance “ill-suited to 21st-century Europe” and stating that it should at least forswear accepting any more nations as members, including Ukraine. Kimmage, who is a Catholic University professor and a senior fellow at both the German Marshall Fund and the Wilson Center, wrote that “NATO suffers from a severe design flaw: extending deep into the cauldron of Eastern European geopolitics, it is too large, too poorly defined, and too provocative for its own good…. Today, the alliance is a loose and baggy monster of 30 countries, encompassing North America, Western Europe, the Baltic states, and Turkey. This expanded NATO wavers between offense and defense, having been involved militarily in Serbia, Afghanistan, and Libya. The sheer enormity of the alliance and the murkiness of its mission risk embroiling NATO in a major European war.”
So Kimmage wrote, in order to improve its defensive capacities NATO should publicly and explicitly forswear adding any more members. Moreover, he says, “rethinking the security architecture of Central and Eastern Europe would not be a concession to Putin. To the contrary, it is necessary in order for the most successful alliance of the 20th century to endure and prosper in the 21st.”
