Martin Kettle, I couldn't agree with you less.
Necessity truly is the mother of invention, and so long as Europe remains in effect peacefully occupied by American forces, it will not do what it must.
And "occupied" is the right word for the existing situation, although the occupation is on fairly genial terms.
No matter what lip service America pays to European unity, its de facto policy is to keep Europe from becoming an effective counterbalancing force in world affairs.
The "special relationship" with Britain is the perfect example of this, serving as it does to keep Britain from being fully engaged in Europe where geography and history argue for its fuller participation. It is a quiet strategy of division.
NATO also serves as a way to deter closer relationships with Russia, which seems destined, after all its problems, to become a great nation. It is of course a natural part of Europe, a great storehouse of resources and a future important market.
You say NATO "is also a solution in search of a problem."
But I think it is better put as an organization without a purpose, a purpose from the European point of view at least.
And I think it can be argued that it is a dangerous organization. The lesson from history is that great armies and weapons stocks tend to cause nations more easily to tip into conflict.
That swollen, steroid-fed monstrosity, the Pentagon, built up for the great battles of World War Two, has since that war done nothing but fight pointless wars, including the overthrow of even democratic states. Iraq is only the last of a long chain of bloody destructive conflicts.
The world is not a better place for Iraq, for Afghanistan, for Vietnam, for Chile, for the subsidized wars of the Pentagon's proxy state, Israel, and for a host of vicious interventions.
NATO's role, for example, in Afghanistan is almost delusional. America is not truly interested in Afghanistan's advancement, and most of the hard evidence indicates no such thing is happening.
You can't remake a 14th century society in five years or ten years or twenty-five. And the Taleban never was responsible for 9/11. A group of Saudis were. The Taleban is an intrinsic part of this antique society, not a group of occupiers which is precisely what America and "NATO" are.
Even today, the Potemkin-village schools are closed almost as soon as they are opened. The government - there is no genuine national government - cannot even get the would-be teachers paid, and this is true in the North as well as the South.
"Nation-building" is a glib phrase with little genuine meaning. The examples of Germany and Japan after World War Two do not apply at all. They were advanced societies that suffered a setback. Bricks and mortar and new machines were needed. Human capital existed in abundance, something which does not exist in 14th-century Afghanistan.
The US went there for vengeance, dragging the UN and NATO in for company and window-dressing and as subsidizers.
