In the first place, NATO provides a forum outside the UN that can legitimate American-led military

interventions [bold mine-DL]. Even when the UN isn’t willing to go along, as in Kosovo, NATO can step
forward and provide the kind of multinational support that is increasingly required for effective military
action in the modern age. Put another way, the existence of NATO signals to the U.S. public and to the
broader world community that the U.S. is not simply a rogue power; it is still the leader of the Free
World, and it typically fights either with the concurrence of the Atlantic Alliance or, when that isn’t
possible, with the support of at least a substantial number of its members (as was the case in the Iraq
War).

The U.S. has certainly used NATO to provide political cover when waging illegal and unnecessary wars,
but that doesn’t make those wars any more legitimate. This practice is neither desirable for the U.S. nor
healthy for the alliance itself. Insofar as NATO makes it easier for the U.S. to start wars it doesn’t have to
fight, the alliance has imposed unwelcome burdens on all of its members. If European governments
think that they have to support U.S. foreign wars to prove their value as NATO allies (as many central
and eastern European allies did in Iraq), that puts many members of the alliance in the awful position of
backing an illegal or unwise war that has nothing to do with their security or risking their relationship
with Washington. When the U.S. violates international law under the auspices of NATO, as it did in
Kosovo, it is making the entire alliance complicit in that violation. That doesn’t make the U.S. look better
in the eyes of other nations. It just makes our allies look worse.

NATO has functioned for the last fifteen years mainly as a vehicle for enabling the U.S. to start wars or
pulling European allies into supporting U.S. wars outside Europe, which means it has spent the better
part of the last two decades abandoning its original mission as a defensive alliance.

What must the adults among our NATO allies think of someone like Boot, for whom NATO isn’t a
defensive alliance, but rather mere legal and moral cover for American interventionists. NATO can act as
a restraining force of US military adventurism.

illegal because there was no UN approval nor was any NATO country attacked, and not very successful
because the most powerful military alliance bombed a small impoverished country for two months only
to get a “meh” agreement, and that with Russian help.

Time to pull the plug on NATO. It pains me to observe that Trump is the only one smart or crazy enough
to say what to me seems like a pretty self-evident thing.
As much as Trump was maligned for his comments on the irrelevance of NATO, he’s right about it. NATO
has encouraged more unnecessary US-led military interventionism in an effort for us to control world
affairs as much as possible. At a minimum, NATO should adopt its historically-rooted defensive mission
once again and eschew any interventionist tendencies. Even more appropriately, NATO should just
disband. Permanent transnational military organizations with the fallen human tendency toward evil
when power is consolidated does not bode well for a peaceful world.