Editor’s Note: In the article below, George Friedman, a distinguished scholar, author and commentator, opines on transatlantic security relations and concludes that he doesn’t “know that NATO can exist without a Cold War. Probably not. What is gone is gone.” Yet, for all of his insightful analysis of NATO’s history, he overlooks the crucial and growing role of NATO in securing the West’s cyber defenses. European, Canadian and American cyberdefense plans and actions require coordination to be effective. NATO, which has been expanding its cyberdefense capabilities, is irreplaceable as the mechanism for leading institution for coordinating allied defenses.
While NATO supports inter-governmental cyberdefese cooperation, what is also needed is a mechanism allowing transatlantic coordination of private sector cyberdefenses. The upcoming negotiations between the EU and the US on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) should be used to ensure that critical infrastructure cyberdefenses are developed and maintained in a coordinated manner that promote prosperity and security among Western allies.
Mr. Friedman states that “…Europe is no longer an idea but a continent made up of states with diverse interests.” Europe has been a continent made up of states with diverse interests for a very long time. European diversity did not prevent a common defense during wars hot and cold, it should not stop it now. NATO and TTIP provide the mechanisms to ensure that Europe and North America stand “shoulder to shoulder in defense of liberal democracy and against tyranny.”
From: Real Clear World
NATO Decline and the End of Western Unity
By George Friedman
Several years ago, I wrote a series of articles on a journey in Europe. It was intended both to be personal and to go beyond recent events or the abstract considerations of geopolitics. This week I begin another journey that will take me from Portugal to Singapore, and I thought that I would try my hand again at reflecting on the significance of my travels.
As I prepare for my journey, I am drawn to a central question regarding the U.S.-European relationship, or what remains of it. Having been in Europe at a time when that relationship meant everything to both sides, and to the world, this trip forces me to think about NATO. I have been asked to make several speeches about U.S.-European relations during my upcoming trip. It is hard to know where to start. The past was built around NATO, so thinking about NATO’s past might help me put things in perspective.
On a personal level, my relationship with Europe always passes through the prism of NATO. Born in Hungary, I recall my parents sitting in the kitchen in 1956, when the Soviets came in to crush the revolution. On the same night as my sister’s wedding in New York, we listened on the radio to a report on Soviet tanks attacking a street just a block from where we lived in Budapest. I was 7 at the time. The talk turned to the Americans and NATO and what they would do. NATO was the redeemer who disappoints not because he cannot act but because he will not. My family’s underlying faith in the power of American alliances was forged in World War II and couldn’t be shaken. NATO was the sword of Gideon, albeit lacking in focus and clarity at times.
I had a more personal relationship with NATO. In the 1970s, I played an embarrassingly unimportant role in developing early computerized war games. The games were meant to evaluate strategies on NATO’s central front: Germany. At that time, the line dividing Germany was the fault line of the planet. If the world were to end in a nuclear holocaust, it would end there. The place that people thought it would all start was called the Fulda Gap, a not-too-hilly area in the south, where a rapid attack could take Frankfurt and also strike at the heart of U.S. forces. The Germans speak of a watch on the Rhine. For my generation, or at least those millions who served in the armies of NATO, it was Fulda.
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