NATO won the Cold War thirty-one years ago, but didn’t shut itself down. It remains a giant institution that has expanded considerably over the last three decades, adding both serious powers (e.g., Poland) and comic-opera ones (e.g., Montenegro).

On the other hand, as NATO gets bigger, it also gets hollowed out. Several of NATO’s mainstay countries, such as Germany, don’t seem to take it all that seriously. German military spending declined to 1.3% of GDP during the last decade. From Wikipedia:

In September 2014, the Bundeswehr acknowledged chronic equipment problems that rendered its armed forces “unable to deliver its defensive NATO promises”. Among the problems cited were dysfunctional weapons systems, armored vehicles, aircraft, and naval vessels unfit for immediate service due to a neglect of maintenance, and serious equipment and spare parts shortages. The situation was so dire that it was acknowledged that most of Germany’s fighter aircraft and combat helicopters were not in deployable condition.

But the Germans have boosted their military spending recently and it is now up to 1.53% according to the CIA World Factbook. That compares to Italy’s 1.41%, France’s 2.01%, America’s 3.52%, Russia’s estimated 4.0% percent, Ukraine’s 4.0%, and Israel’s 5.0%. (The U.S. spent 9% during the Eisenhower years and 6% during the Reagan years.)

After all, what is NATO for?

But now, due to Putin’s War, it’s pretty obvious that NATO is to keep the Russians down. I bet a whole bunch of Lockheed salesmen are en route to Berlin at this moment.

This can perhaps help explain the curious “not our decision” stance of American establishment figures about Russia’s demand to promise not to let Ukraine into NATO. For example, when Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) got back from Ukraine a few weeks ago, he told Fox News:

So my hope is that these things will keep this from happening by providing a deterrence. The talks are fine. I know they’re ongoing. But the Russian talks, their goals in these talks are just not realistic at all. To say that NATO cannot accept new members, particularly Ukraine, runs against everything that we know about NATO.

They have an open door policy. It’s not our decision. It’s the decision of the people of Ukraine and it’s the decision of NATO.

I also will tell you, I’m concerned about keeping countries in the region together and on message. And I worry particularly about Germany, and their unwillingness to say publicly that, of course, they would stop this new pipeline, Nord Stream 2 pipeline, should there be an invasion, and also not providing other countries with the ability to provide arms because they are NATO members.

So, we got to be sure that everybody’s on board here to avoid the bloodshed, to avoid this terrible mistake from happening.

What “open door policy”? It requires unanimous agreement of current NATO members to add a new one. Montenegro can block Ukraine’s admission, much less the United States of America.

A lot of the Establishment’s talk about it’s “not our decision” whether or not Ukraine joins NATO resembles talk about how it’s not our decision who gets to immigrate to America because that would be discrimination, which would make the Statue of Liberty cry. But if NATO emerges the big winner institutionally from all this, the whole thing makes more realpolitik sense. Putin starting a war is good for NATO and good for getting Germany to slack off less.