What benefit does NATO offer the US

[jt1]

NATO has just agreed to fund a missile defense for Europe. I'm curious is anyone knows the financial impact of NATO on the US. Of the dollars spent on/in NATO what tangible benefit does it offer the US?

[1KielsonDrive]

I was just thinking the same thing and asking myself the same question. We can't pay for schools. firefighters, cops, unemployment, health care or anything else and we're off fighting wars and financing NATO, the UN, the IMF and we probaby don't know the half of it.

[EastSider]

NATO served its purpose, and it should be dissolved. That should have been one of the first to go after the Soviet Union collapsed. Instead, it's mission morphed [[surprise, surprise, surprise as Gomer Pyle used say).

[gdogslim]

It gives the nato nations leverage against russia, china, iraq and any other nation that wants to take over or destory other countries.
They should cut the budget and force other countries to kick in more, same goes for the UN.

[Detroitnerd]

http://www.counterpunch.com/johnstone11182010.html

Encircling Russia, Targeting China

NATO'S True Role in US Grand Strategy

By DIANA JOHNSTONE
On November 19 and 20, NATO leaders meet in Lisbon for what is billed as a summit on “NATO’s Strategic Concept”. Among topics of discussion will be an array of scary “threats”, from cyberwar to climate change, as well as nice protective things like nuclear weapons and a high tech Maginot Line boondoggle supposed to stop enemy missiles in mid-air. The NATO leaders will be unable to avoid talking about the war in Afghanistan, that endless crusade that unites the civilized world against the elusive Old Man of the Mountain, Hassan i Sabah, eleventh century chief of the Assassins in his latest reincarnation as Osama bin Laden. There will no doubt be much talk of “our shared values”.
Most of what they will discuss is fiction with a price tag.
The one thing missing from the Strategic Concept summit agenda is a serious discussion of strategy.
This is partly because NATO as such has no strategy, and cannot have its own strategy. NATO is in reality an instrument of United States strategy. Its only operative Strategic Concept is the one put into practice by the United States. But even that is an elusive phantom. American leaders seem to prefer striking postures, “showing resolve”, to defining strategies.
One who does presume to define strategy is Zbigniew Brzezinski, godfather of the Afghan Mujahidin back when they could be used to destroy the Soviet Union. Brzezinski was not shy about bluntly stating the strategic objective of U.S. policy in his 1993 book The Grand Chessboard: “American primacy”. As for NATO, he described it as one of the institutions serving to perpetuate American hegemony, “making the United States a key participant even in intra-European affairs.” In its “global web of specialized institutions”, which of course includes NATO, the United States exercises power through “continuous bargaining, dialogue, diffusion, and quest for formal consensus, even though that power originates ultimately from a single source, namely, Washington, D.C.”
The description perfectly fits the Lisbon “Strategic Concept” conference. Last week, NATO’s Danish secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, announced that “we are pretty close to a consensus”. And this consensus, according to the New York Times, “will probably follow President Barack Obama’s own formulation: to work toward a non-nuclear world while maintaining a nuclear deterrent”.
Wait a minute, does that make sense? No, but it is the stuff of NATO consensus. Peace through war, nuclear disarmament through nuclear armament, and above all, defense of member states by sending expeditionary forces to infuriate the natives of distant lands.
A strategy is not a consensus written by committees.

[1KielsonDrive]

Nerd, you rule!

[Geczka]

One who does presume to define strategy is Zbigniew Brzezinski, godfather of the Afghan Mujahidin back when they could be used to destroy the Soviet Union. Brzezinski was not shy about bluntly stating the strategic objective of U.S. policy in his 1993 book The Grand Chessboard: “American primacy”.

As it very well should be.

[Patrick]

A counter to BRIC perhaps?