Sixty years ago this week, as much of Europe still lay in rubble and a third world war seemed imminent, Canada's foreign minister Lester B. Pearson sat down in Washington with his counterparts from the 11 other Western countries that weren't dictatorships or occupied territories, and signed a blood pact worthy of the Three Musketeers.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was, from its beginning, a military "one for all and all for one" between its member states, backed with United States arms and money and tied together by Article V of its 1949 treaty, which declares that "an armed attack against one ¡K shall be considered an attack against all" and that each is obligated to fight in defence of the other.
Canadians and Europeans are only now fully appreciating the true implications of the words in Article V, and their self-destructive potential, as the 26 current members prepare to gather this week to mark NATO's birthday. The mood as leaders head to Strasbourg, France, for the event is decidedly dour, and over the past several months a number of senior NATO officials, diplomats from member countries and military officers have admitted privately they believe the alliance is doomed.
In their view, NATO's existential impossibility has been masked for most of this decade by its greatest and most expensive commitment, the first and only time that Article V has been invoked — the Afghanistan war.
Afghanistan has become the graveyard of NATO. Though the alliance will continue to exist, for a while at least, after most of its members have withdrawn, it will never be the same; no longer will it be able to regain its old role as defender of Europe from Eastern attack, and never again will it be able to conduct a war like Afghanistan.
Its actual role, beyond Kabul, is a matter of intense and possibly fruitless debate taking place just beneath public view in Europe's capitals, in Washington, and in Ottawa. The conflict has shattered all its self-assumptions; Afghanistan has done for the world's major military alliance what the subprime-debt crisis has done for the postwar economic order.
The nature of the bailout plan has become the central topic of military officials around the world.
The sotto voce campaign by defence minister Peter McKay to become the alliance's next secretary-general (a decision that will effectively be made this week, although the appointment is not until July) was built around his frank admission that the alliance may be doomed, and his promise to unite it in a new purpose, however vague.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister and Mr. McKay's leading contender for the job, has also aimed himself at the inky void that is the alliance's postwar future.
There will be long, expensive and noisy efforts to save it, but perhaps it will be better to allow NATO to collapse. If Afghanistan has taught us anything, it is that the world no longer works the way it did 60 years ago.
"The glue of this alliance is gone — the Soviet threat united us and brought us together, and without it, the most effective military alliance in history is at risk of atrophy," Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, the foreign-relations scholar who was appointed Barack Obama's special adviser on NATO, told me before she took the position, expressing a stark judgment she made in a much-discussed report for the Council on Foreign Relations.
"Policy makers will need to notice this atrophy before it's too late. Its engine is running on empty — it lacks the political commitments it needs to sustain its operations. There is a growing disconnect between what the United States is asking it to do and what its European allies are willing or able to do. And we cannot keep on going forward with this growing disconnect."
By traditional measures, this should be a great moment for NATO.
For the first time since 1966, France has agreed to become part of the alliance's command structure, ending a division among European militaries that has often split the continent. There is a new rapprochement with Russia, which appears more interested in co-operating with NATO on their many shared goals rather than in antagonizing the alliance.
