According to a recent interview for The Economist with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, NATO is “brain dead” and “European countries can no longer rely on America to protect its allies”. To be fair, in the interview the French leader has also touched upon a number of interesting issues, including a clear-eyed and cold-blooded realpolitik analysis of European security and transatlantic relations. The French president’s assessment is accurate when he states that Europe stands on a cliff and if it wants to be geopolitically significant it needs to rethink its strategic role.
Macron properly identifies the crisis of Europe with its economic and migration dimensions and its dangerous by-product: populism. He also aptly calls for a reassessment of NATO’s role in contemporary security architecture. He is also partially right when he points towards America’s slow disengagement from Europe in order to concentrate on Asia (though he fails to mention deployment of US and NATO troops to the Eastern flank of the Alliance).
Yet, what will likely be remembered most from this interview is his comment about the alleged death of NATO. However, Macron’s statements couldn’t be further from the truth. NATO – though not in perfect condition – is still very much alive and kicking.
Suicide from fear of death?
As neither the author of this article nor France’s president is a medical doctor, it is worth exploring what being brain dead actually means. The United Kingdom’s National Health Service, defines brain death in situations “when a person on an artificial life support machine no longer has any brain functions”, which means that “they will not regain consciousness or be able to breathe without support”. In this way, a person who is brain dead is legally confirmed dead. In other words, according to Macron, NATO was already in bad shape, but now it is even worse, as it is dead. Since there has been no retraction of what the French president said, this should be a common understanding of his statement about NATO. Right?
Macron also clearly points at the Americans (mostly the Trump administration, but also Obama and his “pivot towards Asia”) blaming them for the dire state of NATO as the US slowly turned its back on Europe. He has not been the first European leader to raise concerns about the changing character of the transatlantic alliance. German chancellor Angela Merkel voiced her concerns in May 2017 – in the context of Brexit and disillusion about co-operation with US President Donald Trump and his administration – when she admitted: “The times in which we could completely depend on others are on the way out” and called on Europeans to take their destiny into their own hands. The striking difference here is in style: whereas Merkel had used carefully selected wording, Macron did not mince words, bluntly declaring the death of NATO and uncertainty about Article 5 of Washington Treaty (which declares that an attack on one country, is an attack on all).
Global News 
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