This ran first a couple days ago in the LA Times , and is picked up this morning in the WNJ . Bacevich is the highly regarded Professor of History and International Relations at Boston University: When he visits Strasbourg, France, this week to participate in festivities marking NATO's 60th anniversary, President Obama should deliver a valedictory address, announcing his intention to withdraw the United States from the alliance. The U.S. has done its job. It's time for Europe to assume full responsibility for its own security, freeing the U.S. to attend to more urgent priorities.... Present-day NATO is a shadow of what it once was. Calling it a successful alliance today is the equivalent of calling General Motors a successful car company -- it privileges nostalgia over self-awareness. As with GM, so too with NATO: Fixing past mistakes will require painful changes. Continuing along the existing trajectory is not an option. If the alliance pursues any further eastward expansion ...

Having nominated as Secretary of Stat e a woman who believes (as did Dubya before her) that NATO should continue to expand into the former Soviet republics , it is unlikely that President Barack Obama will rethink the US involvement in that organization. Which is, as Douglas Bandow points out at AWC , is unfortunate: America and Europe should continue to cooperate on issues of shared interest. But it is time for Washington to turn European security over to Europe. In 1948 the world was in the midst of the Cold War. War-ravaged Europe remained an economic laggard vulnerable to communist subversion, democratic left-wing movements, and Soviet pressure. Joseph Stalin may never have contemplated an invasion of the West, but a U.S.-led alliance became the obvious means to, in Lord Hastings Ismay’s immortal words, keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down... By the 1980s, NATO’s justification had grown threadbare. The sclerotic Soviet empire was still evil, but totally i...