75 years in, NATO remains as vital as ever to American life

News Snapshot:

As NATO marks 75 years since its founding, there are serious questions among some Americans who doubt the value of the trans-Atlantic alliance. They argue that it’s anachronistic, full of burden-sharing slackers and insufficiently focused on America’s main adversary, China. These critiques are to some degree understandable. NATO’s age obscures the reasons why the United States broke with historical tradition in 1949 and entangled itself in an alliance with other countries. As a result, today some Americans, and even some Europeans, take NATO for granted. This is unfortunate and shortsighted. The NATO alliance continues to form the backbone of not...