Will Obsolete NATO be Able to Assuage India’s Security Concerns?

NATO has very little to offer that can address India’s concerns about security, writes Bharat Karnad.

On April 4, 1949, twelve countries, with the United States in the van, created the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). It was the victorious alliance in Europe after the Second World War, transformed to resist the military threat posed by one of its erstwhile members, the Soviet Union. Flush with its success on the battlefield, Moscow had carved out its own exclusive sphere of influence in the Baltic states and central and eastern Europe captured by the Red Army and conceded as spoils of war by the US and the UK. In response to NATO, Russians in 1955 set up a matching bloc -- the ‘Warsaw Pact’.

Sixty-seven years later, with the Cold War long since won, NATO is floundering, consumed by differences over handling a freshly assertive Russia under President Vladimir Putin in a reshaped Europe, an America strained by involvement in too many conflicts and by the effort to contain China, and by squabbles relating to the equitable sharing of alliance costs and military effort.