By Daniel Pipes – – Monday, October 16, 2017

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, known as NATO, faces an existential problem.

No, it’s not about getting member states to fulfill agreed-upon spending levels on defense. Or finding a role after the Soviet collapse. Or standing up to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Rather, it’s about Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Islamist, dictatorial ruler of Turkey whose policies threaten to undermine this unique alliance of 29 states that has lasted nearly 70 years.

Created in 1949, NATO’s founding principles ambitiously set out the alliance goal “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of [member states’] peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.” In other words, the alliance exists to defend Western civilization.

For its first 42 years, until the USSR collapsed in 1991, this meant containing and defeating the Warsaw Pact. Today, it means containing and defeating Russia and Islamism. Of these latter two, Islamism is the deeper and longer-lasting threat, being based not on a single leader’s personality but on a highly potent ideology, one that effectively succeeded fascism and communism as the great radical utopian challenge to the West.

Some major figures in NATO appreciated this shift soon after the Soviet collapse. Already in 1995, Secretary-General Willy Claes noted with prescience that “Fundamentalism is at least as dangerous as communism was.” With the Cold War over, he said, “Islamic militancy has emerged as perhaps the single gravest threat to the NATO alliance and to Western security.”

In 2004, Jose Maria Aznar, Spain’s former prime minister, warned that “Islamist terrorism is a new shared threat of a global nature that places the very existence of NATO’s members at risk.” He advocated that NATO focus on combating “Islamic jihadism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction” and called for “placing the war against Islamic jihadism at the center of the allied strategy.”

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/16/nato-must-be-saved-from-turkey/