According to YouGov, in 2017 almost three-quarters of Britons (73%) approved of NATO membership, this has since fallen to 59%. Likewise, in Germany support has fallen from 68% to 54%, and in France from 54% to 39%. Nordic nations Denmark and Norway experienced drops from 80% to 70% and 75% to 66% respectively.
Last fall, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, warned European countries that they can no longer rely on America to defend NATO allies.
“What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO,” Macron declared in an undiplomatic interview with The Economist. Europe stands on “the edge of a precipice,” he said, and needs to start thinking of itself strategically as a geopolitical power; otherwise, we will “no longer be in control of our destiny.”
NATO is not ‘brain-dead’ but does face real threats to its future.
Just after he signed the founding Washington Treaty in April 1949, the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, said in a BBC radio broadcast that it was “an endeavor to express on paper the underlying determination to preserve our way of life – freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and the rights and liberty of the individual.”
NATO has never been just a military alliance but is under growing pressure to refocus its purpose and messaging for 2020.
