NATO turned 65 this April, in the same year it plans to withdraw all combat troops from Afghanistan, one of the flagship operations it has overseen during its tenure – but perhaps not the most criticized.
In 1999, NATO began a massive bombing campaign in the former Yugoslavia without approval from the United Nations. It would become the first time the alliance did not look outside its growing borders before acting on its own: Kosovo, a subregion of Serbia, claimed it wanted independence, so NATO set about helping it secede. The offensive is not dissimilar, at least in rhetoric, to what Putin has claimed he hopes to achieve in annexing Crimea from Ukraine.
Critics have tried to turn this year’s NATO anniversary into a retirement ceremony, calling for the alliance to step out to pasture – gracefully, of course. In a column entitled, “NATO on Viagra,” foreign policy wonk John Feffer said the alliance’s new status as an old-age pensioner should serve as a subtle cue for it to step aside. Once the crisis in Ukraine is dispensed with, he concluded, it becomes time “for downsizing and memoir-writing, not hanky-panky in the east.”