From Slate: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates took a whack at the allies on Tuesday at a NATO Strategic Concept Seminar in Washington, D.C., berating all but a handful of them for spending too little on defense and paying too little attention to the gravest threats of the post-Cold War era…

These failings, he concluded, raise doubts about whether NATO is capable of making the "transition" from "a static, defensive force," formed to deter and beat back a Soviet invasion of Europe, to "an expeditionary force" capable of staving off insurgents and terrorists in faraway lands.

The real question, though, is whether NATO is, or ever was, a suitable vehicle for this new, offensive mission. The evidence to date suggests it isn’t…

NATO was created at the dawn of the Cold War as a regional alliance—a multinational military power to defend Western Europe from a Soviet invasion and a political institution to bind the trans-Atlantic ties between the European continent and the new American superpower. It served both purposes extremely well, but maybe it’s just not meant to be a global counterinsurgency force. The very premise of a NATO command in Afghanistan—that the alliance now needs to stretch its domain beyond its traditional "area of operation"—may be mistaken…

This war is not about the future of NATO, and the future of NATO is not bound up in this war. We shouldn’t let disagreements over Afghanistan cause the fissure of an alliance that’s still valuable in its own right.  (photo: Virginia Mayo/AP)