Opinion | North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is dead

Every year at about this time the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), the world’s most powerful alliance for the past 77 years, holds a conference in Munich to examine its state of health. The one earlier this month was really a wake, but it played out more like the immortal Dead Parrot sketch from Monty Python, in which a customer (John Cleese) enters a pet shop with a cage containing a dead parrot (a Norwegian Blue) and says: “This parrot is definitely deceased, and when I purchased it not half an hour ago you assured me that it’s total lack of movement was due to it being tired and shagged out following a long squawk.” Shopkeeper: “Well he’s … he’s, ah … probably pining for the fjords.” Cleese: “He’s not pining. He’s passed on … He’s a stiff.

This parrot is no more. If you hadn’t nailed him to the perch, he’d be pushing up the daisies. This is an ex-parrot.” And so too with Nato, although it is still nailed to its perch.

The psychodrama raging beneath the surface at the Munich conference was an argument among the European members of Nato about whether the United States could still be trusted. Some insisted the old alliance could survive. More thought that it will have to be Nato 2.0 or no alliance at all.

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Most EU leaders have lost the faith. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said bluntly: “The United States’s claim to leadership has been challenged and possibly lost.” Echoing Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, he said: “[The] rules-based world order no longer exists,” and that “a deep divide has opened between Europe and the United States.” Starting with U.S. Vice-President J.D.

Vance’s anti-European tirade at last year’s Munich conference, we have had U.S. air strikes on Iran and five other countries, the subjugation of Venezuela, American complicity in the genocide in Gaza, and above all U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats to invade Greenland, which is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, a Nato member.

Curiously, Greenland was what tore it, and most Nato leaders now understand Trump’s U.S. is, at best, an unreliable ally and sometimes openly hostile. Nor are they confident that the United States will remain a country where governments change hands democratically, so they have to plan for the worst.

It’s not really a huge crisis. The existing Nato is an ideal template for a successor alliance that includes most or all of the existing members except the United States. If Canada dares to stay in, they wouldn’t even have to change the name.

The new alliance would still have ample numbers, wealth and weapons to deter any Russian attack. Filling the gaps that remain when American troops all leave Europe would take some years, but the risk is really quite small.

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