NATO’s post-cold war role

The retiring US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, expresses dissatisfaction with the lukewarm participation of the European countries in NATO’s military actions in the Third World e.g. Afghanistan and Libya. He said they were “willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in the European defence budget.” The Europeans, according to him, should be able to go to war alongside the American forces in the Third World. The US troops were in Europe for that purpose.
NATO was created in1949 in order to defend the Western Europe from a Soviet attack. USA’s adherence to it as a founder member was an indication of its commitment to this objective. In fact, it was the real force underpinning the alliance. The other great powers - Britain and France - having suffered devastation during the Second World War, could hardly match the real or perceived Soviet strength.
But the Soviet Union had suffered the greatest destruction of all in the war, losing 15 million dead and over half of its industry destroyed. It may have maintained the largest army after the war, but nobody believed it could think of taking on the US, which, moreover, was the only power possessing nuclear weapons at the time. No, there was no military threat to Western Europe from that quarter. However, there was an ideological one. The US for long resisted holding All-German elections for the fear that they would throw up a communist regime. There was a similar danger in France and Italy in the immediate post-war period. (The US later objected to the holding of elections in the whole of Vietnam for the same reasons.) And the communist movement was generally on the offensive throughout the world, as capitalism appeared to be incapable of solving the problem of poverty, while engendering compulsively war and fascism. However, as the extant European colonial system seemed capable of containing the communist menace in the Third World, the main danger was in Europe. So, NATO was confined to it. The ideological challenge was thus met with mainly a military response. There was nothing incongruous about it, as the Western leaders had no doubt in their minds that, if the communists won elections in France or Italy, they would prevent them by force from taking office. And Stalin would have been pleased. He did not want communists coming into power in any advanced country and showing up the barbarism to which he had reduced the socialist experiment in Russia.
The positive aspect of these policies was that they helped avoid a military confrontation between the blocs. Even the old style interstate war in Korea was not permitted to spread.
Khrushchev had rejected Kennedy’s proposal at Vienna in 1961 to practically divide the world between the two powers, whereby the West would respect the existing communist bloc, but would not permit the spread of communism outside it. But the Soviet leader was inclined to follow the suggestion in practice and had practically washed his hands of Vietnam by the time he was overthrown. His successors too sought not just détente, but close economic relations with the US. Hence, their impatience with the revolutionary movements in the Third World and their extreme dislike of people like Che Guevara. They found it incomprehensible that these revolutionaries wanted to make revolutions, instead of carrying out instructions from the clerks of the Soviet Foreign Office.