This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 17th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It's hard to overstate the role of NATO and the current assault from Russia on Ukraine.

Katers Ted Gableen Carpenter and Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow in the American State

Craft program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, discuss NATO's role in

setting the stage for war in Ukraine today.

How has NATO affected European defenses among the member nations in NATO. Stephen, I'll start with you.

It's affected it in different ways, particularly because the United States has always been the leading security provider within NATO and in fact has insisted on doing so.

So as we exit the Cold War, the idea is that Europe will be whole and free.

European defense spending drops quite sensibly, but the United States rather than taking that opportunity to pull back

or building a kind of pan-European security organization that would include Russia,

instead opts to remain the dominant security provider in Europe and in fact to support successive waves of NATO enlargement.

What this does, it gives a number of European states within NATO, little incentive to provide for their own defense, because it's the

United States that would realistically be the leading actor in any, for long time unlikely contingency that there would in fact be a

conflict between NATO and Russia.

So a lot of the debate we've heard in recent weeks has focused on this

question of the extent to which the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine has provoked Russia.

I think an underappreciated aspect of the NATO question, though, is also why is it that Europe now has to hurriedly do more

on defense more than three decades after the end of the Cold War, had the United States

taken a lower military profile for a long time. It may well be that Russia would still be the aggressive Russia that we see that's

possible but Europe might have been able to handle this problem more or less on its own.

Ted? The United States made the fateful decision

...