This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 12, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

If NATO members in Europe want to be protected from aggression,

perhaps they should spend just a little more on their own defense

rather than depend on the United States for an open-ended guarantee of their security.

That from Cato Institute Senior Fellow Doug Bandow at a March 4th event, the future of NATO, and the transatlantic security framework.

Appreciate the opportunity to be here. There are important issues to talk about, you know, NATO's future and European security.

Of course, it's interesting.

We're discussing these issues in the midst of the Asian pivot,

which this administration has promoted.

And it was supposed to be a profound reorientation of American

foreign policy yet at the moment the United States is engaged in a new war in the

Middle East and is confronting Russia in Europe and one starts to wonder about what kind of a

pivot it really was. But I do think the pivot does raise the important issue of

priorities which is certainly from World War I through the Cold War Europe was the priority.

The United States was prepared to go to war to ensure that Europe was not dominated by a power viewed as hostile.

It was prepared to put American troops

into abandon its historic policy of pretty much

kind of strategic independence and splendid isolation.

And it was only when you got to the end of the Cold War where that suddenly started to change.

And I think for good reason, starting to look at economic issues, security issues, the dynamism of the region,

all of these suggest that Asia was taking

...