Sure. It's never been our intention to argue that NATO needs to disband or that we need to get out of NATO. The architecture we had in mind began as a concept at the end of the Second World War, that is, to create a United Nations organization. It was supposed to be an all-encompassing solution that would deal with international peace and security, economic prosperity, and social issues. That organization remains in existence, and it does some very good work in most fields. It does a little bit of good work in the security field, but it is not fulfilling the security function it was designed to fulfill, in part because of the way in which the UN is organized. Its decision-making is captive to unanimity among the permanent members of the UN Security Council, and that has been rare in any period of time since the UN was created.
NATO came along as a pragmatic fix for the problem that western countries had with the UN's inability to do security. In the NATO charter, the Washington Treaty, right up front it says we believe in the United Nations, but we also believe in the United Nations principle that we're entitled to our self-defence. In the event that the United Nations cannot guarantee our self-defence, there's nothing to inhibit us from developing alternative arrangements under the UN system. That's what NATO did.
For years NATO's function was strictly to deal with the most immediate problem, which was the defence of Europe. When that function was no longer required at the end of the Cold War, NATO surprised many people by performing admirably a vital function that has been given very little attention—to ensure the stability of the process by which the Soviet captive states were reintegrated into Europe. It would have boggled the minds of people in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s to think that the Cold War would come to an end, not with a bang but a whimper, and that an angry shot would never be fired, and that all of those countries the Soviet Union had taken over would find themselves not just in NATO but in the European Union, acting under European Union rules.
NATO has served two vital functions. A third one—and I'll let George discuss this in greater detail—has been its ability to train people, train countries, its own members and others—