The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

Did NATO have problems? Of course. Not for nothing was Henry Kissinger’s famous 1965 work entitled The Troubled Partnership: A Reappraisal of the Atlantic Alliance. The list of NATO deficiencies was long, including, after the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse, the feckless abandonment by several European members of their responsibility to provide for their own self-defense. Under President Clinton, America suffered its own military declines, as he and others saw the collapse of Communism as “the end of history,” slashing defense budgets to spend on politically beneficial domestic welfare programs. This “peace dividend” illusion never ended in much of Europe, but it ended in America with the September 11 mass murders in New York and Washington by Islamicist terrorists. NATO’s future has been intensely debated among national-security experts for decades, with many urging a broader post–Cold War agenda. Barack Obama criticized NATO members for being “free riders,” not spending adequately on their own defense budgets, but, typically, had simply graced the world with his views, doing nothing to see them carried out.