NATO rocked to its foundations: China Daily editorial

As the leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization member states have gathered in the United Kingdom for their summit this week, the intriguing question has been whether the evident divisions among them would be widened or would they find enough common ground to forge renewed solidarity.

The safe bet would probably be on them papering over the cracks.

Yet the rifts run deep. The bickering between some of the European countries and the United States and even the haggling over money reveal an increasingly dysfunctional family and an ailing military alliance that is struggling to recalibrate its role in today's changing world.

A single summit will not be enough to guarantee that the current disputes that divide NATO will be resolved anytime soon, as they are symptomatic of a fast-changing world to which some of the NATO members are struggling to adapt, especially its erstwhile leader.

Nor will its supporters get any reassurance from NATO leaders that the military alliance will be able to find a quick remedy to beef up its waning clout.

Although NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Wednesday ahead of chairing a meeting of the NATO leaders that the organization is agile, active and adapting, the divisions show it is anything but. In a world that faces an increasing threat from non-traditional security risks that call for collective wisdom and action, NATO is still ensnared in the past.

And many of the issues NATO leaders are having to face now have been of their own making if one plows deeper into such questions as why a security vacuum has emerged again in Syria after the Islamic State terrorists were defeated and who was responsible for giving the green light to Ankara to hunt down Kurds in Northern Syria.

The current feuding between different members over various issues seem to destine NATO to obsolescence, as they reveal an organization that is still clinging to an outdated security outlook.

Long after the Cold War, which was the rationale for its being, has ended, NATO's inability to adapt itself to the new realities has inevitably made itself vulnerable to being irrelevant to its members.

Like it or not, in an increasingly multipolar world, NATO's original reason for being no longer exists. Unless it really does adapt to changing realities and accepts that it should seek collaboration rather than confrontation to address the real threats of the time, it too will find itself consigned to the trash can of the past, where, quite frankly, it belongs.