Is Nato finished?

After Muammar Gaddafi and his ghastly children fled Tripoli, Libyans desecrated his statues and stamped on his posters. As it turned out, the Libyans really did hate Gaddafi enough to rise up, arm themselves and overthrow him. Gaddafi’s own elite units mostly melted away when the rebels advanced into Tripoli, and even the dictator’s tatty palaces (where did all that oil money go, one wonders) were abandoned by his personal guard. Backed by western airpower and special forces, the rebels entered many of these ramshackle structures unopposed.

The Libyans have a right to be proud, and we in the West have a right to feel relieved. This wasn’t Suez, in the end, and the most dire predictions have so far failed to come true. But neither was the Libyan expedition a great triumph for the North Atlantic alliance. In fact, anyone who has spent any time in Washington lately can’t help but be disturbed by the murmurs of complacency heard around London and in the British press over the past week. ‘The Atlantic alliance… remains the only credible multilateral structure for major interventions,’ writes my friend Matt d’Ancona, this magazine’s former editor. But if that’s true, then we are in serious trouble.

In case you’d forgotten: Nato was divided and uncertain about Libya from the start. Two of the alliance’s most important members, Germany and Turkey, bitterly opposed any intervention. The expression ‘dragged kicking and screaming’ is not inappropriately applied to the attitude of the American president either. When Barack Obama finally, reluctantly, agreed to participate in the operation, it was only to assist: Europe, he declared, must lead.