Otto von Bismarck: Welcome back to PhilosophersTalk.com, where thinkers discuss! I am Otto von Bismarck, and when we concluded Part One I was explaining to Mr. Burke why the Iran conflict is not the cause of NATO's dysfunction but the moment at which NATO's pre-existing dysfunction became impossible to ignore.
Edmund Burke: And I am Edmund Burke, and I was explaining to Mr. Bismarck why the man who constructed the alliance system of 19th century Europe and watched it subsequently disintegrate into the most destructive war the world had seen to that point might want to proceed with somewhat more humility when advising the present age on the wisdom of dismantling alliances.
Otto von Bismarck: I died in 1898. What happened afterward is not my responsibility. I consider it ungentlemanly to hold a man accountable for the decisions of successors he would not have tolerated.
Edmund Burke: And yet you are here proposing to repeat the logic, if not the specific decisions.
Otto von Bismarck: I am proposing the opposite logic. My successors refused to acknowledge what was breaking until it broke catastrophically. I am proposing to acknowledge what is breaking now and manage the transition while management is still possible. A controlled dissolution and an uncontrolled collapse are not the same thing. I would have thought a man with your appreciation for the importance of process over outcome might recognize the distinction.
Edmund Burke: I recognize the distinction perfectly well. I dispute the premise that dissolution is required, controlled or otherwise. You have asserted that the divergence over Iran represents an irreconcilable structural difference. You have not demonstrated it. Nations disagree about specific conflicts all the time without that disagreement constituting grounds for dissolving the framework that allows them to cooperate on everything else. France and the United States had a profound disagreement about the Iraq war in 2003. NATO survived it. The alliance is not more fragile now than it was then.
Otto von Bismarck: The Iraq disagreement was about whether to launch a war. The Iran divergence is about what the purpose of the alliance actually is, what obligations membership creates, what risk is acceptable, and who bears the cost when the answers differ. These are not disagreements about a specific decision. These are disagreements about the foundational premises of the arrangement. When two partners in a business enterprise discover that they have different understandings of what the business is for, this is not a management problem. This is a structural problem. It requires restructuring, not a better set of meetings.
Edmund Burke: Or it requires the kind of patient institutional renegotiation that alliances have always used to adapt to changing circumstances. NATO's founding document has been reinterpreted multiple times. Its membership has expanded. Its geographic scope has shifted. Its command structures have evolved. The institution has changed continuously for 75 years while maintaining its core function. You are treating an institution as though it were a contract with fixed terms, when in fact it is more like a constitution that adapts through accumulated practice and shared commitment.
Otto von Bismarck: A constitution requires a common political community to sustain it. The question the Iran war has raised is whether the political communities of Europe and North America are still common in the relevant sense. They share history. They share certain values in the abstract. But they have different energy dependencies, different relationships with the broader Middle East, different demographic pressures, different domestic political coalitions, and different assessments of where the next serious threat to their security actually comes from. These differences are not superficial and they are not temporary. They are the consequence of 30 years of diverging strategic experience since the Cold War ended.
Edmund Burke: Diverging strategic experience is precisely what a functioning alliance is supposed to integrate. The purpose of the consultative mechanisms within NATO is to bring different national perspectives into alignment through deliberation. You are describing the problem that the institution exists to solve as though it were evidence that the institution has failed.
Otto von Bismarck: I am describing a problem the institution has consistently failed to solve for 30 years, and which the Iran conflict has demonstrated it cannot solve, as evidence that the institution cannot solve it. There is a difference between a problem that an institution addresses imperfectly and a problem that reveals the institution's fundamental limitations. NATO is very good at coordinating the defense of territory its members all agree should be defended. It is entirely unable to coordinate strategy toward regions and conflicts where its members have incompatible interests. The world has moved into the second category. The alliance has not.
Edmund Burke: If the alliance is dissolved, what replaces it? You keep describing the problem without addressing the consequences of your solution. Europe does not currently have the capacity for independent strategic action. The United States does not have relationships with individual European nations that could substitute for the collective framework. Russia and China both understand that a dissolved NATO represents an opportunity. You are proposing to remove the architecture that has prevented great power conflict in Europe for 75 years without explaining what fills the vacuum.
Otto von Bismarck: Nothing fills the vacuum immediately, because a vacuum is what actually exists behind the NATO facade. The facade is not preventing conflict. The underlying reality of American and European interests is doing the work, imperfectly, because the facade obscures where those interests actually align and where they do not. Remove the facade and nations must make honest decisions about where to cooperate, at what level, and at what cost. Europe builds its own security capacity because it must, rather than free-riding on American guarantees it has come to treat as permanent. America pursues its own strategic priorities without being slowed by partners who will not share the burden. Both parties are more honest about what they can actually commit to. This is not chaos. This is clarity.
Edmund Burke: You are describing a world that has never existed and assuming it will function as a theory predicts. This is the error I have spent my career identifying. Every revolutionary scheme for demolishing existing arrangements and replacing them with something more rationally designed has produced consequences the designers did not anticipate and would not have welcomed. The world after NATO dissolution is not a world of honest bilateral arrangements and clear strategic alignments. It is a world in which Russia reassesses what it can take back, China reassesses what it can claim, and every smaller nation that has relied on collective security guarantees reassesses whether it needs a nuclear weapon. The chaos is not theoretical. It is predictable. It is the chaos that always follows when you remove an institutional framework without replacing it with something that can bear the same load.
Otto von Bismarck: Mr. Burke, you have just described the consequence of bad dissolution conducted carelessly by people without the competence to manage it. I am proposing dissolution conducted deliberately, with transition arrangements, with bilateral framework agreements, with renegotiated security guarantees for the nations most exposed. There is a version of this that is managed. You keep describing the worst version as though it were the only version.
Edmund Burke: And you keep assuming that managed dissolution is available to you when nothing in the history of institutional collapse supports that assumption. Institutions do not dissolve on schedule according to the preferences of theorists. They collapse when the internal pressures exceed the capacity to contain them, and the consequences are determined by what is in place when they collapse, not by what a very confident man with a theory had planned. You are proposing to initiate a process you cannot control and assuming you will be able to direct its outcome.
Otto von Bismarck: And you are proposing to maintain a fiction until it collapses on its own, which it will, and assuming that is preferable to acting now while there is still something to manage.
Edmund Burke: I am proposing to maintain and reform a functioning institution rather than demolish it on the basis of a theory about what might work better!
Otto von Bismarck: You are proposing to preserve a non-functioning institution because you are sentimentally attached to the memory of when it functioned!
Edmund Burke: Sentimentally! You use that word as though continuity and accumulated wisdom are weaknesses rather than the foundation of everything that has ever worked in the history of human organization!
Otto von Bismarck: I use that word because you are proposing to maintain an arrangement that the Iran war has shown cannot perform its core function, on the grounds that it was very good at a different core function thirty years ago, and this is sentiment, Mr. Burke, not strategy!
Edmund Burke: NATO FUNCTIONS!
Otto von Bismarck: NATO PERFORMS THE APPEARANCE OF FUNCTIONING!
Edmund Burke: THAT IS NOT THE SAME THING!
Otto von Bismarck: IN DIPLOMACY IT IS OFTEN WORSE!
Edmund Burke: INSTITUTIONS ARE NOT EXPENDABLE!
Otto von Bismarck: WHEN THEY STOP WORKING THEY ARE!
Edmund Burke: WRECKER!
Otto von Bismarck: ANTIQUARIAN!
Edmund Burke: CYNIC!
Otto von Bismarck: SENTIMENTALIST!
Edmund Burke: RECKLESS!
Otto von Bismarck: PETRIFIED!
Edmund Burke: Since Mr. Bismarck appears to have exhausted his capacity for actual argument and moved on to adjectives, allow me to invite you to subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.com, where at least one participant in every debate has read the relevant history carefully enough to know that destroying things is considerably easier than building them. If you found this conversation useful, please like this video and share it widely, particularly with anyone who has recently suggested that a 75-year security alliance should be dissolved by a man whose own alliance system ended in the worst war in human history, because they deserve to hear the counterargument.
Otto von Bismarck: And do subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.com, where Mr. Burke will continue his heroic project of defending every imperfect institution he has ever encountered on the grounds that the alternative might theoretically be worse, a position that has the considerable advantage of never being falsifiable and the considerable disadvantage of never being useful. Please also visit AITalkerApp.com, where you can create your own animated conversations, which I recommend as a significant improvement over listening to a man explain why the status quo is always preferable to thinking clearly about what the status quo is actually doing. The link is in the description. Click it before Mr. Burke explains why clicking unfamiliar links represents a dangerous break from established browsing tradition.
