NATO: friends and enemies

Schmitt once wrote enigmatically in his Glossarium, "Tell me who your enemy is and I'll tell you who you are."

Twenty years after the collapse of the USSR, NATO is in shambles, lacking a concrete identity and, judging by its recent showing in Libya, an effective military presence.  The disillusionment of the alliance's greatest benefactor, echoed in Gates's "blunt warning," points to a bleak future.

The sorry state of the alliance suggests that the abstract enemy "terror" is just as weak at delineating real divisions as the abstract "bourgeoisie" was for communists.  As real communism quickly dissolved into genuine political conflicts with concrete enmity between putative communist nations and ethnicities (Russia against China, for example) or conflicts over actual resources, so the war on terror has allowed supposedly anti-terror forces to fracture.  NATO infighting, feet-dragging, and willingness to arm and support forces formerly identified as terrorists suggests that the abstraction of "terror" is insufficient to preserve NATO as an alliance of friends with a specific, concrete identity.

The existence of a unified, concrete enemy permits nothing less than political intransigence for opposing allies. The source of NATO's decline is echoed in Nietzsche's advice:

Better an enmity cut from one block
than friendship held together by glue.