Don't Poke the Soufflé
The thing about large military alliances is that they function, when they function at all, on the same basic principle as a very old and expensive piece of enterprise software: nobody fully understands how it works, nobody wants to touch the configuration, and the one person who wrote the original documentation retired in 1975 and is not returning calls.
NATO, founded in 1949 by a group of people who had recently watched an entire continent burn down twice in thirty years and considered this a suboptimal outcome, operates on a principle so elegantly simple that it has survived everything the 20th century could throw at it, including France. The principle is this: an attack on one is an attack on all, everyone shows up, and the whole thing is sufficiently credible that nobody tries it. This is, when you think about it, a remarkable achievement. It is like keeping a soufflé standing for seventy-six years. You do not poke the soufflé.
Someone is considering poking the soufflé.
The specific mechanism being floated, according to sources who have clearly not read the treaty, is to "suspend" certain member states from "important or prestigious positions" within the alliance. This is a fascinating proposition, since the North Atlantic Treaty, which one can read in its entirety in about the time it takes to eat a sandwich, contains no suspension mechanism whatsoever. There is no Article specifying what happens when a member state proves insufficiently enthusiastic. The framers, veterans of an era when insufficient allied enthusiasm had consequences measured in cities, apparently considered this scenario and decided that the threat of mutual annihilation was probably deterrent enough without building in a naughty step.
The practical effect of "suspending" a country from NATO while continuing to base two significant military installations in that country is left as an exercise for the reader. Presumably the suspended country's generals would stop being invited to certain meetings while American aircraft continued to land on their runways. The suspended country would, one imagines, be deeply wounded by the symbolism while remaining puzzled about the logistics. It would be rather like banning someone from your gym membership while continuing to use their shower.
A note on IT infrastructure: NATO is not merely a military arrangement. It is, among other things, an enormous shared information technology apparatus spanning thirty-two nations, running on interconnected systems, shared threat intelligence, joint cyber defence operations and, somewhere in Brussels, a server room that nobody talks about but which is doing rather important work keeping certain malicious actors out of the power grids of countries whose names you would recognise. When you "suspend" a member, does someone file a ticket to remove them from NATO Active Directory? Who holds the admin credentials?
The Falkland Islands gambit is where the plan achieves what can only be described as a kind of transcendent self-defeat.
The Falkland Islands are home to approximately 3,700 people, several hundred thousand sheep, and a quantity of penguins who have historically expressed no strong preference on sovereignty questions. They sit in the South Atlantic in a condition of agreeable obscurity, bothering no one. The 1982 conflict over them produced 900 deaths and resolved nothing diplomatically, while confirming only that the islands are very difficult to get to and very cold when you arrive. The strategic value of the Falkland Islands, in the current geopolitical context, is not immediately obvious to anyone who does not have strong feelings about wool futures.
The proposed gambit is to signal to Britain, a nuclear-armed permanent member of the UN Security Council and the alliance's most capable European military, that continued uncooperativeness might result in American sympathy shifting toward Argentina's territorial claim. Argentina is currently governed by a man who has expressed great admiration for the current American president, which is presumably the logic. The chain of reasoning runs: Britain is not helping enough, therefore America should consider supporting Argentina's position, therefore Argentina might attempt another landing, therefore Britain would fight them again, therefore America would be in the position of actively rooting for a war between its oldest ally and its newest Latin American friend, all while simultaneously trying to conclude business in the Middle East.
Sources said the people who modelled this scenario were not asked about it for very long.
The truly under-examined consequence of systematically alienating the alliance is not the direct military one, which is bad enough, but the infrastructure consequence.
Cyber operations, unlike naval fleets, do not announce themselves in the Strait of Hormuz. They proceed quietly, in the small hours, through whatever gaps the defenders have left unattended. The defenders are, in the main, the same alliance whose enthusiastic participation is currently being questioned. Fragmenting that defensive architecture, introducing distrust into the shared intelligence relationships, causing certain members to quietly begin reconsidering what they share and with whom, creates gaps. Gaps are what the other people are looking for. They are, in a very real sense, looking for nothing else.
The geopolitical version of a zero-day exploit is a coordinated attack on a moment when the defending alliance is distracted by an argument about who owes what to whom. The attackers are aware of this. They are, in fact, counting on it.
The historical record is moderately clear on what fills the strategic vacuum left by a retreating American commitment to European security. It is not, on the whole, an improvement. The continent has some experience with ambitious reorganisations of the European order, and the reviews have been, to put it gently, mixed. The people who built NATO were not naive idealists. They were exhausted realists who had spent several years in rubble, and their conclusion was that the mechanism of mutual commitment, however annoying its maintenance, was preferable to the alternative.
The alternative is available for inspection in any decent history library.
There is a concept in systems theory called Chesterton's Fence: you should not remove a thing until you understand why it was put there. The fence standing in the middle of the road looks pointless until you discover it is the only thing between you and the edge of a very significant drop. NATO is an exceptionally large and expensive fence. It has been there for a long time. It is, if you squint, somewhat inconvenient.
I am waiting to see how the soufflé landing goes.