Nate LaMar: NATO at 75: A personal perspective on unified strength

As a young lieutenant, I served in a very atypical assignment for which I was sent to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, to learn German, followed by the Individual Terrorism Awareness Course at Fort Bragg (now Fort Liberty) in North Carolina. This was in preparation for being sent to a joint unit at the grassroots level of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

We were 40 U.S. Army soldiers stationed at a remote site, which was actually a Bundeswehr Kaserne (German Army base) with 2,000 German soldiers. There was no post exchange (known as a PX) or commissary or American housing compound. I lived “on the economy,” a phrase that means I was outside the military bubble, on the top floor of an apartment building with entirely German neighbors. Serving as liaison and linguist officer with our German Army hosts, about 80% of my time was spent speaking German. In a position with top secret clearance, I was occasionally in civilian clothing and with longer hair, during and after the Gulf War.

Under the Status of Forces Agreement, the Bundeswehr provided each U.S. Army soldier at joint remote sites up to two free train tickets per month to use anywhere in Germany on the Deutsche Bahn (German Rail)—the best rail system in the world. On weekends not in the field or serving as duty officer, I explored Germany from top to bottom. (I also visited every neighboring country.) As the Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall had fallen, I often visited Berlin and parts of former East Germany. Traveling well beyond tourist sites and often getting out of my comfort zone (for example, exploring abandoned Soviet bases) gave me a deep appreciation not only for the defeat of Nazism but also for the defeat of communism in Europe.

Headquartered in Brussels, NATO was founded in 1949 as an alliance to counter the former Soviet Union and its fellow communist satellite countries in Eastern Europe. Now 32 countries strong, NATO today includes all of these former satellites throughout Eastern Europe along with some constituent parts of the former Soviet Union itself, such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. NATO’s most recent members include Finland and Sweden, historically neutral countries who applied for NATO membership after being spooked by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Having an 832-mile border with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Finland is now NATO’s “front-line state.” Others with NATO membership interest include Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia and Ukraine. With the exceptions of Cyprus, Kosovo and Russian satellite Belarus, European countries who are not members of NATO are members of NATO’s Partnership for Peace, which also includes the three countries of the Caucasus and the five “stans” of former Soviet Central Asia.

As a young lieutenant serving in a joint unit, never did I dream that someday I would represent a civilian employer on NATO’s Industrial Advisory Group, where we engaged in deep-dive studies of emerging technologies for interoperability among NATO members’ militaries. For another previous employer, I dealt with NATO’s Support & Procurement Agency in Luxembourg.

This week, the 75th NATO Summit took place in Washington, D.C. The summit happened amid the dual specter of isolationism and protectionism infecting a presidential election between two elderly non-veterans representing the extremes of each of their parties. Politics must stop at the water’s edge. We cannot sell out Ukraine, Israel or Taiwan. As I keep a close eye on the proceedings of the summit, I pray that cooler heads will prevail and that the U.S. will—to paraphrase Matthew 5:14—continue to serve as the shining city on a hill, as leader of NATO and the free world.•

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LaMar, an international business and government consultant, served as Henry County Council president from 2009 to 2019.