NATO needs new sense of purpose

Born out of the ashes of World War II, the NATO alliance -- for North Atlantic Treaty Organization -- was a defensive pact created in 1949 by the nations that had destroyed Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, with one major exception: the Soviet Union. Resisting its post-war expansion became the focus of NATO's mission in Europe.

But with its founding purpose made moot two decades ago, NATO is floundering -- a fact long recognized but only pointed out in irrefutable detail last week by outgoing U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

NATO's present may be problematic, but its history is substantial. While the Western allies acted as occupiers only until the former Axis nations of Germany and Italy could set up their own democracies, the Soviets kept a hard grip on the nations they had conquered as the Red Army swept all resistance aside in its march on Berlin.

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