Real quick: Can you name the 32 members of NATO?
Hmm... you can’t?
Did you stop at nine? Thirteen? Or maybe 21?
Too bad. Because you, your children, or your grandchildren may be treaty-bound to fight and possibly die for those nations if they’re ever attacked.
And that’s a problem.
If a well-informed American cannot name all the allies we’re sworn to defend, has the alliance become a little too large?
(For the record, here’s an alphabetical list of NATO members and the year they joined.)
Sure, many Americans would likely rally to fight for allies like the United Kingdom, Spain, or Canada.
But what about North Macedonia or Albania?
Or, had the Biden administration succeeded, Ukraine?
It’s fair, even reasonable and rational, for an American to say unequivocally “No.”
Let me be clear: I’m not against NATO. It protected the free world during the Cold War and I still believe in its founding mission.
I even served in a NATO mission myself.
When I was just 21 years old, I was a private first class in the Alabama Army National Guard, and my unit was activated to participate in Operation Joint Endeavor, the peace-enforcement mission in the former Yugoslavia that helped end that horrible war in Bosnia.
I still proudly display my NATO Service Medal at home.
Most Americans understood and supported that mission—interestingly, we were working alongside the Russian Army back then, not against it.
Oh, the good old days.
However, NATO has doubled in size since that mission in Bosnia, growing from 16 members to 32 over several rounds of enlargement, making collective defense a complex and increasingly controversial commitment.
Remember, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty states that an attack against one is an attack against all.
That’s why we must urgently look at what some of our NATO allies are doing today.
While President Donald Trump is trying to de-escalate the war in Ukraine, some of those nations seem intent on escalating it, even discussing sending in their own troops.
And when one of their units accidentally fires a missile into a Russian apartment building — and accidents always happen in war — how do you think Moscow would react?
If we’re to believe what the media and many on the left say—that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a bloodthirsty “madman”—what do you think a madman would do?
What do you think a bloodthirsty madman with thousands of nuclear missiles would do?
I don’t want to ever find out.
That’s why we cannot allow a NATO member—or several, or even all of them—to drag America into a war we do not want and are trying very hard to avoid.
We need calm heads to prevail and for the alliance to take a collective step back from the brink and remember what it was founded for in the first place:
To deter war, not prolong it.
(J. Pepper Bryars is a veteran and author of "American Warfighter." Readers can contact him at jpepper.substack@gmail.com.)