---
title: "NATO’s Rot From Within"
description: "A worrying percentage of European publics don’t want to honor the fundamental tenet of the Atlantic alliance."
date: "2015-08-06"
authors:
  - name: "Bruce Stokes"
    job_title: "Former Director, Global Economic Attitudes"
    link: "https://www.pewresearch.org/staff/bruce-stokes/"
url: "https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2015/08/06/natos-rot-from-within/"
---

# NATO’s Rot From Within

*Special to [Foreign Policy](http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/08/06/natos-rot-from-within/)*

At the 1949 [signing ceremony](http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/09/opinion/foreign-affairs-porgy-bess-nato.html) for the Washington Treaty that created NATO, a band played show tune selections from George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, including “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”

Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, what NATO itself [calls](http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_110496.htm) the cornerstone of the alliance, commits members to come to each other’s defense. Sixty-six years after NATO’s creation, a recent Pew Research Center survey of people in nine NATO nations, representing the lion’s share of NATO defense spending, suggests public commitment to Article 5 “ain’t necessarily so.”

At a time of tensions with Russia not seen since the Cold War, many publics in the Western alliance are divided in their support for a potential military confrontation with Moscow over its territorial ambitions. To [paraphrase](http://history1900s.about.com/od/churchillwinston/a/Iron-Curtain.htm) Winston Churchill, NATO’s challenges are now not just “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” but at home.

*Read more at [Foreign Policy](http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/08/06/natos-rot-from-within/)*