The origin in 1949 of the security community linking both sides of the Atlantic can be traced to the need Western countries felt in the nascent Cold War for unity, at the initiative of the United States, to cope with threats from the eastern bloc led by the Soviet Union.

Surprisingly, however, one-third of NATO's history, the past 20 years, has occurred without the existence of the Warsaw Pact, its adversary.

Can the longevity of the pact itself be enough to justify its existence?

The governments and policy experts of NATO member states are all intent on trumpeting the value of the alliance's existence.

To be sure, it seems the transatlantic treaty arrangements have been institutionalized solidly enough to deflect the argument that the Cold War's end has made the alliance's existence meaningless.

Part of this institutionalization arises from the view that the European Union was immature, with deficiencies regarding security, and that the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe--currently called the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe--and the United Nations were too weak.

NATO also has been regarded as embodying values shared by the democracies that make up the transatlantic community, values that are envisioned to be potent enough to serve as a framework for incorporating and integrating emerging democracies in eastern Europe.

A closer look at the 20 years of the post-Cold War era, however, shows that although NATO did reinvigorate itself temporarily in the 1990s, skepticism has again arisen over the values of the security partnership, even to the extent of questioning the very point of NATO's existence.

Connected to this is the end of the unipolar world structure in which the United States was regarded as the world's sole superpower.

The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States signified that U.S. soil itself was vulnerable to assaults, which cast the nation in a role opposite to that which it usually plays, as an agent for dealing with problems beyond its shores. Washington found itself needing the help of other countries.

One need not detail the imbroglios of the Iraq war and the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, at this point. And Hurricane Katrina showed miserably the vulnerability of the United States to natural disasters. Then there is the recent global credit crunch that originated with the subprime loan debacle in the United States. This ongoing financial crisis is fundamentally different in nature from something like the 1997 Asian monetary crisis.

All these events show that the United States is no longer a country worth being modeled on.

Although U.S. President Barack Obama has been making what may be deliberate spectacles of diplomatic feats, the foundation of the American Empire has already been deeply eroded.

Given the empire has been stripped of its validity to "righteousness," an alteration of U.S.-European relations cannot be avoided.

The NATO summit talks in April in Strasbourg, France, were brimming with praise for Obama. But when it came to the issue of dispatching more troops to Afghanistan, which Obama referred to as a "touchstone" of NATO's unity, the contributions from the heads of European states effectively ended with perfunctory compliments for the new U.S. president.

While Washington is set to send 21,000 additional combatants to the terrorism-plagued country, only about 5,000 European troops are to be sent there, with 3,000 of them for short-term monitoring of an election scheduled in the summer. The rest will be in charge of civil affairs and not involved in combat missions.

In the background of all this is the majority of eligible voters in major European nations who are opposed to sending more troops to Afghanistan.

As the war in Afghanistan has become increasingly a war fought by the United States, one analyst has warned that the North American-European military alliance has been changing into something that could be called, at its best, a "coalition of the willing by default."

NATO, under these circumstances, is on the brink of becoming brain-dead.

The task of galvanizing afresh the alliance seems to be almost impossible even with the force of Obama's best possible endeavors.

*Endo is a fellow of the European University Institute and concurrently a professor at Hokkaido University.