Summit of the unwilling

You must have heard the phrase "back to the future." Nothing else could better describe my feelings while following the NATO summit in Brussels on May 25, which President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also attended.

Just as in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, NATO took the decision to contribute more centrally to the fight against terrorism (i.e. ISIL) at this summit. Another coincidence is that ISIL made a bomb attack in the United Kingdom, Manchester, prior to the summit, just as al-Qaeda had attacked London in the aftermath of Sept. 11.

But don't fall for the similarities. Neither NATO is the same nor is the world as it was in 2001. Moreover, NATO's contribution to counter-terrorism will not be same either. 

The very next day after al-Qaeda attacked the U.S. on Sept. 11, NATO invoked its Article stating that an armed attack against one of its member states should be considered an attack against all members. Based on this ground, the coalition pioneered by the U.S. intervened in Afghanistan, which was considered to be the main base of al-Qaeda.  

After that came Iraq. U.S. President George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq based on the excuse that Iraq's President Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Yet this time NATO didn't stand by Washington. In particular, France and Germany opposed the intervention upon which U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made the distinction between "old and new Europe." According to this distinction, the European countries supporting the U.S.'s Iraq policy were the "new Europe." 

Afterwards Bush established a "coalition of the willing" composed of 49 countries, which invaded Iraq in March 2003. In other words, this intervention was conducted by individual states without the...