While in London two weeks ago, I visited with Dr. Liam Fox, MP, the Conservative Party's "shadow defense minister." We spoke about Iraq, Iran's nuclear program and NATO. The NATO meetings this week in Riga are important because NATO's operations in Afghanistan are stretching its resources thin, and there - even now - insufficient cooperation between nations' forces, reducing their effectiveness. I asked Dr. Fox why.

He said that one basic problem is the French, whose intransigence in cooperation with NATO is an historic fact. But more than the French problem, most of the nations that provide forces to the NATO operation don't really operate as a unified force. He said, "More of a worry (than French intransigence) is the fact that we have 37 countries in Afghanistan but with more than 70 operating caveats. The [NATO] Secretary General's view is not that our need was for more troops but the need to be able to use the troops that are there already." The Brits view themselves part of a NATO force, as do the Americans, but other nations' take the opposite view. Fox said, "The Germans, Italians and the Spanish are not as maneuverable and deployable for our commanders as they need to be to make an effective NATO operation." This lack of cooperation in the biggest out-of-theater NATO operation bodes ill for NATO's future. NATO is facing a big challenge: the European Union's planned defense force. It would compete with NATO for resources, and would break the Atlantic relationship between Europe and the United States. Fox isn't in favor of it.

"NATO is really at an important crossroads here," Dr. Fox said. "We Conservatives still believe that our relationship with the United States is still the most important defense relationship that we have and to move away from that transatlantic defense identity towards a European defense identity would be a huge mistake for a number of reasons.

"Our European partners don't spend enough on defense...The idea that we would be able to make up for the protective defense umbrella that we get from a partnership with the United States would be laughable if it weren't tragic. Second reason is that, of course, there is no coherence in European foreign policy outlook as was shown adequately by the situation in the Balkans...Third, we could never see the EU take over a defense role because we couldn't accept a supranational body ever committing our troops to battle."

There is a value to NATO, Fox said, that goes beyond its charter as a military alliance. It has a "brand name" and reputation that puts it on a special level. Fox said, " In public opinion polls in the United Kingdom, NATO has the same...is regarded as having the same ability to confirm moral legitimacy as the United Nations has...NATO is regarded as a force that has not only moral but legal legitimacy."

Fox believes in the Atlantic partnership, and in NATO. Divorcing America from Europe - by action of either side - is, in his view, a bad idea. "American isolationism is a bad thing for the world. Like it or not, America is the global superpower and that position by itself confers duties as well as benefits," he said. One of these duties is to hold NATO together.

I hadn't appreciated that NATO's reputation was one that could, like the UN in so many American and European minds, be a source of international legitimacy for its actions. We should be thinking of NATO in those terms, and building - and rebuilding - its abilities to make best use of it.