I have said many times before that NATO (not Nato, BBC!) has outlived its usefulness. It is after all the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and as such should stick to its neighbourhood. Afghanistan is an exception since the 9/11 attacks were an attack on a member nation, and Article 5 covers that quite distinctly.
Rebuilding Afghanistan was never in the agreement and I object to it as a bottomless pit for blood and treasure. Certainly routing al Queda and putting the boot to the Taliban government neutralized the immediate threat (as much as reasonably possible) and could be counted as effective payback under the circumstances. Iraq was most certainly NOT a NATO concern, and has done much to put the USA in the situation where they need to be guilting other Alliance countries into stepping up.
Regional confederations of nations with aligned interests are coming together, which is a good thing for them. America is worse than broke and entirely too beholden to the Chinese holdings of US debt and currency to be counted on in South-East Asia, for example. That said, no combination to be found around the South China Sea can stand up to Chinese strong-arm tactics over its ludicrous claimed Exclusive Economic Zone , assuming that China continues to disregard world opinion about it's blatant expansionism.
One can of course compare what China is doing on it's way up with what the US did, and a lot of it is standard Great Power manoeuvring. The South China Sea stuff however is baldly hegemonic and there is no way to spin that one as anything other than screwing over everyone smaller than them in the neighbourhood.
The world is adjusting to the balance of power, much as it did 20 years ago. China is not quite a Superpower, but it's on its way up as the Americans contract, and this leaves local vacuums that China will happily fill. China however is not a monolith, and the cracks are plastered over at the moment.
So, should NATO get involved in a dispute over the Spratly Islands? Certainly what happens in that part of the world is significant to international trade, but the Europeans are almost as boned as the USA, and in any event shy about shooting at anyone who can shoot back. I don't see Canada getting into that, nor any reason why we should. If the Americans think we should get involved just because they are, I don't see it that way, and I don't think the Canadian government (and certainly not the people) will either. Multiply that by all of the NATO signatories, and you have a problem with Mr. Panetta's position.
Piracy in the Indian Ocean? Sure, that's something that affects almost everyone, and doesn't drag us into geopolitical struggles. Peace support (not Peacekeeping!) in Africa, Company to Battalion scale? That sort of thing also can work, provided the area in question has any reasonable chance of being salvaged.
You may see a trend here: smaller countries like Canada can do the smaller stuff, but we have to have a good reason to do so if it's not part of our treaty obligations. If that's what the Americans want, they might get it, albeit appealing to NATO for it renders completely meaningless the terms of that organization. There is this other thing called the UN that was designed to do this sort of job, but we've seen how well that works. Time for everyone to re-evaluate their national interests and possibly re-combine into more relevant organizations to meet those.
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