Barack Obama arrived in Strasbourg on Friday for this weekend’s NATO summit enthusing about the military organization, which he described at a joint press conference with French President Nicolas Sarkozy as “the most successful alliance in modern history.” That it may have been. But Obama’s praise contrasts starkly with the scathing assessment of the state of NATO, now 60 years old, by European military analysts, who say that the gap in military capability between the United States and Europe has grown so big that in some places battlefield communication between NATO forces and their US allies has become difficult
