Albania hailed by NATO

PARIS, June 13 – Albania was one of five NATO member countries that spent more than the agreed 2 percent of economic output on defense. The other four were the United States, Britain, France and Greece.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates called on the Atlantic allies of the U.S. to pay and do more to overcome the alliance’s military shortcomings.
The alliance has grappled with diverging internal views over whether NATO should be an instrument of “hard” combat missions– generally the U.S. view– or the preference among some in Europe for “soft” power, like humanitarian, development and peacekeeping.
Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall, NATO’s raison d’etre has been questioned. Now, with its hands in two military campaigns in Afghanistan and Libya, doubts about the alliance’s future have hit a new peak.
Founded in 1949, NATO was intended to counter the Red Menace of Stalin’s Soviet Union. While that threat is long gone, Gates and others say some of the alliance’s 28 member states– all European except for Canada and the U.S. — remain too comfortable under Washington’s security umbrella.