A month ago, as opponents of this weekend’s NATO summit in Chicago and the civic authorities hosting it each laid plans against the other’s order of battle, the Chicago chapter of the National Writers Union spoke up for the First Amendment rights of the protesters. “In 1968,” an NWU statement began, “the Democratic Party came to the City to nominate a president. What happened then became a part of Chicago’s history: a massive public uprising of protest against an unjust war and a corrupt political system that created a massive local reaction within the City’s police department. Violence and chaos resulted.”
The Tribune has identified the NATO summit as one of the year’s biggest local stories and thrown all its resources into the coverage. Last Friday’s page-one story was a report on measures the FBI is taking to prevent terrorism. Sunday’s front page focused on the gathering protesters: “Confronting the logistics of travel, shelter, food and legal aid is activists’ first task.” Topping Monday’s page one was a story on decisions Loop businesses have made to keep employees home “to avoid potential headaches caused by NATO protesters.”
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“When the cold war ended,” the Economist reported, “European countries accounted for 34% of NATO’s military spending. Today that has fallen to 21%. . . . Realistically, then, NATO will have to content itself with doing less with less. That need not be disastrous. The dream of a ‘global NATO,’ that recruits partners from all over the world and intervenes wherever trouble rears its head, flowered a few years ago, but has since wilted. Once its troops are out of Afghanistan, the alliance should revert to its regional roots. However, given America’s new semi-detachment and Europe’s economic austerity, there is a clear danger that ‘doing less’ rapidly becomes ‘doing nothing’. That would be a catastrophe.”
Occasional articles in the Chicago press have regarded the summit in a wider context. In the Sun-Times Monday the context was Washington: Lynn Sweet, the one-woman Washington bureau, considered the political risks to President Obama if the summit goes badly and concluded there were few. “As political time goes, the presidential election is light-years away,” wrote Sweet. “Mayor Rahm Emanuel has much more at stake in the summit.”
