Posted on 08/07/2014 9:51:21 AM PDT by Kaslin
ISTANBUL -- April marked the 65th birthday of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, formed at the height of the Cold War to stop the huge postwar Red Army from overrunning Western Europe.
NATO in 1949 had only 12 members, comprising Western Europe, Canada and the United States. Its original mission was simple. According to the alliance's first secretary general, Lord Hastings Ismay, NATO was formed "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down."
Western Europeans were terrified of the Soviet Union, which had just gobbled up all of Eastern Europe. They feared that the American army would go home after World War II, just as it had after World War I, consistent with its isolationist past. And the war-torn democracies were scared that Germany might quickly rebound to prompt yet another European war for the fourth time in less than a century.
Sixty-five years later, the Cold War has been won and has now been over for a quarter-century. Germany is quite up. The Russians are not so out. America seems not to want to be in anywhere.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
He does. And he's in for a nasty shock.
Rome paid for peace and it killed them. We have a responsibility to ourselves first.
Actually sixth, if you count the Danish War of 1864 and the Seven Weeks' War of 1866, both caused by Prussian aggressiveness. Germany post-1871 was just an enlarged Prussia.
What NATO?
Southern flank of the USSR... but Turkey used to be a more secular state then.
They "jumped the shark" long before that...
the infowarrior
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