Posted on 01/18/2019 10:15:01 AM PST by Kaslin
"Treaties are like roses and young girls. They last while they last."
So said President Charles De Gaulle, who in 1966 ordered NATO to vacate its Paris headquarters and get out of France.
NATO this year celebrates a major birthday. The young girl of 1966 is no longer young. The alliance is 70 years old.
And under this aging NATO today, the U.S. is committed to treat an attack on any one of 28 nations from Estonia to Montenegro to Romania to Albania as an attack on the United States.
The time is ripe for a strategic review of these war guarantees to fight a nuclear-armed Russia in defense of countries across the length of Europe that few could find on a map.
Apparently, President Donald Trump, on trips to Europe, raised questions as to whether these war guarantees comport with vital U.S. interests and whether they could pass a rigorous cost-benefit analysis.
The shock of our establishment that Trump even raised this issue in front of Europeans suggests that the establishment, frozen in the realities of yesterday, ought to be made to justify these sweeping war guarantees.
Celebrated as "the most successful alliance in history," NATO has had two histories. Some of us can yet recall its beginnings.
In 1948, Soviet troops, occupying eastern Germany all the way to the Elbe and surrounding Berlin, imposed a blockade on the city.
The regime in Prague was overthrown in a Communist coup. Foreign minister Jan Masaryk fell, or was thrown, from a third-story window to his death. In 1949, Stalin exploded an atomic bomb.
As the U.S. Army had gone home after V-E Day, the U.S. formed a new alliance to protect the crucial European powers -- West Germany, France, Britain, Italy. Twelve nations agreed that an attack on one would be treated as an attack on them all.
Cross the Elbe and you are at war with us, including the U.S. with its nuclear arsenal, Stalin was, in effect, told. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops returned to Europe to send the message that America was serious.
Crucial to the alliance was the Yalta line dividing Europe agreed to by Stalin, FDR and Churchill at the 1945 Crimean summit on the Black Sea.
U.S. presidents, even when monstrous outrages were committed in Soviet-occupied Europe, did not cross this line into the Soviet sphere.
Truman did not send armored units up the highway to Berlin. He launched an airlift to break the Berlin blockade. Ike did not intervene to save the Hungarian rebels in 1956. JFK confined his rage at the building of the Berlin Wall to the rhetorical: "Ich bin ein Berliner."
LBJ did nothing to help the Czechs when, before the Democratic convention in 1968, Leonid Brezhnev sent Warsaw Pact tank armies to crush the Prague Spring.
When the Solidarity movement of Lech Walesa was crushed in Gdansk, Reagan sent copy and printing machines. At the Berlin Wall in 1988, he called on Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall."
Reagan never threatened to tear it down himself.
But beginning in 1989, the Wall was torn down, Germany was united, the Red Army went home, the Warsaw Pact dissolved, the USSR broke apart into 15 nations, and Leninism expired in its birthplace.
As the threat that had led to NATO disappeared, many argued that the alliance created to deal with that threat should be allowed to fade away, and a free and prosperous Europe should now provide for its own defense.
It was not to be. The architect of Cold War containment, Dr. George Kennan, warned that moving NATO into Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics would prove a "fateful error."
This, said Kennan, would "inflame the nationalistic and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion" and "restore the atmosphere of the cold war in East-West relations." Kennan was proven right.
America is now burdened with the duty to defend Europe from the Atlantic to the Baltic, even as we face a far greater threat in China, with an economy and population 10 times that of Russia.
And we must do this with a defense budget that is not half the share of the federal budget or the GDP that Eisenhower and Kennedy had.
Trump is president today because the American people concluded that our foreign policy elite, with their endless interventions where no vital U.S. interest was imperiled, had bled and virtually bankrupted us, while kicking away all of the fruits of our Cold War victory.
Halfway into Trump's term, the question is whether he is going to just talk about halting Cold War II with Russia, about demanding that Europe pay for its own defense, and about bringing the troops home -- or whether he is going to act upon his convictions.
Our foreign policy establishment is determined to prevent Trump from carrying out his mandate. And if he means to carry out his agenda, he had best get on with it.
Get out!! It has no purpose but global governing of your life. Russia has 145,000,000 population. We have 345,000,000 We need them as ally against China. Socialist loved communist Russia— now they use Russia as a bogus boogie man against Trump ( but fail) . Get out of NATO!
Since Kosovo, NATO has been doing the Saudis’ bidding.
NATO should have declared victory, and disbanded when the Soviet Union fell 27 years ago.
Its become another permanent bureaucracy and deep state power-control tool. By backstopping their defense, the USA is also subsidizing European leftist, multi-cult and social-engineering schemes.
The Soviet threat was secondary.
Rethink NATO?
We should give notice that we’re out, no matter what, in 10 years.
When NATO expanded to countries like Romania and Bulgaria it lost me and most thinking people. When there were allusions to bringing in Georgia and Ukraine they should have lost all Americans.
Sheer insanity.
Yeah, lets have a nuclear war because Russia reclaims Ukraine and/or Georgia./s
Why did we bomb Christians on Easter in Kosovo to implant illegal alien moslems from Albania in Kosovo? Any clue?m What were we doing there?
We basically allowed France to keep their Indochina colonies in exchange for them joining NATO.
Big mistake on multiple fronts.
NATO is a subsidiary of what Eisenhower called the “Military Industrial Complex” to keep conflicts going worldwide and to insure the profit margin on the war manufacturing machinery.
Cool. What does that mean?
We don’t need to think anymore. It’s time to leave. It sucks our wealth & is not needed.
“At Age 70, Time to Rethink NATO”
I’ll get back to you next year.
The U.S. didn’t join NATO to protect Europe from the Soviets. We joined NATO to protect Europe from Germany.
Hello, friend.
OMG! I’m older than NATO!
“10 years”
The commitment needs to be made and completed within Trump’s Presidency. To wait 10 years would give the swamp a chance to start a war just to prove NATO is needed.
The European countries weak on defense because we are doing it for them need to just pretend there is a war on the horizon and build their armed forces up accordingly as quickly as they can. There’s no reason they cannot do this.
I’d say give them a years notice of the pullout start, with completion at the end of the second year.
We should have withdrawn when the Cold War ended in 1991. NATO is the Anglo-Saxons + the Poles and a whole bunch of useless leaches - the Germans foremost amongst them.
We know we cannot count on them. The threat the alliance was intended to stop no longer exists. Withdraw. Bring the Boys Home.
THIS DAY IN HISTORY 1949 Federal Republic of Germany is established
The Federal Republic of Germany (popularly known as West Germany) is formally established as a separate and independent nation. This action marked the effective end to any discussion of reuniting East and West Germany.
In the period after World War II, Germany was divided into four occupation zones, with the British, French, Americans, and Soviets each controlling one zone. The city of Berlin was also divided in a like fashion. This arrangement was supposed to be temporary, but as Cold War animosities began to harden, it became increasingly evident that the division between the communist and non-communist controlled sections of Germany and Berlin would become permanent. In May 1946, the United States halted reparation payments from West Germany to the Soviet Union. In December, the United States and Great Britain combined their occupation zones into what came to be known as Bizonia. France agreed to become part of this arrangement, and in May 1949, the three zones became one.
On May 23, the West German Parliamentary Council met and formally declared the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany. Although Konrad Adenauer, the president of the council and future president of West Germany, proudly proclaimed, “Today a new Germany arises,” the occasion was not a festive one. Many of the German representatives at the meeting were subdued, for they had harbored the faint hope that Germany might be reunified. Two communist members of the council refused to sign the proclamation establishing the new state.
The Soviets reacted quickly to the action in West Germany. In October 1949, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was officially announced. These actions in 1949 marked the end of any talk of a reunified Germany. For the next 41 years, East and West Germany served as symbols of the divided world, and of the Cold War animosities between the Soviet Union and the United States. In 1990, with Soviet strength ebbing and the Communist Party in East Germany steadily losing its grip on power, East and West Germany were finally reunited as one nation.
Please keep us Canadians in. :) But demand our government actually fund the military like it matters to them.
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