NATO Expansion Would Be an Epic ‘Fateful Error’(1997)

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first NATO supreme allied commander. Shortly after assuming that post, he wrote these words in February 1951:

“If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project [NATO] will have failed.”

One can only wonder at his reaction today if he learned that 46 years later, the United States was the dominant force in a plan not just to continue our powerful military presence there but to enlarge NATO’s responsibilities and increase U.S. costs and risks in Europe. If his granddaughter, Susan Eisenhower, is any guide to his reaction, he would not be pleased. She gathered an impressive group of 49 military, political and academic leaders who joined her in signing an open letter to President Clinton on June 26 that terms the plan to expand NATO “a policy error of historic proportions.”

Why have so many knowledgeable and responsible authorities, in addition to the letter’s signatories, raised powerful objections to NATO expansion? Diplomat-historian George F. Kennan perhaps said it most clearly when he wrote earlier this year in a newspaper commentary: “Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected . . . to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first NATO supreme allied commander. Shortly after assuming that post, he wrote these words in February 1951:

“If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project [NATO] will have failed.”

Ike was President until 1961, what the hell did he do about getting the US troops out of Europe {I was one that was stationed in Germany from 60-62}.

I never knew that Ike said that, but he sure was part of the 'failure' of NATO.

NATO, like the UN is a part of the US welfare system for the 'poor countries' of the world.

Let Uncle Sugar do {pay for} it.

But it’s all water under the bridge now.

Yes, a tremendous opportunity was lost in the 1990s regarding Russia.

Remember how laughable it was when Clinton put Al Gore in charge of our Russia relationship?

I can imagine Al Gore probably got his chakra released often by expensive hot Russian masseuses, but if so that was pretty much his only accomplishments in that position.

But today we are where we are now. The Eastern European countries who were once controlled by Moscow but now have self-government from Estonia to Latvia to Lithuania to Poland to Hungary and all the others have a well-justified fear that Moscow may once again work to deny them their right to self-government.

No one who heard Putin’s crude paranoid Hitler-like speech in which he suggested that Ukraine and Belarus have no legitimate right to even exist as countries could say it is unreasonable for these countries to be worried.

Maybe before the speech some could argue that Putin just wanted to help find a peaceful solution to the hostilities between the LPR/DPR separatists and the Ukrainian government, but not after that speech.

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first NATO supreme allied commander. Shortly after assuming that post, he wrote these words in February 1951:

“If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project [NATO] will have failed.”

Eisenhower did not have the hindsight of past events looking back in 1961. He could not see the course events would take that would lead to his conclusions about NATO being wrong. 1961 was the year of the Berlin airlift as the Soviets tried to choke off western access to the divided capital of divided Germany. That crisis was preceded four years earlier, in 1958 (7 years after Eisenhower spoke), by the Soviets stating they no longer accepted the terms of the Potsdam agreements. The Soviets still occupied one half of Germany, all of Poland as well as other rump Soviet installed regimes across "Eastern Europe". Eisenhower must have falsely imagined that the Soviets would become peaceful after 1951. If so, it was a false hope. It was also a false hope that France and Germany would resolve their differences sufficiently to provide 100% of a common defense against the Soviets (France for a long time after WWI was opposed to Germany being reunified). Yet, things would have been worse if the U.S. - the friendly giant neutral outsider - did not continue to be the glue that held NATO and western Europe together militarily. I could have accepted the Eisenhower premise after the fall of the Soviet Union, but then again I am not 100% convinced that Russian behavior would have been hugely different. Why? What we saw as a Communist Empire in the Soviet Union, and thought it was dissolved when the Soviet Union fell apart, Vladimir Putin saw as a Russian Empire that, yes, had expanded under the Soviets, but to him its nature was always more Russian than Soviet. Putin, who was KGB head in Germany when the Soviet empire fell apart, and his view of what is "rightfully" belonging to "mother Russia" is more important today that anything Eisenhower said or imagined in 1951. Eisenhower could not foresee how a Liberated Eastern Europe , from Poland, up to Lithuania, Latvia & Estonia, across to Ukraine, down through Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, Serbia & Bulgaria would view Russian attempts to revive its old empire in 2022. Maybe Eisenhower falsely thought they would want to join Russia instead of as they have, joining their western democratic neighbors. Maybe the "failure" of NATO was in a false belief by some (like Eisenhower), that the military alliance in addition to standing against the Soviet union would also revive Europe militarily to stand on its own. That view failed to realize that military policy by itself was not going to bridge all that still divided western Europe and some of what still divides it today. Only today, the growing division in Europe is in former "Eastern" European states more willing that west Germany to take a strong stand against Vladimir Putin's Russia. They seem to have a greater sense of their freedoms, that are only 30 or so years old, than do some western Europeans that have had their freedoms much longer, and that includes some that have embarked on a Marxist path of reneging on those freedoms today. I think Eisenhower was wrong and at most he should not have thought he or anyone could predict events in Europe ten years down the road. and not being able to predict them suggests it was wrong to put the blame on a "failure" of NATO if things did not work out as Eisenhower imagined they should.

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