After 75 years, it's time for NATO to pass into the mists of time
It no longer has a rational, justifiable or safe mission
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the international clown and conman who -has managed to extract billions of dollars in guilt payments from the West to continue the war with Russia, reiterated again last week his demand that Ukraine become a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which is precisely why that war began in the first place. In July, what is always dubbed as the most successful military alliance in history, met in Washington to celebrate its 75th anniversary. As this bloated organization met to celebrate its past successes and ignore the current idiocy of having 32 member states, it would have been an appropriate opportunity to acknowledge that NATO has for decades now been a military alliance without a clear, desirable or safe objective and should have been dissolved at about the same time that the Warsaw Pact.
Nobody present suggested that this notion is not only absurd and provocative but impossible. Just as it is equally absurd right now and impossible to give US missiles to Ukraine so it can fire these projectiles directly into Russian territory and invite a nuclear retaliation.
There were no calls for NATO to stop expanding or that this once-great military alliance that has become a club of fools has become not an instrument of peace and security but of war and instability.
That wasn't on the agenda anymore than the conviction that the United States doesn’t need NATO for its own security and should be pursuing an America First doctrine to eschew European alliances.
Yet NATO has become a historical oddity, an organization without a reason to exist except to sustain the careers of trough-feeding bureaucrats. It’s as anachronistic as the Austro-Hungarian Empire just before its dissolution after the First World War.
Like that bygone kingdom, NATO continues to celebrate its past and is marking its 75th anniversary this year. But it is time to say goodbye and amen. Time to shutter the windows and close up shop because this gang of knaves simply has no good or justifiable reason to exist.
That’s not an easy statement for me to make because no one believed more strongly in the need and efficacy of NATO than this writer.
But history moves on. Eras end and organizations that both defined and shaped those eras must die with them.
Yet NATO has become a historical oddity, an organization without a reason to exist except to sustain the careers of trough-feeding bureaucrats. It’s as anachronistic as the Austro-Hungarian Empire just before its dissolution after the First World War.
It wasn’t just Secretary of State James Baker who reassured Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev on Feb. 9, 1990 that NATO would expand “not one inch eastward.”
So did George Bush, Sr. As did German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. And French President Francois Mitterand. Oh yes, let’s not forget that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher also lent her assurances.
Gorbachev had learned to like and trust President Ronald Reagan. He believed Reagan, after a career of anti-communism, was willing to find some compromise with the Soviet Union in the interest of world peace and saving a few dollars purchasing a supply of nuclear warheads that kept increasing yet could never be used without consigning the globe to oblivion.
He trusted Baker. He thought he could trust the West, even as he saw the demise of the Soviet Union as clear as the horizon on a sunny prairie morning.
That’s why he dissolved the Warsaw Pact on July 1, 1991. He could see the proverbial writing on the wall and understood that history had passed by this alliance of Soviet satellite that a new chapter in European and world history was about to be written and the Cold War was over.
It’s a shame that the United States forgot that vision soon after Baker made his famous pledge. It’s more the pity that NATO today cannot see that it has become an obsolescent alliance without a discernible military objective, other than to foment war with Russia.
Put simply, with 32 members, NATO is not a military alliance so much as it is a ticking time bomb. With the treaty’s Article 5 insisting that an attack on one member state is an attack on all, that increases the risk and probability of war astronomically as virtually every European state has joined the team. The result has not been any enhancement of collective security but the rising certainty of collective suicide. Do Americans really want to go to war because the frontiers of Slovakia are threatened?
Do they want to go to war because Russia does not want Ukraine to become a member?
It is amazing how the Biden administration and much of Congress remains oblivious to why Russia objects to Ukraine joining NATO. Can they not recall the massive pushback from the United States when the Soviet Union planted nuclear missiles in Cuba, within striking distance of Washington?
NATO has become the symbol of America’s mistaken quest for foreign wars everywhere, all the time. I know. I wrote some of the talking points while deployed as a public affairs officer in Tuza, Bosnia. NATO’s action in the former Yugoslavia was a test to see if the alliance could reimagine itself as something other than the chief container of Soviet communism and the protector of Western Europe.
The Cold War was over after all and NATO should have been over with it. But you can’t kill that much bureaucracy overnight and so the war planners and policy makers went to work on retooling the alliance for those “interesting times” of the post-Cold War world. NATO would become an organization dedicated to “peacemaking” and insert itself wherever it could to settle conflicts.
Put simply, with 32 members, NATO is not a military alliance so much as it is a ticking time bomb. With the treaty’s Article 5 insisting that an attack on one member state is an attack on all, that increases the risk and probability of war astronomically as virtually every European state has joined the team. The result has not been any enhancement of collective security but the rising certainty of collective suicide.
It has been a recipe for disaster and unending wars around the world as NATO and the United States decided it had both the right and the moral authority to intervene wherever and whenever it deemed appropriate.
Strangely, the United States struggled to maintain some kind of stable relationship with the USSR throughout the history of that despotic regime but it can’t be bothered to even talk to Russian President Vladimir Putin right now. It was an ally of Russia in the Second World War despite it being led by one of the worst mass murderers known to man, Joseph Stalin. Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. recognized that as much as it loathed communism, a nuclear war would be worse, so it found ways to communicate and cooperate with its arch rival. Lifetime anti-communist President Richard Nixon even established detente with our nemesis.
But today, as America and NATO encroach ever closer to Russian territory and other NATO member states like Britain and France have talked stupidly about sending troops to Ukraine to fight Russia, there is little extant fear of nuclear war, even though we are closer to it now than we have been since the Cuban Missile Crisis, previously mentioned, in October 1962.
America had a golden opportunity with the collapse of the Soviet Union to welcome a new Russia into the commonwealth of nations as it tried to embrace both democratic government and a free economy. But the U.S. kept telling itself that winning the Cold War meant the endless evisceration of Russia and the ever enlarging hegemony of American power around the world.
U.S. administration after administration convinced themselves that Russia without communism was somehow worse than the old Bolshevik slave state and that arms reduction treaties could be freely abrogated without so much as a twinge of guilt or regret.
What a slap in the face to Reagan and Gorbachev who believed they had achieved so much not just for their own time but for the future.
NATO continues to blow any opportunity for world peace by reading talking points that are 40 years old and insisting that Russia is operating from a script written in 1939 by Adolf Hitler.
But today, as America and NATO encroach ever closer to Russian territory and other NATO member states like Britain and France have talked stupidly about sending troops to Ukraine to fight Russia, there is little extant fear of nuclear war, even though we are closer to it now than we have been since the Cuban Missile Crisis, previously mentioned, in October 1962.
Consider what we have lost in the following personal anecdote.
In 1996, I had Christmas dinner with the U.S. Army in Bosnia. The mess hall contained about 50 long tables and benches for the personnel deployed there. I sat with three soldiers of the Green Berets, hoping to hear some good stories that I could send through the NATO public affairs network.
Across from us sat three soldiers with the Russian special forces. In broken English, they attempted to communicate with their counterparts across the table.
Then it occurred to me. This was the story. Here were three men from Russia and three from America who had been – until about five years earlier – trained and committed to killing each other in any war that might occur between their two countries.
How nice, I thought, that these former combatants were able to dine together on this Christmas Day and share turkey, stuffing, mash potatoes and goodwill.
It heralded a much brighter future but what has been crudely termed “neocon” foreign policy got in the way. Ego got in the way. Power impeded commonsense.. The Military Industrial Complex reasserted itself and found other ways to break the bank on military spending.
With the world as close to world war now as it was in July 1914 when other alliance systems insisted military conflict was the only solution to diplomatic problems, it is time to say no.
And it is time for NATO to go.
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Thank you David. I agree with this disconnect and support the ripple effect. OPEC+ would be one wealth transfer we could do without too. Maybe someone will discuss why we decommissioned the petroleum refineries in Canada, like PetroCan in Oakville. China can make one in a week and creates independence from these self-proclaimed gods. Thank you again. I hope you stay well good sir.
Yes NATO and the WHO and the UN, all need to quietly go away! agreed, we don't need these types of organizations. They just lead to control!