In the latest in a
long line of newly-invented “impeachable offenses,” President Trump has
pondered the worthiness of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). For
daring to even question continued US membership in a defunct 70-year-old
organization, the FBI openeda criminal investigation on
President Trump.
“Is the president
actually a Russian agent?” wondered officials at the highest levels of the FBI
and the Department of Justice. These people are crazy, which we’ve known for a
while, but aside from that President Trump has raised a great question: What
good is NATO anyway?
Wouldn’t it be good to
do a review of alliances that America is still in, now that everyone who made
the original deal has been dead for several decades? Americans were still
paying a 3% tax on their long-distance phone bills in 2006 which was ostensibly
supposed to be paying for the Spanish-American War. That conflict ended in
1898, but no one in Washington ever thinks, “Hey, that’s dumb so we should stop
doing it.”
Having the benefit of
hindsight 20/20, we should be able to take a look at NATO in 2019 and decide
whether it’s worth preserving. No one in the European Union seems to value it.
They just adore the
steady flow of cash from the American taxpayers to pay for their defense. Most
European countries are worried about staving off populist uprisings in their
own countries right now, rather than worrying about some imminent attack from
Russia.
It’s hard for the
French government to worry about Montenegro when the Yellow Vests are
destroying all their speed cameras and setting cars on fire.
NATO was formed as an
alliance in 1949 so that the United States could flex its muscle and prevent
the Soviet Union from overrunning Western Europe. That was a real threat at the
time.
Declassified KGB files
now have historians rewriting the books for World War II, since it appears that
Stalin provoked Hitler into that war to begin with. But the Soviet Union fell
apart in 1992.
That threat has been
gone for 27 years and counting. The Russia that exists today is not the
Soviet Union of old.
Even if Vladimir
Putin wanted to invade Western Europe, he doesn’t have the
military strength to do it (and he’s given no indication that he wants to do
it).
Donald Trump has
wisely prevented NATO from welcoming Ukraine into NATO, ending a provocation
supported by Hillary Clinton and the neocons that could have led
to war with the Russians.
A lot of people are
mistakenly under the impression that America is obligated to respond with
nuclear weapons in the event of a Russian attack on a NATO ally. If Russia were
to send tanks into Latvia, the United States would turn their country into a
smoking pile of radioactive rubble in response. This is false.
President John F.
Kennedy’s administration ended that policy in 1961. As Angelo Codevilla of the
Hoover Institute has pointed out, NATO has effectively been a “Potemkin
village” for the 58 years that have passed since that policy change. So again:
What is the point of NATO?
It was an alliance to
defend against a threat that no longer exists (the Soviet Union). NATO has
pretty much been fully funded thanks to the largesse of the American taxpayers
for all these years.
European contributions
have historically ranged from 10% to 30% of NATO’s budget, with Americans
paying the rest. As President Trump pointed out in 2017, Germany now spends
billions of dollars purchasing energy from Russia – yet wants America to
continue paying to defend against Russia. Shouldn’t Russia fall more into the
“ally” column for Germany when they’re doing that much business with them?
NATO is also supposed
to be a two-way street. But what are European countries doing to help America
in Afghanistan? There are a few Brits there, but not surprisingly, NATO did not
come to help out America in any significant fashion in Iraq or Afghanistan.
(But boy were they eager to help Hillary with Libya! Say, how did that work
out?)
Maybe there is some
purpose for NATO that could be worked out if people were willing to sit down
and talk honestly about it. But it’s clear that NATO no longer serves its
original purpose.
It might not be
necessary to scrap it entirely, but until someone comes up with a better idea,
that’s starting to look more and more attractive.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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