A correct and urgent question is returning to the public discussion of U.S. foreign policy; namely, why the hell is our republic still in NATO. Trump rather oddly said that he would get out of the alliance if the European gang and Canada did not pay their fair share. Money, of course, should have little to do with propelling us to leave NATO. Commonsense, constitutional requirements, and genuine national interests are the key motivators for our departure.
The truth is that NATO never has stopped a war with Russia. Only the fact of mutually assured destruction via nuclear weapons turned that trick. If NATO did anything, it cold-bloodily provided a tripwire to ensure that a westward military move by Soviet forces would yield plenty of dead American troops in the war’s first hours. In response, as after Pearl Harbor, the patriotic adrenaline of Americans would flow in a torrent, leaving no time to scourge and hang U.S. leaders who signed such a useless and unconstitutional alliance, one that left the republic with no option but war. What American leader in his right mind would put Americans at risk of participating in a third — and final – world war, after the enormous amounts of blood, money, and degraded civil liberties that were spent saving the Europeans in two earlier world wars. In both wars, American interests would have been best served if we had politely but adamantly abstained from that pair of traditional and wearisome European blood-lettings.
Trump probably should not have said he would urge Russia to go after NATO when America gives the alliance the boot. This was unnecessary. Trump knows that Putin has made it pretty clear that he wants no part of Europe’s weak-kneed, atheistic, government-dependent, multicultural, and increasingly mongrel population, which, like too many Americans, is too cowardly to stand up and fight off domestic regimes that are stripping them of everything from their history, national pride, and work ethic, to their faith, localism, children, and heritage of liberty, much of which Putin himself has spent the past quarter-century trying to restore in Russia. Being a sharp lad, Putin also sees that the NATO nations and the United States are murdering themselves; why would Russia decide to get in the way of their accelerating self-destruction?
On this issue, Trump has also – intentionally or not – misled Americans. The United States should leave NATO for two reasons, neither of which is solely monetary.
–(a.) The first has to do national character. NATO has 28 countries that lack the national pride and sense of responsibility to pay and sacrifice for their own defense, and which have militaries that have long since proven they cannot fight worth a good damn. Like the U.S. military, they are led by woke generals who have grown rich, arrogant, and contemptuous of their troops by bending-over and obeying extravagantly wealthy politicians who hate the nation-state, and – with the flag officers’ help — weaken it at every turn. U.S. and NATO generals in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now as they do Israel’s bidding against the mighty Huthis, have demonstrated that they are nowhere near fit – physically or mentally — to win a war against even much-lesser enemies. Any U.S. funding for NATO since the fall of the Soviet Union has been wasted and or grifted by its European recipients and their generals. Money cannot buy or strengthen character.
–b.) America has played the nurse-maid and guardian of Europe’s drift toward decadence and authoritarianism since 1917. This assistance has not helped a lick in getting the elites of those states to regain their manliness, self-reliance, and a proud and stubborn sense of the importance of unflagging nationalism. I had a professor who once said that “Britain and probably all Europe died on the Somme in 1916, though the death will take long to recognize.” These days, America too is dying, and perhaps one day someone will accurately claim that “the republic died on the Rio Grande” from a suicide arranged by its grinning and depraved governing elite. Until the coroners confirm America’s own death, let us get out of NATO and let Europe fend for itself while its corpse stinks ever more strongly and its death is finally clear to all.
