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Kurtz Whines About NATO

Yes, this failure of the NATO alliance is nothing short of scandalous.  ~Stanley Kurtz O, treachery!  O, villainy!  Where’s New Europe when you need it, right?  Perhaps if NATO had not long been a glorified cover for justifying continued American presence in Europe and serving as our way of Washington referring to America as a […]

Yes, this failure of the NATO alliance is nothing short of scandalous.  ~Stanley Kurtz

O, treachery!  O, villainy!  Where’s New Europe when you need it, right?  Perhaps if NATO had not long been a glorified cover for justifying continued American presence in Europe and serving as our way of Washington referring to America as a “European power” and perhaps if NATO had had a purpose after 1991 that did not involve bombing Serbs that required the kind of preparedness that we now wish the Europeans had we would not now be in the present predicament of NATO shortchanging the mission in Afghanistan.  You cannot guide national policies towards lower and lower levels of military expenditure, all the while preaching to your people that military solutions never accomplish anything and then expect to have public opinion robustly behind ongoing overseas deployments to war zones. 

Being the hegemon and protector of western Europe came at a price–the Europeans handed over the bulk of the defense work to us, and set about spending their money and their energy on other things.  This was a perfectly acceptable way to run an alliance of partner nations, but it was an awfully silly way to run an empire–we should have made clear that their obligations were going to increase, not decrease, after the USSR collapsed.  Then they might have dissolved NATO when the getting was good.  Now the Europeans are stuck with the embarrassment of being members of a military alliance that cannot or will not fully function as members of a military alliance.  Mr. Kurtz, still stunned by the betrayal (O tempora! O mores!), asks:

If NATO cannot fight here, what good is it? 

But NATO was perfectly willing to bombard civilians from on-high in Yugoslavia.  Apparently we just didn’t use the right kind of propaganda to win over all the governments to commit to the fight; perhaps if we started making up stories about genocide in Afghanistan, as we did for Kosovo, more countries would come through.  But perhaps–and this is the real kicker for the warmongers who have fought for NATO expansion at every stage–NATO should have ceased to exist long ago, and maybe it should not have become little more than a shell for anti-Russian political encirclement and maybe it should not be fighting anywhere outside of Europe anyway since it was a defensive, anti-Soviet alliance!

It is unfortunate that we outsourced the mission most vital to our national security to our European allies.  It is a shame that we have committed the bulk of our land forces to an irrelevant, pointless campaign that shows no sign of ending while leaving the allies to pick up the slack in the more vital theater.  But that is not NATO’s fault.  We all know who is responsible for that decision. 

This shows us that, as helpful as the British, Germans, Danes and Canadians have been in Afghanistan, most of NATO is made up of dependencies when it comes to military security that cannot keep up their end of the bargain.  That is not a surprise, and has become more and more the case as we have brought in nations that have dismally outdated military equipment and insignificant military budgets (then again, why should Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia bother with large military budgets?).  While bringing in allies with dismally outdated equipment gives defense contractors and companies something to do, it doesn’t really help very much if the peoples of those countries joined NATO because they thought it was a kind of democracy-prestige club (“all the cool democracies are in NATO, Mom, can I join, too?”) rather than a military alliance that would require them to fight.  In fairness, why should most of these states–almost half of which were on the other side during the Cold War–feel particularly obligated to us now?  We might have retained Turkish goodwill, but we thought dictating terms and outraging public opinion with the Iraq war were better ideas.  We can be confident that NATO’s “failure” here is another unpleasant consequence of the Iraq war.

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