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Monday, August 11, 2014

NATO No More

Victor Davis Hanson argues that NATO is on the way out:

According to the alliance’s first secretary general, Lord Hastings Ismay, NATO was formed “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

Western Europeans were terrified of the Soviet Union, which had just gobbled up all of Eastern Europe. They feared that the American army would go home after World War II, just as it had after World War I, consistent with its isolationist past. And the war-torn democracies were scared that Germany might quickly rebound to prompt yet another European war for the fourth time in less than a century.

Sixty-five years later, the Cold War has been won and has now been over for a quarter-century. Germany is quite up. The Russians are not so out. America seems not to want to be in anywhere.


In other words, NATO has lost direction because the mission objective has become murky.

It is said that Putin fears provoking NATO. More likely he will soon seek to wreck it by deliberately bullying weak and distant NATO members like Estonia, over whose independence Europeans are unlikely to start a war.


Put in that context, Putin's actions over the last year start to make a lot of sense, do they not? He knows that NATO is wobbly, the United Nations is less effective than ever, (surprising to me, as I thought that impossible), and the Chinese are becoming cunning Asian versions of Yankee traders with dreams of empire. Europe and America have had enough of each other, like a couple who get back together every few years and have a brief, torrid affair before somebody's car gets the windows knocked out and there's a dead rabbit in the kitchen.

Putin knows all of this. He knows he doesn't have to start a war, all he has to do is orchestrate the break-up and then sell himself as the man on the white horse. As I said, he's a crafty bastard.

2 Comments:

Blogger The Mad Builder of Periwinkle said...

Unfortunately on our side we didn't get a Crafty Bastard; we got stuck with the Dumb Bastard. :/

11:53  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://cache2.asset-cache.net/gc/170986305-russian-president-vladimir-putin-horse-gettyimages.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=GkZZ8bf5zL1ZiijUmxa7QXh2dIESyS3WthIeq6HU3tcwaTreosr7mbQbqHjJa0y7u7e%2F7uFMEaP0ai0ObfdOzA%3D%3D

16:10  

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