NIÑO's CORNER: Our Enemy, NATO
The ruling class is drooling. They’ve long sought after Ukraine to be the next member of NATO, making the US all the more poised for an unforgiving war. With tensions building between Ukraine and Russia, an America First approach to NATO is urgently needed.
War is probably closer than any of us realize. Now that Ukraine and Russia are conducting simultaneous military drills, it’s a good time to look back at NATO’s legacy of dismantling American sovereignty.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed 72 years ago as a check against the Soviet Union. It has magnified to two-and-a-half times its original size, going from 12 member nations to its current 30.
Article 5 of NATO commits Americans to war when “an armed attack against one or more of [NATO members] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all; and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them...will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith...including the use of armed force.”
The Constitution be damned. Ever since the US became a founding NATO member in 1949, the Constitution has been ignored especially with regard to war powers, which were written down to reside with the Congress.
The boosters and managers of this collectivist treaty pact still obsess over Russia, no matter the cost to Americans in dollars as well as in lost traditions and liberties. It’s the textbook case of the entangling alliance that George Washington warned us against. But that doesn’t matter to a political cabal that doesn’t serve the American people, and instead caters to the interests of the defense industry.
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first NATO supreme allied commander but he was no unhinged warmonger. Shortly after assuming that post, he wrote these words in February 1951: “If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project [NATO] will have failed.”
The great diplomat George Kennan warned in 1997 that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected...to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”
In 2009, Patrick J. Buchanan wrote, “Few Americans under 30 recall the Cold War. Yet can anyone name a single tripwire for war put down in the time of Dean Acheson or John Foster Dulles that we have pulled up?”
I would say NATO has outlived its usefulness, but maybe it was never all that useful anyway.
The story of America joining NATO is also the story of the fall of the republic and the Old Right that defended it.
He was known as Mr. Republican. Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio warned the costs of NATO would be “incalculable” when the treaty was brought to the Senate for approval. It would “give the president...unlimited power to go out and arm the world in time of peace,” he said.
The great writer Garet Garrett said that “Domestic policy becomes subordinate to foreign policy,” when NATO was in its infancy. The empire manifests at home as well as abroad, often in an even more malformed way. The anarcho-tyranny and police state before us today is no coincidence.
Stark predictions also came from other corners of American life. The businessman Sterling Morton of the Morton Salt Company said the country had “embarked upon a path which can only lead to eventual bankruptcy, eventual dictatorship, and the end of that system of life known as ‘the American Way.’”
Just as the historic warnings went unheeded, the opposite was true for the same old fear mongering of the other side.
Writing in The Republic magazine, confessed ex-KGB spy Michael Straight said that if America didn’t join NATO, it “may lead Stalin to attack Western Europe in 1951.” Interestingly, Straight had been one of Stalin’s favored spies to potentially run for the U.S. presidency.
The war drums beat louder as just this week, President Joe Biden declared a national emergency and dropped new sanctions on Russia just a couple days after phoning Russian President Vladimir Putin and signaling for a diplomatic summit.
NATO and its consequences must be opposed fiercely by the authentic right wing today, the America First crowd.