NATO: The Comeback Kid Who Never Left
zlotx5
Wed, 07/12/2023 – 07:58
Insatiable in their need for gloom, North American and European commentators have, for over a half-century, declared NATO to be in decline, or moribund, or dysfunctional, unnecessary and—the most-preposterous claim of all—provocative.
Yet, every time that Europe’s Ostpolitik club, its violent pacifists and subversive industrialists, suggested that NATO, not the Soviet Union, was the problem, the Soviets leapt to NATO’s assistance by strangling a neighbor: Hungary, East Germany, then-Czechoslovakia, Poland…and toss in distant Afghanistan. The most-cynical as well as the most-earnest anti-NATO efforts in Europe, whether Charles de Gaulle’s theatrics or the later anti-Pershing II demonstrations, just couldn’t help a USSR predisposed to play the mean drunk at the garden party.
After the Soviet collapse, the Serbs did their best to fill the threat vacuum, violating the longest period of peace Europe’s western half had ever experienced. NATO proved its worth yet again—and proves it still in the Balkans.
Then Putin arrived, alarming an attentive minority but excused by the somnolent or craven. But the through line for NATO has been Russian, whether in its Soviet or Putin-era neo-tsarist incarnation. And for their part, the Russians always took NATO seriously, …read more
Source:: Hoover Institution