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Indispensable Alliance: Why NATO?
By John DerbyshireAt the end of The Pickwick Papers, Samuel Pickwick decides to retire. He had founded the Pickwick Club in order to mix with different varieties and shades of human character Nearly the whole of my previous life having been devoted to business and the pursuit of wealth. His curiosity satisfied at last, he declares the club dissolved. The Pickwick Club then ceases to exist. This is an unusual turn of events in human affairs. Clubs, societies, organizations, leagues, and alliances, once born, rarely die other than by violence. ...Big international organizations are not exempt from this principle. Long after the purpose for which they were founded has, as the founder of National Review would have said, lapsed into desuetude, there they still are, busily meeting and deliberating and budgeting, all in pursuit of nobody quite knows what. (Since every principle needs a name, I shall, honoring the late WFB Jr., christen this one the Principle of Desuetudinal Persistence.) ...And so to NATO, than which a plainer instance of the Principle of Desuetudinal Persistence could hardly be found in international affairs. NATO was founded in 1949 to provide for collective defense against the USSR, which was at that time consolidating its little empire in eastern Europe. NATO gained a formal adversary with the founding of the mirror-image Warsaw Pact in 1955. The two leagues stared menacingly at each other across the Iron Curtain for a generation and a half. The Warsaw Pact dissolved itself in July 1991; the USSR followed suit a few months later. NATOs reason for existence melted away with them. The notion that the drunken, ragged, and demoralized army of Boris Yeltsins starving, depopulating Russia might sweep victoriously across western Europe to the Atlantic was plainly absurd. Nobody even pretended to believe it. So what did NATO do? Why, the organization set about expanding itself! The process of expansion continues today. From twelve original members in 1949, NATO has now reached 26, with formal invitations to two more nations, Albania and Croatia, issued just last week. Nobody can tell me what purpose NATO serves, other than the unnecessary annoying of Russia, the only European nation with big fossil-fuel reserves. Nor can anyone explain to me the reason for maintaining, as of a year and a half ago, 64,319 active duty U.S. military personnel in Germany, 33,453 in Japan, 29,086 in South Korea, 10,449 in Italy, 10,331 in Britain, 1,810 in Turkey (a NATO member surely youve noticed how helpful they have been to us in our Iraq project?), and 1,361 in Belgium. What exactly are we protecting ourselves against here? A world-threatening resurgence of Belgian fascism? Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2008-04-22 |
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