Abolish NATO? Or the UN? Or both…
Following WWII, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Treaty (NATO), was established in 1949 for the collective defense… Wait, hold on a minute. Isn’t collective a term the Communists use? More on that later. Anyway, NATO was established for the purpose, as NATO’s first secretary General Lord Ismay summed up, “to keep the Russians out, the American’s in, and the Germans down.” That the USSR posed a serious threat to the security of Western Europe, there was no question — That Europe wanted America to become point man for their defense against the USSR was merely a continuation of Churchill’s political machinations to draw an isolationist US into WWII and European politics. Add two world wars with Germany, and Europe gets an additional bonus by having the US stationed in bases in Germany to disabuse them of any ideas of having another go at conquering the continent.
Through the 1950’s up to the late 1980’s, NATO and the USSR stood glaring at each other across the Iron Curtain. Dreams of an epic armor battle at the Fulda Gap between the Warsaw Pact and NATO forces that would make the tank battle at Kursk look like a piker filled the heads of armchair wargamers and inspired books like Red Storm Rising. Then, gosh darn it, Gorbachev’s Glasnost herald a new era of open politics in Soviet Union. Some electrician named Lech Walesa was giving the Communist party in Poland fits with organized strikes.
Suddenly in 1989, East Germany takes down the Iron Curtain. The cold war thaws into a hopeful spring. What was NATO going to do with all those tanks, planes, and troops? Worse, what were the generals going to do to keep their jobs? No enemies to fight, and the politicians were promising a peace dividend to citizens by closing military bases.
A common quip of the Berliners in the last days of WWII “Enjoy the war. The peace will be terrible” now seemed a reality for poor NATO. Without a combat command, military career advancement would come to a standstill. Without the need to maintain ongoing weapon superiority, the military industry would lay off employees. There goes the economy.
Desperate, NATO takes a cue from the movie of Canadian Bacon, and becomes involved in the ethnic strife in Yugoslavia between the Croats and the Serbs to look useful and from being disbanded. It becomes the strong arm of the UN, enforcing that august body’s no-fly zone mandate, as well as the UN’s arms and economic sanctions. NATO continued by initiating air strikes in Bosnia, and deploying a peacekeeping force on the ground. NATO finds a use for its leftover cold war ordinance collecting dust by mounting an 11-week bombing campaign.
NATO cleverly names the bombing sorties with various titles such as Operation Deliberate Force, so as to assure people that the bombs were not dropped by accident, or Operation Allied Force, in case someone doesn’t already know that NATO is a collective (there’s that Communist word again!) of various nations working together to enforce the peace by killing people.
What is strange about the working relationship of NATO and UN is that the former resists attempts to by the latter to have the final word regarding its military actions. The UN would say, “Don’t bomb, we have things under control,” and NATO would reply. “Yes we will bomb, just to make sure.”
I guess when you have one organization whose mission is to preserve peace, and another whose job is to break things to protect democracy, you are bound to have some philosophical differences. As the Good Book says, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” How any nation can belong to both organizations, and yet come to cross-proposes deciding if and who should be bombed, is beyond me. Sounds like one of them is unnecessary and is getting in the way of the other. Better yet, to be on the safe side, it might be best to get rid of both. But that’s just my opinion.
