NATO was founded to counter the expansionism shown by Soviet Russia. The US remained part of the alliance throughout the Cold War because the military power of the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies exceeded that of the European members of Cold War NATO. After the collapse of the USSR, Russia lost all of her dependent provinces and the Warsaw Pact alliance was no more. The European members of NATO were now collectively more powerful than Russia. There was no longer any need for NATO, and it should have been replaced with a purely European alliance, leaving the US to look out for Western interests outside of Europe.
But this didn't happen and now with war in Europe, the US remains tied down in Europe and must necessarily cede Taiwan to China should China decide to take it.
This is really well said, Dan, and I hadn't thought about these questions for much too long. It's important to remind ourselves of the things we know, even the things that we think are obvious, because they are not obvious to everyone -- as evidenced by your negative nancy commenters so far .... :(
NATO is good and all, but so much of warfare now is economic / technological / informational. China gained its dominant position today largely through theft - corporate espionage, infiltrating western universities, etc. - and false promises made to international trade organizations. Soft power, like the belt & roads initiative, has been used to capture large satrapies around the world without firing a shot. Western elites (none moreso than in Canada) have been all too happy to be bought out and paid off to look the other way or actively cooperate with the transfer of technology and research, and to continue trading with a nation that gets preferential treatment and still cheats on every treaty.
When China began liberalizing its economy in the 1990s, it looked for a while as though they were becoming more western in outlook. I was fooled. I thought at the time we should encourage that development, expecting that with greater affluence the Chinese people would demand more social freedoms as well. Instead, the opposite happened. The west has moved closer to the communist system than the communists have moved toward western values. We have lost our desire or will to protect our international interests. Even to say this is now widely regarded in the west as being "racist."
When Trudeau goes to the NATO summit and uses his 5 minutes in the spotlight to talk about the threat of climate change, he is singing from the Chinese songbook. The fashionable obsession with the weather - and with gender - make NATO weaker and China stronger.
There is no doubt that climate change will have a profound impact on nations’ strategic interests in coming decades and sadly will most likely be the cause of new conflicts, so why shouldn’t it be discussed at NATO summits?
Please read Dan's latest piece on predicting the future of war. Beginning a comment on this topic with "There is no doubt that climate change will..." identifies you as an ideologue rather than a thinker.
Natural climate change has in the past and possibly will in the future contribute to mass migrations, and militaristic invasions. But I'm talking about the present, and at present this is not what is happening. The countries *least* concerned about climate change - China, Russia, Iran, Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon - are the ones on the militaristic move. The mass migrations across the open borders of Europe and North America are not caused by climate change, but by economic opportunities (including exploiting the generosity and "compassion" of the recipient welfares states). The west's obsessive (and utterly erroneous) obsession with catastrophic anthropogenic climate change only helps the enemies of the west and weakens us.
That is a comment sorely lacking in self awareness, since to refer to anthropogenic climate change as a "fashionable obsession" or "utterly erroneous" are clearly the words of an ideologue. Without citing any alternative evidence, you breezily dismiss the thousands of climate scientists whose modelling shows that this presents a clear and present danger that will worsen in years to come, and impact upon food supplies, water, migration and also future conflicts.
Of course, it is possible that models are wrong, or technology will save the day, just as it's possible that the Chinese threat could fizzle out, but Nato would be being highly complacent if they didn't discuss the issue at their summits.
I'm not an ideologue wrt climate change. I accepted the narrative in the early days, like everyone else; but decades of research on the topic has convinced me that it is just another "The end of the world is nigh!" scare story which have always been popular throughout human history. Sorry I don't have another lifetime to educate you on the evidence on this platform. You undoubtedly wouldn't accept it anyway. ("modeling" LOL)
My informed judgment on a broad range of social /political issues has proven to be quite accurate over the years, whereas the hair-on-fire climate alarmists have been proven wrong time and time again. Based on track record, I'll stick with my own expertise.
Hmm. I would describe NATO as a US-led alliance to defend Europe against the Soviet Union and now post-Soviet Russia, rather than a system of collective security like the interwar League of Nations. Their common interest didn't depend on whether they were democracies or not: Spain and Portugal were military dictatorships up to the 1970s.
Why did the US not retreat into isolation again after WWII, as it had after WWI? George F. Kennan, writing in 1951:
"Today, standing at the end rather than the beginning of this half-century, some of us see certain fundamental elements on which we suspect that American security has rested. We can see that our security has been dependent throughout much of our history on the position of Britain; that Canada, in particular, has been a useful and indispensable hostage to good relations between our country and British Empire; and that Britain's position, in turn, has depended on the maintenance of a balance of power on the European Continent. Thus it was essential to us, as it was to Britain, that **no single Continental land power should come to dominate the entire Eurasian land mass**. Our interest has lain rather in the maintenance of some sort of stable balance among the powers of the interior, in order that none of them should effect the subjugation of the others, conquer the seafaring fringes of the land mass, become a great sea power as well as land power, shatter the position of England, and enter--as in these circumstances it certainly would--on an overseas expansion hostile to ourselves and supported by the immense resources of the interior of Europe and Asia."
Or as Jefferson put it: the enduring interest of the US lies in preventing the entire force of Europe from being wielded by a single hand.
So then we need to fall back on the question of the specific interests of individual nations. When there's a clear threat (which is certainly the case today!), it makes sense to form an alliance against the threat. But because of the difficulty of collective action (individual nations have an incentive to free-ride), you usually need some power to take the initiative and put together the alliance. For 400 years or so, that was England and then Britain. After WWII, it was the US.
It now looks like the Pax Americana is coming to an end. If Trump takes power again and withdraws the US from NATO, the remaining NATO allies will need to figure out if they can continue to stick together and back Ukraine against Russia.
If your initial description is correct, what was NATO for the two decades between the fall of the Soviet Union and when Putin's Russia became aggressive? As for seeking peace in a balance of powers, that was indeed Britain's policy in the 19th century, and the result was the First World War. Not a fan. As for assembling an alliance in advance of a foreseeable threat, that didn't go so well in advance of the screamingly obvious threat of Nazi Germany. And it ignores that the ground can shift in unforeseeable ways faster than any alliance can be assembled. Remember that there was no threat to peace a mere seven years before Nazi Germany invaded Poland. NATO is highly interoperable. You cannot possible assemble its equivalent in a few years, so if you merely wait and respond to events your collective security will be, at best, ad hoc. And in military affairs, "ad hoc" means "hope and pray."
I agree that it's far better to maintain alliances than to try to build them from scratch when you're literally under the gun. I'm a big fan of institutions, and that includes NATO. But I also think that the fundamental divide in international politics isn't between good and evil (or between democracy and dictatorship) - it's between those countries which support the status quo and those which seek to overturn it. And the balance of power between those two sides matters.
When the combined power of the status-quo countries is outweighed by the power of the countries opposed to the status quo, we can expect trouble. This was the case before WWII, for example, when the US had disarmed and Britain and France were facing off against Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan.
The current situation is that the US and its allies support the status quo, and the major countries seeking to overturn the status quo are China, Russia, and Iran. With the US fully engaged, the status quo powers still outweigh the revisionist powers, but not by an overwhelming margin - see Noah Smith's comparison of manufacturing output. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/youre-not-going-to-like-what-comes
If, under Trump and his successors, the US is no longer part of the equation, we're going to see serious trouble.
"What was NATO for the two decades between the fall of the Soviet Union and when Putin's Russia became aggressive?"
The same as after Putin's Russia became aggressive: an alliance against post-Soviet Russia. As I understand it, one of the major factors behind NATO expansion into Eastern Europe was that countries such as Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia continued to fear Russia.
After the Soviet Union fell NATO didn’t have a purpose. The Russians voluntarily dismantled their empire, tried to adopt our system, dropped their universalist ideology of world revolution, and basically did nothing of much importance for decades.
So it went looking for one, because what are the people that run NATO (and NatSec more generally) going to do all day to justify their existence?
Standard government program that outlived its original purpose but didn’t get shut down.
Eventually they managed to push the Russians too far and we’ve got this war, which now justifies their existence. You create your own justification if none exists.
Thank you for the link from the other post. My objection would be that in practice we did not see this freedom and democracy ideological purity: during WW2, Greece was a Metaxas dictatorship similar to Fascist Italy who invaded them, Chiang Kai-Sekh China was not really anything like a democracy, and Yugoslavia was ruled by a king. Post-WW2 the NATO was fine with Francoist Spain, the colonels Greece, and whatever was going down in Turkey, the weird struggle between secularist military coups and Islamist elected leaders. In more modern times, in the nineties by Buddhist buddies could not organize in Greece because no other church but the Greek Orthodox could legally exist, and the NATO countries are buddies with regimes like Saudi Arabia, ruled by a king, who murdered a dissenting journalist with bone saws.
This does not show a commitment to democracy and freedom.
But if we see it as simply protecting the interests of capitalism then all of this suddenly makes sense.
The confrontation between the West and Putin escalated slowly, with many steps on both sides. But I remember how it started - economically. Putin was re-nationalizing key industries that got privatized to people with links to Western capitalists. After that a lot of things happened, but this was the first fallout. And the commitment to defend Ukraine might have something to do with American agribusinesses owning a lot of land there.
Don't get me wrong, Putin is still in the wrong and the West is probably still the least bad force in the world. But let's not have too many illusions. It is not freedom or democracy, it is that the Western ruling class has the most humane sensibilities of all ruling classes in the world.
On the first paragraph, yes, agreed. NATO was not an exercise in pure idealism. But then, in International relations, nothing ever is.
On the second point, sorry, can't buy it. Russia's economy is tiny and I've seen no evidence of connected capitalists engineering anything in the conflict. What I have seen is an aging dictator rattling on endlessly about nationalism and Czarist fantasies, and citing that same rattling as the motivation for his actions. I think we should take him at his word.
The world was hugely interdependent and interconnected before WW1. There were lots of alliances between lots of countries, which was the reason it spiralled out of control when Franz Ferdinand was murdered. Alliances can be good, but they can also bring everyone into the conflict once it starts. This is not to say that alliances are wrong, just that there is more to it.
Putin invaded Ukraine because he felt it began to approach Nato, which he felt would be a strategic threat. If Ukraine hadn't done that, the invasion might not have happened. That doesn't mean it was Ukraine or Natos fault. It was Putins fault, since the only reason Russia might feel threatened by Ukraine and Nato is that Russia is a dictatorship. If Russia had been a stable democracy, it would have no good reason to fear Ukraine becoming a member of Nato.
But since Russia is a dictatorship, it was probably not a good idea for Ukraine to approach Nato. If you believe it was, then why not try to get Taiwan into Nato?
Interconnections, interdependence, alliances etc sounds like it could only reduce the risk of war. Why kill your debtors, customers etc? But a dictator might reason that this gives them extra leeway to act boldly, since he/she knows that his/her opponents will reason this way. This means they think they can afford to take chances, since everyone will have much to lose by attacking them. And an authoritarian state backed by a strong military alliance (such as Turkey) may feel emboldened in its aggressions since it knows nobody will attack it.
If Nato should exist, it should be for stable democracies only and perhaps the members should not be allowed to enter other military alliances, sinces that might generate a domino effect that brings the whole Nato into a local conflict.
The pre-WWI alliances were Great Power contests for dominance, or efforts to maintain a balance of power that served a Great Power interest. Angell saw them as unstable and dangerous and he was right.
Russia did not invade Ukraine because he thought it would join NATO. Russia invaded Ukraine because Putin sees Ukraine as part of Russia, indeed, its origin point, and he is seeking to restore the Russian empire. He has been extremely explicit on this.
If Russia behaved in the western hemisphere the way we behaved in Ukraine, we would have done exactely what Russia did. We in fact did during the Cold War.
Once you can accept that the Russians and people and not Orcs, some kind of reasonable policy can be adopted. But if they are orcs led by Sauron then only total war is inevitable.
All true! And that should be a counter argument to all who tries to see the world through big powers lenses. I hate when some people tell me that the war in my country it’s a deal between Russia and the US. Especially when it’s said by someone from the West. I could understand that they might don’t know the history of Eastern Europe well, but to forget your own — it’s a shame!
EU doesn't need NATO. Actually we need NATO to be ended. Especially Mediterranean countries need new alliances related to new visions, out of exploitations, out of consumerism, out of the boundaries of a country -US- which is just the simulacro of itself, puppeted by the weapon industry/finance Spectre
The EU itself features a very similar defense clause to NATO, but most countries of the EU have underspent on defense for years, hence the reliance on US within NATO. If EU were to spend more on defense, US's position in NATO would be far less strong.
NATO was founded to counter the expansionism shown by Soviet Russia. The US remained part of the alliance throughout the Cold War because the military power of the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies exceeded that of the European members of Cold War NATO. After the collapse of the USSR, Russia lost all of her dependent provinces and the Warsaw Pact alliance was no more. The European members of NATO were now collectively more powerful than Russia. There was no longer any need for NATO, and it should have been replaced with a purely European alliance, leaving the US to look out for Western interests outside of Europe.
But this didn't happen and now with war in Europe, the US remains tied down in Europe and must necessarily cede Taiwan to China should China decide to take it.
This is really well said, Dan, and I hadn't thought about these questions for much too long. It's important to remind ourselves of the things we know, even the things that we think are obvious, because they are not obvious to everyone -- as evidenced by your negative nancy commenters so far .... :(
NATO is good and all, but so much of warfare now is economic / technological / informational. China gained its dominant position today largely through theft - corporate espionage, infiltrating western universities, etc. - and false promises made to international trade organizations. Soft power, like the belt & roads initiative, has been used to capture large satrapies around the world without firing a shot. Western elites (none moreso than in Canada) have been all too happy to be bought out and paid off to look the other way or actively cooperate with the transfer of technology and research, and to continue trading with a nation that gets preferential treatment and still cheats on every treaty.
When China began liberalizing its economy in the 1990s, it looked for a while as though they were becoming more western in outlook. I was fooled. I thought at the time we should encourage that development, expecting that with greater affluence the Chinese people would demand more social freedoms as well. Instead, the opposite happened. The west has moved closer to the communist system than the communists have moved toward western values. We have lost our desire or will to protect our international interests. Even to say this is now widely regarded in the west as being "racist."
Yep, agreed. Security is about so much more than stopping tanks rolling across borders.
When Trudeau goes to the NATO summit and uses his 5 minutes in the spotlight to talk about the threat of climate change, he is singing from the Chinese songbook. The fashionable obsession with the weather - and with gender - make NATO weaker and China stronger.
There is no doubt that climate change will have a profound impact on nations’ strategic interests in coming decades and sadly will most likely be the cause of new conflicts, so why shouldn’t it be discussed at NATO summits?
Please read Dan's latest piece on predicting the future of war. Beginning a comment on this topic with "There is no doubt that climate change will..." identifies you as an ideologue rather than a thinker.
Natural climate change has in the past and possibly will in the future contribute to mass migrations, and militaristic invasions. But I'm talking about the present, and at present this is not what is happening. The countries *least* concerned about climate change - China, Russia, Iran, Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon - are the ones on the militaristic move. The mass migrations across the open borders of Europe and North America are not caused by climate change, but by economic opportunities (including exploiting the generosity and "compassion" of the recipient welfares states). The west's obsessive (and utterly erroneous) obsession with catastrophic anthropogenic climate change only helps the enemies of the west and weakens us.
That is a comment sorely lacking in self awareness, since to refer to anthropogenic climate change as a "fashionable obsession" or "utterly erroneous" are clearly the words of an ideologue. Without citing any alternative evidence, you breezily dismiss the thousands of climate scientists whose modelling shows that this presents a clear and present danger that will worsen in years to come, and impact upon food supplies, water, migration and also future conflicts.
Of course, it is possible that models are wrong, or technology will save the day, just as it's possible that the Chinese threat could fizzle out, but Nato would be being highly complacent if they didn't discuss the issue at their summits.
I'm not an ideologue wrt climate change. I accepted the narrative in the early days, like everyone else; but decades of research on the topic has convinced me that it is just another "The end of the world is nigh!" scare story which have always been popular throughout human history. Sorry I don't have another lifetime to educate you on the evidence on this platform. You undoubtedly wouldn't accept it anyway. ("modeling" LOL)
My informed judgment on a broad range of social /political issues has proven to be quite accurate over the years, whereas the hair-on-fire climate alarmists have been proven wrong time and time again. Based on track record, I'll stick with my own expertise.
Hmm. I would describe NATO as a US-led alliance to defend Europe against the Soviet Union and now post-Soviet Russia, rather than a system of collective security like the interwar League of Nations. Their common interest didn't depend on whether they were democracies or not: Spain and Portugal were military dictatorships up to the 1970s.
Why did the US not retreat into isolation again after WWII, as it had after WWI? George F. Kennan, writing in 1951:
"Today, standing at the end rather than the beginning of this half-century, some of us see certain fundamental elements on which we suspect that American security has rested. We can see that our security has been dependent throughout much of our history on the position of Britain; that Canada, in particular, has been a useful and indispensable hostage to good relations between our country and British Empire; and that Britain's position, in turn, has depended on the maintenance of a balance of power on the European Continent. Thus it was essential to us, as it was to Britain, that **no single Continental land power should come to dominate the entire Eurasian land mass**. Our interest has lain rather in the maintenance of some sort of stable balance among the powers of the interior, in order that none of them should effect the subjugation of the others, conquer the seafaring fringes of the land mass, become a great sea power as well as land power, shatter the position of England, and enter--as in these circumstances it certainly would--on an overseas expansion hostile to ourselves and supported by the immense resources of the interior of Europe and Asia."
Or as Jefferson put it: the enduring interest of the US lies in preventing the entire force of Europe from being wielded by a single hand.
Unfortunately, Angell's argument for the "harmony of interests" between the security of an individual nation and the collective security of everyone turned out to be incorrect. See Hans Morgenthau, "Politics Among Nations" (1948). https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.74487/page/n349/mode/1up?view=theater
So then we need to fall back on the question of the specific interests of individual nations. When there's a clear threat (which is certainly the case today!), it makes sense to form an alliance against the threat. But because of the difficulty of collective action (individual nations have an incentive to free-ride), you usually need some power to take the initiative and put together the alliance. For 400 years or so, that was England and then Britain. After WWII, it was the US.
It now looks like the Pax Americana is coming to an end. If Trump takes power again and withdraws the US from NATO, the remaining NATO allies will need to figure out if they can continue to stick together and back Ukraine against Russia.
If your initial description is correct, what was NATO for the two decades between the fall of the Soviet Union and when Putin's Russia became aggressive? As for seeking peace in a balance of powers, that was indeed Britain's policy in the 19th century, and the result was the First World War. Not a fan. As for assembling an alliance in advance of a foreseeable threat, that didn't go so well in advance of the screamingly obvious threat of Nazi Germany. And it ignores that the ground can shift in unforeseeable ways faster than any alliance can be assembled. Remember that there was no threat to peace a mere seven years before Nazi Germany invaded Poland. NATO is highly interoperable. You cannot possible assemble its equivalent in a few years, so if you merely wait and respond to events your collective security will be, at best, ad hoc. And in military affairs, "ad hoc" means "hope and pray."
I agree that it's far better to maintain alliances than to try to build them from scratch when you're literally under the gun. I'm a big fan of institutions, and that includes NATO. But I also think that the fundamental divide in international politics isn't between good and evil (or between democracy and dictatorship) - it's between those countries which support the status quo and those which seek to overturn it. And the balance of power between those two sides matters.
When the combined power of the status-quo countries is outweighed by the power of the countries opposed to the status quo, we can expect trouble. This was the case before WWII, for example, when the US had disarmed and Britain and France were facing off against Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan.
The current situation is that the US and its allies support the status quo, and the major countries seeking to overturn the status quo are China, Russia, and Iran. With the US fully engaged, the status quo powers still outweigh the revisionist powers, but not by an overwhelming margin - see Noah Smith's comparison of manufacturing output. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/youre-not-going-to-like-what-comes
If, under Trump and his successors, the US is no longer part of the equation, we're going to see serious trouble.
"What was NATO for the two decades between the fall of the Soviet Union and when Putin's Russia became aggressive?"
The same as after Putin's Russia became aggressive: an alliance against post-Soviet Russia. As I understand it, one of the major factors behind NATO expansion into Eastern Europe was that countries such as Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia continued to fear Russia.
(Parenthetically, there were a *lot* of contemporary actors and observers who believed that it was possible to compromise with Nazi Germany, right up until Hitler annexed all of Czechoslovakia. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.74487/page/n65/mode/1up)
After the Soviet Union fell NATO didn’t have a purpose. The Russians voluntarily dismantled their empire, tried to adopt our system, dropped their universalist ideology of world revolution, and basically did nothing of much importance for decades.
So it went looking for one, because what are the people that run NATO (and NatSec more generally) going to do all day to justify their existence?
Standard government program that outlived its original purpose but didn’t get shut down.
Eventually they managed to push the Russians too far and we’ve got this war, which now justifies their existence. You create your own justification if none exists.
Thank you for the link from the other post. My objection would be that in practice we did not see this freedom and democracy ideological purity: during WW2, Greece was a Metaxas dictatorship similar to Fascist Italy who invaded them, Chiang Kai-Sekh China was not really anything like a democracy, and Yugoslavia was ruled by a king. Post-WW2 the NATO was fine with Francoist Spain, the colonels Greece, and whatever was going down in Turkey, the weird struggle between secularist military coups and Islamist elected leaders. In more modern times, in the nineties by Buddhist buddies could not organize in Greece because no other church but the Greek Orthodox could legally exist, and the NATO countries are buddies with regimes like Saudi Arabia, ruled by a king, who murdered a dissenting journalist with bone saws.
This does not show a commitment to democracy and freedom.
But if we see it as simply protecting the interests of capitalism then all of this suddenly makes sense.
The confrontation between the West and Putin escalated slowly, with many steps on both sides. But I remember how it started - economically. Putin was re-nationalizing key industries that got privatized to people with links to Western capitalists. After that a lot of things happened, but this was the first fallout. And the commitment to defend Ukraine might have something to do with American agribusinesses owning a lot of land there.
Don't get me wrong, Putin is still in the wrong and the West is probably still the least bad force in the world. But let's not have too many illusions. It is not freedom or democracy, it is that the Western ruling class has the most humane sensibilities of all ruling classes in the world.
On the first paragraph, yes, agreed. NATO was not an exercise in pure idealism. But then, in International relations, nothing ever is.
On the second point, sorry, can't buy it. Russia's economy is tiny and I've seen no evidence of connected capitalists engineering anything in the conflict. What I have seen is an aging dictator rattling on endlessly about nationalism and Czarist fantasies, and citing that same rattling as the motivation for his actions. I think we should take him at his word.
The world was hugely interdependent and interconnected before WW1. There were lots of alliances between lots of countries, which was the reason it spiralled out of control when Franz Ferdinand was murdered. Alliances can be good, but they can also bring everyone into the conflict once it starts. This is not to say that alliances are wrong, just that there is more to it.
Putin invaded Ukraine because he felt it began to approach Nato, which he felt would be a strategic threat. If Ukraine hadn't done that, the invasion might not have happened. That doesn't mean it was Ukraine or Natos fault. It was Putins fault, since the only reason Russia might feel threatened by Ukraine and Nato is that Russia is a dictatorship. If Russia had been a stable democracy, it would have no good reason to fear Ukraine becoming a member of Nato.
But since Russia is a dictatorship, it was probably not a good idea for Ukraine to approach Nato. If you believe it was, then why not try to get Taiwan into Nato?
Interconnections, interdependence, alliances etc sounds like it could only reduce the risk of war. Why kill your debtors, customers etc? But a dictator might reason that this gives them extra leeway to act boldly, since he/she knows that his/her opponents will reason this way. This means they think they can afford to take chances, since everyone will have much to lose by attacking them. And an authoritarian state backed by a strong military alliance (such as Turkey) may feel emboldened in its aggressions since it knows nobody will attack it.
If Nato should exist, it should be for stable democracies only and perhaps the members should not be allowed to enter other military alliances, sinces that might generate a domino effect that brings the whole Nato into a local conflict.
The pre-WWI alliances were Great Power contests for dominance, or efforts to maintain a balance of power that served a Great Power interest. Angell saw them as unstable and dangerous and he was right.
Russia did not invade Ukraine because he thought it would join NATO. Russia invaded Ukraine because Putin sees Ukraine as part of Russia, indeed, its origin point, and he is seeking to restore the Russian empire. He has been extremely explicit on this.
If Russia behaved in the western hemisphere the way we behaved in Ukraine, we would have done exactely what Russia did. We in fact did during the Cold War.
Once you can accept that the Russians and people and not Orcs, some kind of reasonable policy can be adopted. But if they are orcs led by Sauron then only total war is inevitable.
It’s possible that every country has their orcs and Saurons. But some currently have norms and voting systems that don’t let them take charge.
You're right about Putins reasons. I should have said 'partly because'.
All true! And that should be a counter argument to all who tries to see the world through big powers lenses. I hate when some people tell me that the war in my country it’s a deal between Russia and the US. Especially when it’s said by someone from the West. I could understand that they might don’t know the history of Eastern Europe well, but to forget your own — it’s a shame!
This is exactly right...I had forgotten about Norman Angell.
But not about Adolf marching across Europe and butchering millions of innocent people, and the price we paid to get rid of him.
EU doesn't need NATO. Actually we need NATO to be ended. Especially Mediterranean countries need new alliances related to new visions, out of exploitations, out of consumerism, out of the boundaries of a country -US- which is just the simulacro of itself, puppeted by the weapon industry/finance Spectre
The EU itself features a very similar defense clause to NATO, but most countries of the EU have underspent on defense for years, hence the reliance on US within NATO. If EU were to spend more on defense, US's position in NATO would be far less strong.