Let’s Get Naughty about NATO

Let’s Get Naughty about NATO

The glorious leaders and the elite minions that lead us, from Left, Right, and in-between, are barely competent.

Christopher Chantrill for American Thinker 

Everybody is talking about NATO this week, so I will too. But I warn my liberal readers: you won’t like it.

Let me be clear. All my life I have dutifully followed the narrative on NATO. Until I read a couple of books. The first is Never Again: Britain 1945-1951 by Peter Hennessy, about how the Labour Party government’s socialist “Planning” agenda totally failed. The other book is Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy, about how the “balance of power” is best. The two books powered a couple of my blog posts, and a NATO timeline:

• On February 22, 1946, George Kennan sent his Long Telegram from Moscow “advising that the U.S. abandon cooperation for a policy of firm, long-term containment” of the Soviet Union.
• On June 20, 1948, the West Germans replaced the inflationary Reichsmark with the Deutschmark and began their Wirtschaftwunder.
• On June 24, 1948, the Soviets began their Berlin Blockade.
• On June 28, 1948, the western allies began the Berlin Airlift.
• On July 2, 1948, seven-power negotiations began for NATO.
• On November 2, 1948, Harry Truman won reelectionas President of the United States.
• On January 20, 1949, at his inauguration, President Truman announced a North Atlantic security plan.
• On April 4, 1949, the NATO Treaty was signed in Washington, D.C.
• On May 12, 1949, the Soviets ended the Berlin Blockade.
• On March 2, 1952, Stalin sent a “Peace Note” proposing reunification of a neutral Germany.
• In January-February 1954, the Soviet Union asked to join NATO.
• On May 9, 1955, West Germany got to join NATO.
• On May 14, 1955, the Soviet Union and seven other Eastern European countries created the Warsaw Pact.
• On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall was reopened.
• On October 3, 1990, East Germany was dissolved and Germany was unified.

Stop right there and go back and read through the list again. I bet you only knew about a third of the events in the list.

Now tell me what the U.S. leaders thought they were doing. Really, they weren’t thinking. They were just reciting Kennan’s Long Telegram.

Let’s get all Trumpy. After winning two world wars, the U.S. became a global hegemon “like you’ve never seen it.” In World War II we basically paid the Brits’ bills with Lend-Lease, and a good part of the Soviets’ bills as well. Then after the war we kept war-torn Europe alive with enormous financial assistance. The Brits kept having “sterling crises” while implementing their stupid socialist Planning and we’d come and bail them out.

In 1948, after two years of inflation and price controls during Allied occupation, Ludwig Erhard and Wilhelm Röpke implemented Austrian economics and the German economy zoomed into the Wirtschaftwunder stratosphere with two years of 15% growth and a decade of 7%-8% growth. The Soviets immediately began their Berlin Blockade. The U.S. response was to create a military alliance against the Soviets, formalized after Harry Truman was safely reelected President.

But then, in 1952, Stalin published his “Peace Note” that proposed the unification of Germany as a neutral power. The West rejected his offer, so in 1955 the Soviets created their own alliance, the Warsaw Pact, and that was that, until the Soviet Union broke up.

Look, I think that Stalin was the baddest baddie in world history, excepting only Mao Zedong. But think about Stalin’s situation at the end of World War II. For sure, his soldiers bore the brunt of Hitler’s advance up to the gates of Moscow, but later his soldiers got to rape every German woman east of the Elbe. Meanwhile the U.S. executed a 27-front war -- or close to it -- rolling up the Germans in North Africa, Italy, and then western Europe. After the Battle of Midway the U.S. had the Japanese on the run, and then blew them up with a couple of newly minted A-bombs.

Just think what it was like to be the Russian dictator after watching a world-conquering performance like that. As Trump says: “there’s never been anything like it” in world history. Thank goodness Stalin had all those Soviet spies keeping an eye on things in Washington, so he had half a clue what was coming next.

I’ll bet you a nickel that, in 1948, Stalin was really scared that the U.S., one day soon, would decide to roll up eastern Europe and put paid to Stalin and communism and reveal the Soviet Union for what it was: a Potemkin village.

Life is rough for dictators. A couple of days after Stalin’s death, Lavrentiy Beria -- the guy Stalin relied on to go after the saboteurs and wreckers -- released all the doctors accused in the Doctor’s Plot.

Look, I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. I just think that the glorious leaders and the elite minions that lead us, from Left, Right, and in-between, are barely competent. Maybe.

Let’s just say that NATO was a good idea at the time and leave it at that.

Image: Nicolas Raymond