Sorry Old Soldier Should’ve Been Mustered Out Long Ago

The prospective expansion of NATO into Central and Eastern Europe is bad news both for Europe and the United States.

NATO ought not to be going east, west, north or south.

It ought to be going away.

When I marched up the gangplank of an American troopship bound for Europe in the fall of 1951, a lowly private drafted at the outbreak of the Korean War, I shared the common view that we were on a mission to preserve freedom and democracy. We were the first reinforcements for NATO, the newly formed North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Over the years, I have come to recognize NATO not as the protector it purports to be but as a danger to world peace and a self-serving, self-perpetuating burden on the public.

Critics of NATO’s expansion rightly claim that eastward movement of this Western military alliance will inflame nationalist passions in Russia and perhaps reignite the Cold War. In reaction to NATO expansion, Russian President Boris Yeltsin has already returned to a first-use nuclear weapons policy.

“If we are driven into a corner and are left with no other option, we will resort to nuclear weapons,” said Boris Berezovsky, deputy head of Russia’s security council.

This makes the risk of global nuclear war all the greater.

The expansion of NATO also entrenches a military force that should never have been formed in the first place. NATO came into being in 1949 on the wings of a Cold War myth - that Western Europe was threatened by the Soviet troops that had conquered Central Europe in World War II. The truth was that Soviet designs on the West were purely political, never military.

The myth of a communist military menace served as a rationale for the bolstering of American military forces in Europe, reversing the demobilization that had been under way since the end of the war. This generated an East-West military buildup in Europe and enshrined Europe as the crown jewel of the Pentagon’s worldwide military presence.

The perceived threat from the Western military buildup prompted the Soviets to bolster their own military forces in Eastern Europe, the historical path for Western invasions of Russia. This perception, in part, led to the crushing of national uprisings in East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and ‘60s. NATO can claim credit for prolonging the suffering of the people of Eastern Europe.

On this side of the Atlantic, those who suffered were the American people, burdened with the cost of maintaining what came to be a vast array of air and naval bases and other military installations from the tip of Norway to the toe of Italy, from the firths of Scotland to the foothills of Turkey.

American taxpayers have picked up the tab - somewhere between $50 billion and $75 billion a year - for the congenial European duty and combat-free opportunities that have lured many of their sons and daughters into the military and kept them there.

NATO has come to serve not only as a playground for the Pentagon, but also as a staging area to project military power beyond Europe. It was from NATO bases that the Pentagon rescued Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, bombed Libya in the 1980s and launched the Persian Gulf War in 1991. It is through NATO that the United States now maintains its military clout in the oil-rich Middle East.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the disappearance of the last vestige of the Soviet threat, NATO had to find a new reason for its continued existence. An answer presented itself in the bloody civil war in the Balkans, which followed the breakup of Yugoslavia.

A half century after the end of World War II and a decade after the death of Soviet authoritarianism, peacekeeping has replaced national defense as the justification for the Pentagon’s global military presence. It is a rationale as phony today as it was the day NATO was formed.

National security comes from building a healthy, welleducated, democratic society at home, not from diverting the resources that are essential to sustain it.

Peacekeeping is the proper role of nations acting collectively through neutral international bodies such as the United Nations, not that of foreign armies serving narrow national interests.

Let Europe and other regions look to themselves for regional security - with help, if needed, from the United Nations. And let America get back to the work of democracy at home.

It’s time for NATO to go.

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