It is not at all surprising that Victor Davis Hanson has written an excellent commentary. But his latest, about the ingratitude and duplicity of NATO, titled “Trump didn’t wreck NATO — he just exposed its anti-US hypocrisy”, is especially excellent and timely.
And here is just a small taste:
NATO members are not legally required to join another member’s military operation that isn’t formally sanctioned by the alliance or aimed at protecting the membership’s homelands.
But they often do just that.
When NATO members in the past have operated unilaterally to defend their own national interests, they have often called on the United States, as NATO’s strongest member, for overt help.
For nearly 40 years, the US offered logistical, intelligence, reconnaissance, refueling and diplomatic support to the French in their postcolonial efforts to protect Chad from Libya and, later, Islamists.
Currently, President Donald Trump has not asked NATO members to help bomb Iran — even though Europe, not the US, was in range of Iran’s ballistic missiles, and soon perhaps nuclear-tipped ones as well.
Europeans are far more vulnerable to Iranian-inspired Islamic terrorism.
They are more reliant on oil from the Middle East, some of it passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
All the US had initially requested was basing support in disarming a common Western enemy that, for nearly half a century, has slaughtered American diplomats and soldiers and tried to kill an American president and secretary of state.
But most NATO members could not even offer tacit help.
Let me say, again, that this commentary is especially excellent and timely.
You have the link (here it is again). Please read every word.
And then wonder why we would stay in such an organization/what would become of NATO if we left/what a threat to do so might generate in terms of European nations finally committing to their own defense, instead of relying on us…and contributing little other than criticism of how we are servicing them.
