When the Cold War ended in 1991, NATO had just 12 member states: Today it has 32. Finland and Sweden have just joined and the number in the next couple of years will certainly grow to 34, if the Western World lasts that long. Do you feel safer? Really?
The Republic of Ireland and Austria look certain to jump on the bandwagon too. But it is a bandwagon rolling at high speed towards the edge of a cliff – In Ireland that would be on Croaghaun (Cruachán) Mountain on Achill Island in County Mayo – 688 meters (2,257 ft) high.
Now why on earth should Finland and Sweden have abandoned the neutrality which has prospered and protected them both for generations? In Sweden’s case through two world wars and for more than 200 years?
Why should Ireland, which has always enjoyed excellent relations with the United States and the United Kingdom over the past century of its independence, need to join the Atlantic Alliance now?
Even during World War II, when Ireland stayed determinedly neutral, it’s intelligence service cooperated fully and very effectively with the US Office of Strategic Services to entirely suppress Nazi military intelligence, the Abwehr and prevented it from getting any useful intelligence on Allied convoys brings millions of American and Canadian soldiers and enormous quantities of food, fuel, weapons and ammunition for the liberation of Western Europe.
Through the 42 years from the 1949 Washington Treaty to the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union, NATO was a defensive alliance in which powerful, genuinely democratic, coherent and responsible major Western nations – the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Turkey, Italy and Spain, dominated the European side of the alliance. When they differed from the United States, it was always to urge more cautious, restrained and responsible policies on Washington, Their influence on the alliance was also cautious, conservative and constructive.
Today, of course, we see an entirely different picture.
NATO has 32 member states. A majority of them are Eastern European postage stamp-sized countries that bring absolutely no military or strategic deterrent strength to the alliance whatsoever.
The idea that Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Albania, North Macedonia, Luxembourg or Slovenia can bring any military strength or deterrent capability to NATO is laughable.
Yet the top diplomats, defense officials and generals of the United States fill their days, weeks and years with endless initiatives to pour strength and influence into these postage stamp entities as if they matter.
And worse still, they let such tiny countries – and still small-sized older ones like Romania and the Czech republic which have consistent histories of total military failure and incompetence wrecking the major powers they support- drain their strength and drag them into useless commitments they cannot even meet.
Then there is Poland: Its historic function for 300 years has been to draw one European superpower after another into total destruction by invading Russia.
This was the fate of Sweden under King Charles XII in the 1720s, the First French Empire under Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812, the German Second Reich under the blustering, incompetent and inadequate Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1914-17 and finally the genocidal German Third Reich of Adolf Hitler in 1941-45.
Today history has repeated itself yet again with what the great English poet-prophet and visionary William Blake more than 200 years ago described as a “fearful symmetry.”
The policymakers of Washington, the ignorant dolts in Congress and the lobotomized talking heads of the American media really believe that “consulting” an endless succession of “statesmen,” “scholars,” “strategists” and “leaders” from the ridiculous petty principalities of Central and Eastern Europe makes them strong.
Every week, virtually every day, a succession of undersecretaries and assistant secretaries of state and four star generals solemnly inform one Senate and House subcommittee after another that the multiplicity of US allies in Europe give us “capabilities” that Russia and China cannot possibly match.
They are absolutely right.
But the capabilities our leaders are so proud of are all negative ones: They are capabilities in stupidity, infantile dreaming and total incompetence.
By contrast, who do Russia and China listen to? Each other. And to India and Iran, along with Pakistan. All major, formidable nuclear-armed nations with strong, coherent regular military forces and cultures of proud and potentially militarily formidable national pride and identity.
Therefore Russia and China are strong.
But we are weak.
More than half a century ago in his classic work on diplomacy and strategic capabilities “The Collapse of British Power,” the great British historian Correlli Barnett pointed out the difference between nations and allies that were exporters of military strength and national security and small, weak ineffectual countries that only consumed such power and drained it from their allies.
Throughout modern history the phenomenon of small incompetent nations that embarrassed their stronger allies and pulled into ultimately catastrophic and ruinous wars is a well-known one.
Romania did this to the Western allies in World War I and twice to Nazi Germany in World War II. Hitler relied on miserably equipped, despised and untrained Romanian armies to guard the flanks of his famous Sixth Army – the infantry that had conquered all of Europe in less than three years – to guard its flanks at Stalingrad in November 1942. They disintegrated. The Sixth Army was isolated and annihilated and Germany was doomed to lose the war.
Less than two years later, a reconstituted Sixth Army was isolated, trapped and annihilated again and another 300,000 soldiers trapped, and wiped out in another Red Army offensive in the late summer of 1944.
Occasionally tiny allies can punch above their weight, like Serbia, which smashed the enormous armies of the tolerant and civilized Habsburg Empire in the fall of 1914, or Israel, which repeatedly embarrassed, drained and discredited the Soviet Union by beating its Arab allies in a succession of Middle East wars from 1956 to 1973.
However, even coherent small allies can be dangerous.
Britain charged into World War I and lost more than a million dead, bankrupting itself in the process to support “gallant little Belgium” in 1914.
The entire Russian Empire, one of the largest in history with its proud, rich Orthodox Christian civilization going back 1,100 years, was annihilated because it charged into an unnecessary war with Germany in 1914.
Germany itself, prosperous, stable, confident, rising and powerful, was pulled into a ruinous war it could not win against Russia, France, Britain and eventually even the United States in 1914-17 because of its alliance with weak, unstable, insecure Austria-Hungary.
Today the United States has repeated all those exercises in suicidal stupidity in spades.
America has allied itself and committed its own one third of a billion people not only to one irresponsible tiny nation in Europe, but to an entire platoon of them.
Polish leaders and their Western dupes are as relentless in urging the policymakers of Washington to their nation’s doom by provoking a thermonuclear war with Russia as their ancestors urged Charles XII to invade Russia 300 years ago, Napoleon more than 200 years ago, and the Germans of 1914 to go charging in during the world wars of the 20th century. And now they are doing it again.
At Tehran in 1943 and Yalta in 1945 Franklin Roosevelt of the United States and Winston Churchill of Britain never doubted for a second what they had to do. They wrote off Poland and the nations of Eastern Europe to the merciless oppression of Josef Stalin in order to achieve the wider goals of destroying Nazi Germany and then securing generations of peace in Europe. And they were right to do so.
Throughout US public discourse on NATO, one mantra is always repeated ad nauseum: It is that the Alliance, the United States and the West are vastly stronger and enjoy a practical and military as well as diplomatic and moral superiority neither Russia nor China, nor even both of them acting together can hope to match.
As I have warned in these columns before, American and also British policymakers and pundits have been hypnotized by the superficial magic of numbers and cheap, worthless self-deluding rhetoric.
Since President Bill Clinton took office in 1993, US policymakers and their eager NATO acolytes have tirelessly dived into the same doomed cesspool with comparable results. Integration of the chaotic and usually tiny militaries of Central Europe in NATO and bringing them up to US standards has proved to be a will of the wisp – endlessly pursued yet never achieved.
All the while, Russia quietly, systematically and successfully totally modernized its strategic nuclear forces and brought to fruition an entire generation of formidable new nuclear delivery systems ranging from hypersonic glide strike weapons to fifth generation, ICBM carrying nuclear submarines able to annihilate Western Europe and North America from their impregnable stronghold under the Arctic Ocean.
But America’s leaders are trapped in an endless echo chamber of tiny irresponsible Central and Eastern European leaders obsessed with their hostility to Russia and forever urging the major Western powers into more aggressive, hostile and confrontational policies towards Moscow.
Like a bad poker player, the Atlantic Alliance now proves incapable of recognizing a losing hand, or weak and failing policies from Afghanistan to Ukraine. And against all the odds, its members insist on piling more chips that they cannot possibly redeem on the global strategic table.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is not bullying or threatening the West when he warns of the dangers of nuclear world war: He is trying to save America and its NATO allies by waking up their leaders and peoples to the catastrophic destruction they are relentlessly bringing down upon themselves.
But now indeed the Last Bluff will be called, The Last Trump siren warnings of coming thermonuclear global war will sound at last and the Final Judgment will be at hand.
The Gadarene Swine who lead us are already jumping off the cliffs of Croaghaun – and taking the peoples of the West with them.
