Author: victorhanson

From An Angry Reader:

Subject: NATO

Maybe it’s my old age but you seem to be contradicting yourself. You explain quite correctly how useless it is and then suggest that you think strengthen it is a good idea???

Looks like trump wants to dump it knowing Germany will never pony up. Have suggested that article five only valid with paid up members😎

M

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Dear Angry Reader Michael Sanders,

I did not say that NATO was “useless.” My argument, if you were to reread it, was that NATO has expanded to such a degree that it is losing a common purpose and unity, at the very time the shared enemy of the Soviet Union disappeared. My reform suggestions were to limit membership, insist that all members immediately meet their 2 percent of GDP defense spending obligations, and to insist that all members decide on what or who are the common enemies, and then the expected contributions in wartime to prevent a rogue member like Turkey getting into a war and then demanding NATO’s help. The theme of the essay was that NATO is eroding without radical reform, and changes are necessary to save it—and that it is still worth saving it from itself.

V

From An Angry Reader:

Your article…about NATOs challenge is Germany, not America.

Sir,

With all respect but before you write any article you should learn about history. Germany did not start both World Wars. You might want to do some research before writing anything. Very sad how little people here actually know about history and then write about it in an article.

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Dear Angry Reader Susanna Mackenzie,

It is a silly tactic to accuse someone, as compensation for one’s own abject ignorance of history that you display in your letter. I wrote an entire book on World War II, and many as well on European history. That constitutes “some research.” In World War I, the German Schlieffen Plan and the Kurt Riezler’s Septemberprogramm were reflective of Germany’s prewar and wartime ambitions to expand its power in Europe beyond its borders, in a way not so true of its prime antagonists, France and Britain. I suggest you read carefully the terms of the indemnities and land confiscations of 1871 that ended the Franco-Prussian war; the aims of the Septemberprogramm, the particulars of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 1918, and the program of aggression outlined in the 1920s in both Hitler’s Mein Kampf and The Second Book. If you would do so, you would learn of a pattern of German aggression and territorial expansion and acquisition over some 70 years, that ceased only with catastrophic defeat in 1945, the appearance of NATO, the nuclear status of Britain and France, the common enemy of the Soviet Union and the 50-year Cold War, and the utopian attempts of a pan-continental EU. Yet nonetheless Germany finds itself at odds with Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, Britain, and the US, and there is a common denominator: a sort of demand to shape up to German norms of financial protocols, of open borders, of a tough British departure from the EU, and of a reluctance to meet its NATO promises—while running up the world’s largest account surplus and a $65 billion trade surplus with the U.S., both of which Germany insists are non-negotiable realities.

Victor Davis Hanson