“Americans should not go abroad to slay dragons they do not understand in the name of spreading democracy.” President John Quincy Adams.
According to Peter Zeihan, author of the excellent The Accidental Superpower, NATO died yesterday. His latest analysis on NATO is an epitaph to America’s century long plunge into globalism. I urge you to read it.
He doesn’t give President Trump the credit, or the blame. Our gradual disengagement from Europe has been evolving since the fall of the Soviet Union. Trump is just being candid, where others have been coy.
We went to war in Europe 100 years ago, and we’ve been the great imperial power of the world ever since. No more, according to Zeihan. With Trump’s very public and intentional refusal to affirm American commitment to NATO’s Article V (all for one, one for all) our century of wars around the world is over.
No more Vietnams, or Koreas, no more fighting Germans, or Japanese, or Russians. No more war. What, really, is it good for?
Our world, America’s world, is devoid of natural, geopolitically preordained enemies. We are the Lord’s most rich and favored nation, the only great power in world history with no natural enemy, and no fear of invasion.
In the 1960’s, when I was a young man, we were ready to go to war with the Russians, if it came down to it. But it wasn’t because they were Russian. It was perhaps they were communist, and the fires of crusading anti-communism burned brightly in this country.
Lyndon Johnson, a name that will live in infamy, took that flame of anti-communism into Vietnam, and it died there. But we were still ready to fight the Russians if we had to.
But then down came the Berlin Wall, and from that moment forward to this, there has been no stomach in this country for another European war. NATO, and Article V of its charter, are dead not because of Donald Trump. They are dead because of American public opinion. The mothers and fathers of America will simply refuse to send their children to die in a European war.
I got Zeihan’s emailed article after I posted yesterday, and I thought a lot about it. He’s a tad exuberant, and this will all take time to play out, but he’s as right as rain. NATO, and the American Imperial Century, are over. Oh, happy day.
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