Trump Probably Won’t Quit NATO. He’ll Just Make It Unrecognizable

 

Trump Probably Won’t Quit NATO. He’ll Just Make It Unrecognizable.

Donald Trump has threatened to leave NATO so many times — or has appeared to, anyway — that for many of his critics it’s a question of when, not whether, he’d ditch the 75-year-old alliance if he’s reelected president in November.

In truth, Trump would be unlikely to quit NATO outright, according to interviews with former Trump national security officials and defense experts who are likely to serve in a second Trump term. But even if he doesn’t formally leave the organization, that doesn’t mean NATO would survive a second Trump term intact.

In return for continued U.S. participation, Trump would not only expect that European countries drastically increase their spending on NATO — his main complaint when he was president — but also undertake what one defense expert familiar with the thinking inside Trump’s national-security advisory circle, Dan Caldwell, describes as a “radical reorientation” of NATO.

“We don’t really have a choice anymore,” Caldwell told POLITICO Magazine, citing rising U.S. debt, flagging military recruiting, and a defense industrial base that can’t keep up with the challenge from both Russia and China. — Politico

Our Take: Let’s talk about NATO.

It didn’t happen overnight. It was a sequence of progressive steps that were pursued for purportedly noble purposes— to halt authoritarianism— yet the exact opposite is the truth.

It began in 1900, with the Anglo-French Alliance, which was exactly what it sounds like: a treaty between France and Britain, which had been historic rivals, though after Napoleon’s doomed campaign into Russia and subsequent Congress of Vienna in 1815– where the monarchies of Europe were restored, and the experiment of democracy curtailed— the French Empire became Britain’s little brother.

Next came the Western Union in 1948, where the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg joined the Alliance. The following year, NATO was officially formed, as part of the Truman Doctrine, which vowed to “support democracies against authoritarian threats.”

The Truman Doctrine was signed in 1947, as part of a comprehensive effort to stand up against what were perceived as threats from Soviet Russia. That year Truman also signed the National Security Act, creating an intelligence agency that would be tasked with brainwashing the world’s populations to love America and hate communism— or at least, that was what the CIA claimed to be doing.

Driving this drama was a standoff between the Soviets and Turkey at the end of WW2. The Soviets wanted access to the Mediterranean from the Black Sea through the Turkish Straits. The Allies pressured Turkey to refuse, and when Britain ended their naval assistance in 1947, Truman dispatched the Franklin D. Roosevelt aircraft carrier battle group to keep the Straits under Turkish control, along with $100 million of “foreign aid.”

Turkey joined NATO in 1952.

Given the perceived aggression of the Soviets, NATO was tasked with providing an international bulwark of military power against the communists. When it came to staffing NATO’s military brass, the Allies turned to the professionals who knew the communists the best: former intelligence officers of the Nazi Waffen SS.

Before WW2, Alexander Dolezalek was an officer in the Race and Settlement Main Office— one of the three oldest SS offices in the Third Reich. During the war, he was promoted to the Waffen SS, and assigned as leader of the Britisches Freikorps (British Free Corps) which was a volunteer unit composed of about 60 British men who had willingly defected to serve in the Third Reich.

Their sole task was propaganda.

After the war, he changed his last name to Bomhoff and was hired by NATO to run their "All-European educational project,” which was exactly what it sounds like.

Then there’s Adolf Heusinger, who was the Inspector General of the Nazi Bundeswehr, as well as the Operations Chief within the general staff of the [Nazi] High Command of the German Army.

Heusinger was appointed head of the West German military from 1957-1961, and then Chair of NATO’s military from 1961-1964.

That’s right: during JFK’s presidency, an actual Nazi high commander was the head of NATO’s military.

(This list goes on and on.)

There’s also the little secret that the founding documents of the European Union—founded in 1993— were basically photocopies of the Third Reich’s plans for post-war Europe, had they won… but that’s a rabbit hole for another day.

Suffice to say that NATO is not what we have been told it is, nor is the European Union. — GhostofBasedPatrickHenry