NATO is best when it is doing nothing - Responsible Statecraft - 0 views
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IR US USA Europe NATO ColdWar opinion analysis military politics
shared by Ed Webb on 02 May 21
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From this point of view, the Cold War was not won between 1989 and 1991. It was won between 1956, when the Hungarian masses revolted against communism, and 1961, when the East German communist state confessed that the only way it could stop its population from running away to a better life in West Germany was by building a giant prison wall to keep them in. From that moment, Soviet communism as an ideological model in Europe was dead. It was not yet dead in the former colonial world; and its expansion there, in alliance with anti-colonial nationalism, continued to give it the appearance of strength. But in the end, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan, and elsewhere did not really matter. What mattered to Washington were the great economic centres of Western Europe and maritime East Asia. For these, the United States would have been prepared to risk nuclear war. And for Moscow, the vital interest was Eastern Europe, on the borders of the USSR itself. Recognizing these vital interests of the other side, neither side challenged them.
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the suffering of Vietnamese, Cambodians, Afghans, Ethiopians, and Guatemalans under proxy wars was all too real. But neither NATO as an organization nor (except in the last French and British colonial wars) any non-U.S. NATO country was involved in those wars; and rightly so, for their military contribution would have been insignificant, and the resulting domestic protests would have torn their societies apart. So while the existence of NATO may have helped deter the USSR from aggression — or at least heavy political pressure on Western Europe — NATO did not actually have to do anything.
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The disastrous role of NATO in international affairs began when the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet power gave NATO the chance to do something, and the fear that otherwise it would be abolished gave it the motive to do so
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we may be sure that without Washington to encourage their ambitions and save them from the consequences, even the most expansionist European members of NATO will in fact be very glad to do nothing