Again Trump has it backwards. According
to NATO’s internal logic, the US should pay the members – not the other
way around – for providing services to the empire and a tripwire for war.
The empire doesn’t protect; it provokes and endangers. Who would willingly pay
for that?
As Andrew
Levine, drawing on Andrew
Bacevich, notes:
NATO was a particular problem. By the nineties, it had become integral
to America’s imperial project, but with the Warsaw Pact gone, and the
Cold War over, it was hard to make a case that would appeal to anyone outside
the war machine’s ambit for needing it at all.
However, the empire’s stewards did need NATO because they couldn’t
or didn’t want to police the empire on their own, and because the UN
could not be counted on to bend to America’s will – not with all
those pesky little countries with different ideas in the General Assembly,
and not with Russia and China having veto rights in the Security Council.
NATO, on the other hand, was a serviceable international organization
that the United States could dominate and also, not incidentally, use to keep
European powers under its thumb – in the unlikely event that any of
them might decide to get uppity.
On Bacevich’s telling, this is what American machinations in the
former Yugoslavia were about – once it became clear that the US could
not remain aloof from the disintegration of that formerly socialist and multi-cultural
country without ceding power to the Germans and other European upstarts.
For [Bill] Clinton – or, rather, for the Clintons and their co-thinkers
– dropping bombs on Serbians was a way to make NATO relevant, and also
to insure that the United States would continue to call the shots in the so-called
Free World.
NATO is America’s tool. The member states
don’t need it. America’s ruling elite does. That elite got rather upset in 1966
when French President Charles de Gaulle, resenting US overbearance, withdrew
his country from NATO’s military structure and asked
for the removal of NATO troops from France. (France again became a full
military member in 2009.) America has always taken the position voiced by George
H. W. Bush as he prepared to send his military to war against Iraq in 1990-91:
“What we say goes.” That’s American exceptionalism.
Trump consistently shows an inability to close the deal – ironic, no? Time
and time again he’s picked up on a piece of a legitimate issue, seemed uninterested
in facts and arguments that would develop the point into a decent campaign issue,
then botched it. I think I know why: Trump’s shtick is that the US is the aggrieved
nation: because of weak and stupid leaders it has been taken been advantage
of every which way. That’s great fodder…