Col. Douglas Macgregor — NATO Is Not Dying. It’s a Zombie

Why is NATO a zombie. According to Col. MacGregor, it fuels the military-industrial complex that lies at the heart of the US economy, so it is kept alive indefinitely. Of course, we knew this already, but here is a former insider saying it.

Mysteriously, the promises given to President Mikhail Gorbachev by President George H. W. Bush, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, President Francois Mitterand, Chancellor Helmuth Kohl and their foreign ministers in 1990—not to expand NATO eastward; not to extend membership in the NATO alliance to former member states of the Warsaw Pact—were ignored. Why was this important strategic commitment made by NATO’s key leaders to President Gorbachev ignored?

Well, in the 1990s, the Russian threat was nonexistent and there was no reason to suppose it would return. In addition, President Clinton and the Senators who were nominally in charge of overseeing the conduct of U.S. Foreign and Security Policy were mesmerized by the prospects of being on the right side of history and campaign donations.

Given the voracious appetite for cash in Congress the defense industries were clearly interested in NATO expansion and found ways to advocate for it. Weapons sales to East European nations invited to join NATO promised huge profits. Bruce Jackson, a Lockheed vice president from 1993–2002, rushed to set up the Committee to Expand NATO and reportedly used contributions from defense companies to lobby Congress for NATO expansion.…

The upshot.

After 2001, just about anything could be and was characterized as an existential threat to the American People: Islamist Terrorism or the Global Caliphate, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and, by 2012, a resurgent Russia. Defense budgets rose and U.S. Forces were now in Africa, the Mideast, Asia and Eastern Europe. By the time President Obama completed his first term Moscow concluded that Washington’s expansion of the NATO Alliance combined with its open-ended presence in Afghanistan and the Near East was really a coordinated plan to make Russia's strategic situation untenable.

Now the US has to contend with an enemy that it created, Worse, Russia is the only enemy that now poses an existential threat to the US. Worse than that, US policy have driven the US and China into a strategic alliance. This is not only an existential through but also presents the challenge of land war in Asia that the NATO allies cannot win. This is the definition of folly. "Fools rush in where angels fear to read."

This is also corruption on a grand scale.

The crazy continues to proliferate. While the GOP has been identified as the war party historically, it was Bill Clinton that led the charge in advancing NATO eastward and attacking Russian ally, Serbia, almost igniting WWIII. Now the war party is the Democrats. Now the war party is bipartisan.

The National Interest
NATO Is Not Dying. It’s a Zombie

Col. Douglas Macgregor, U. S. Army (retired)