Oh Noes ... Muh NATO

unserious or unstable people are thick in the natsec arena in election years

Election years are so tiresome. When people are incapable or disinterested in discussing real and substantial topics, they will nut-pick an extreme, exaggerate a low-probability whim, or just invent crap out of whole cloth.

When you take that expected part of the silly season and roll it into what any right-of-center American who has lived in Europe has seen in stark relief - Europeans’ warped view of the USA because they see it only through the narrow straw of WaPo/NYT and their derivatives - then, boy-howdy do the normies have a lot of chaff to sail through anytime our great Atlantic Alliance comes up.

Case in point from Ellen Knickmeyer at the AP with an article best read in the breathless voice of a panicked eight-year-old, “Can you ‘Trump-proof’ NATO? As Biden falters, Europeans look to safeguard the military alliance.“

Let me start by typing something you won’t find on these pages very often, I’m in alignment with someone from the Atlantic Council;

Rachel Rizzo, a senior fellow on NATO with the nonpartisan think tank the Atlantic Council, says she has a blunt message for Europeans: “Freaking out about a second Trump term helps no one.”

Second, while people are entitled to their nervous breakdowns and thrilling stumbles to their preferred fainting couches (case in point of the byproduct of only reading WaPo and NYT), they are not entitled to their personal system of government.

A single President can’t walk away from NATO;

The Senate, after 10 days of debate, agreed with the Foreign Relations Committee and approved the treaty on July 21 by a vote of 82 to 13. The President ratified the treaty on July 25; it entered into force August 24, 1949, after the other signatory nations quickly ratified. The first meeting of the North Atlantic Council was convened by Secretary Acheson in Washington on September 17.

It is a treaty, not a gentleman’s agreement. On top of that, last year;

Congress has approved legislation that would prevent any president from withdrawing the United States from NATO without approval from the Senate or an Act of Congress.

The measure, spearheaded by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), was included in the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which passed out of the House on Thursday and is expected to be signed by President Biden.

This is simply a fever dream, fried air, dead letter, election year … whatever is the correct way to describe this type of political fear-mongering and wish-casting.

Back to Rizzo’s comment. Why are people freaking out? Simple - many in the European and American natsec nomenklatura don’t understand anyone to the right of Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) and don’t try to think too critically about things that align with their priors.

The USA has no intention of abandoning Europe to whatever wolves come from the east, mostly because it is not in our self-interest to allow that.

However, the American public has grown weary of playing demi-empire and allowing rich nations to free-ride on our defense budget. We’re happy to help our friends do their job, but not do their job for them as they lounge about tut-tut’n how we do it.

Here is a simple fact, there is no one in Europe who can back the NATO collective like we can, or for that matter, keep them on the same team and off each other’s throats for more than a generation. Any EU military structure is a dead letter because it will quickly turn in to an attempt for the French or <gasp> the Germans to once again create a pan-European army in order … to defend Europe against … look at your chart;

“If an American president comes into office and says, ‘We’re done with that,’ there is definitely will in Europe to backfill the American role,” said John Deni, a senior fellow on security at the Atlantic Council. “The Brits would jump on it.”

But “even they will acknowledge they do not have the capacity or the capability, and they can’t do it at the speed and the scale that we can,” Deni said. “This notion that we are somehow Trump-proofing or future-proofing the American commitment — either to Ukraine or to NATO — I think that mostly is fantasy.”

There is a real danger to NATO, and a less imperial American mindset is not it. No, not at all.

The greatest danger to NATO is first of all those nations like Belgium, Spain, etc whose governments refuse to invest the absolute minimum for the alliance’s collective defense - the same source nations of those who hate the Americans who continue to point out their failures to carry their fair share of the alliance’s burden.

Right behind them in second place are those EU-primacists who do not even like the concept of NATO with its Anglosphere primacy and instead want a strong EU-controlled military capability. See commentary on those people above.

In the end, what I would offer to anyone on either side of the Atlantic who thinks a new Trump administration would yeet the USA out of NATO on a whim is this; get out more. Actually talk to people on the natsec right. Get out of your intellectually onanistic terrariums. And for the sake of your larger credibility and sanity - do not think the America you read about in the NYT/WaPo and their derivatives, especially in an election year, is a reflection of the full reality.

Read broadly. Seek out a contrary opinion. Have reasonable discussions of substance. Don’t assume anyone who disagrees with you on policy is evil and the absolute worst version of their enemies’ caricature.

In the end, we all want the same thing, don’t we? Keep America in, the Russia out, and the France & Germany down.

OK, I kid a bit on the last part, a little. Perhaps not. Well, you know.