After 75 years, NATO is as crucial as ever for world peace
National Post, 06 April 2024
The mutual defence alliance is not as strong as it should be, but without it Russia would have free rein
NATO marked its 75th anniversary this past week. It has been one of the most successful military and security alliances in history.
In the decades preceding 1949, Europe had suffered two wars of unimaginable horror. In the years before 1949, Moscow added to its internal empire with an external empire reaching into the heart of Europe. Both were, as they would eventually be called, “evil.”
The attempt to reconstitute that empire under Vladimir Putin has caused undue fretting about NATO in recent years, with a resurgence in the isolationist stream in American conservatism. Yet it is the present Russian aggression against Ukraine that demonstrates the value of NATO.
The question in 1949 was how to deal with the threat of war in the face of Stalin’s expansionist communist tyranny. Hitler’s expansionist tyranny had plunged Europe into war. (Contra Putin and his interlocutor Tucker Carlson, it was not Polish unwillingness to negotiate away its territory.) Stalin began with a head start over Hitler; he already had occupied and subjugated his neighbours.
NATO, a mutual defence and security pact, meant that Europe was not going back to September 1939, but would make the arrangements of December 1941 permanent. When Churchill received news of Pearl Harbor, he knew that the Americans would now fight alongside Britons and Canadians against Hitler. That was not the case at the war’s outbreak, when Canada joined Britain immediately, but isolationism was too strong to overcome at that point in the U.S.A.
After the war, would America engage or withdraw? NATO was one of the answers. When West Germany joined NATO in 1955, it was an astonishing achievement by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. That Germany and France, having gone to war with each other three times in the previous 90 years, would be allied in mutual defence at the centre of Europe — this was a supreme act of statesmanship and diplomacy.
NATO contained Soviet communism during the Cold War. In the face of significant protests, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl deployed intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe in response to similar moves by Moscow. “Peace through strength” proved successful; in a few years Reagan’s “zero option” was accepted by Moscow, and an entire class of nuclear weapons was dismantled.
NATO was essential to keeping the peace and winning the Cold War. In its 40th anniversary year, newly-free East Germans danced upon the Berlin Wall.
Yet 30 years after the Soviet Union was thrown on the ash heap of history, NATO is under pressure due to Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The pressures are twofold.
The first is a lack of commitment. For too long, NATO members — with Canada in the lead — have been free-riding on the American contribution. The war against Ukraine has made that no longer tenable. European members have already increased their defence spending. It is even possible that Canada may do the same — should pharmacare, electric vehicle subsidies and school lunches not exhaust the exchequer.
Continue reading at the National Post.