RENEWING THE QUESTION ABOUT THE ANACHRONISM OF NATO
(…as the root cause of today’s crisis with Russia)

A few years after the dust had settled from the collapse of the former Soviet Union, and Russia seemed to have transformed itself into something more acceptable for inclusion into polite international society, I wrote a piece suggesting that, since the main reason for continuing with NATO no longer existed, it was now an anachronism and should be replaced by a more appropriate alliance to be called the – European Treaty Organization – which would include Russia as a member of it.

Published in an international newspaper, that idea at the time was vehemently trashed as heretical in the extreme, mainly by EU voices because they felt, to do so, would shift the burden of the cost of such an alliance on it…rather than on America.

For its part, America’s psyche was still mired in Cold War residues (…those former commissars might now be oligarchs…but they were still wearing red underwear, etc…), so mistrust and uncertainty about how this “new” Russia would behave required an arms-length approach, until it proved otherwise, and that distrust of it could be allowed to fade away.

Furthermore, NATO was a handy fig leaf whenever America felt obliged to perform as the world’s police force anywhere. Besides that, since America’s industrial-military complex was the primary source for NATO’s armaments and firepower, doing away with it would cause a serious decline in its revenues (and high-paying employment as well). Topping all these other motives working against that idea, of course, was the inherent reluctance to dismantle a fifty-year old institutionalized alliance, since that would require America leaving its comfort zone…which it was not about to do then…or at any time later.

Looking back on that idea now, we can’t help but ponder on what would have happened if that change had been made back then. Would today’s crisis with Russia exist? Would the entire continent from Gibraltar to the Urals have become a dynamic region of the global economy? Would many of the contentions and conflicts since experienced have been avoided, and would Russia have long since become fully integrated into the European fold?

Who knows? These may be just speculative reflections on what might have been…but, because that was not done…what we see today are Europe’s and Russia’s economies in a very lethargic state, unemployment at unacceptable levels everywhere, general discontent and malaise plaguing everyone, corruption and poor governance compounding all of that, fomenting separatist sentiments eroding any efforts to promote unity of purpose and affiliation. Meanwhile, once again, Russia looms over the horizon as a potential threat rather than being thought of as a favored member of European society.

In some respects today’s situation resembles what happened almost two hundred years ago after the final defeat and fall of the Napoleonic empire, when Russia, and its Czar Alexander I where the leading lights of the coalition that accomplished that., and were warmly welcomed for it…at least for a brief moment in time…until…at an international conference in Vienna to determine how best to re-structure a post-Napoleonic Europe, a wily Austrian named Prince Metternich skillfully manipulated his emperor’s dynastic interests to help shove Russia right back into the continent’s “outback”…where he personally felt it belonged. It was another perfect example of how dynastic or national self-interests always trump common sense arrangements that might otherwise benefit everyone.

As a result every Russian autocrat of whatever ilk since that time has always held the perspective that the rest of Europe was potentially hostile. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was the first demonstration of that. The Crimean War of the 1830s further reinforced that mindset, and Hitler’s invasion in the 1940s simply confirmed that reality for it. Lastly, the extension of NATO, beyond its WWII objectives, and the Cold War that followed, created an ingrained paranoid Russian knee-jerk reaction for lashing out at even the vaguest hint of any kind of possible hostility towards it.

Well, Czar Vladimir I is no Czar Alexander I, but his motivations for his courses of action today are simply more of the same, and must be viewed in the context of that history. NATO’s continuing eastern extension is too painfully reminiscent of Hitler’s – drang nach osten – maneuvers to be accepted. So perhaps the time has come to be renewing that question about the anachronism of NATO, as the root cause of today’s crisis with Russia; and, to seriously reconsider how such a heretical notion of replacing NATO with a strictly European design that would include Russia as a part of it…might have some merit after all, so that the economic prosperity and stability everyone, including Russia, so desperately wants could then become a reality?

Unfortunately, for that to happen, it will require…statesmanship…not brinkmanship … and that’s something which, alas, seems to be sorely lacking in our world today.

CENTURION