Tag Archives: NATO membership

Why Are We In NATO?

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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was founded on 4 April 1949. Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the United States signed the treaty. Since its founding, Greece, West Germany, Turkey, Spain, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Finland and Sweden have joined. Since its founding, no country has left the organization.

On April 1, The Conservative Treehouse posted an article about NATO’s current actions.

The article reports:

The U.S. supports our NATO posture in Europe in part because it provides us with strategic military bases and operations that are considered vital to our national interests. However, as outlined in the Iran conflict, when we need to use those strategic bases the NATO member states withdraw previous permissions. France has blocked us from flying over their airspace, Spain and Italy have said the U.S. cannot use our military bases on their soil for operations. The U.K has refused to protect and/or escort their own energy assets.

The NATO membership is now a one-way street where they demand our military protection, but Europe blocks us from using our own military assets for our independent operations.

Europe, while hiding behind the NATO protection skirt of the U.S, is simultaneously telling the U.S. what we can and cannot do with our own military. Secretary Rubio and President Trump are now confronting this very visible one-way benefit head on.

The article includes the following video:

America has been protecting Europe since World War II. Our military bases there boost the local economies. The decision of some of the NATO counties to deny the use of bases in their countries to deal with the threat of Iran makes it very hard to justify our continued membership in the organization. I think Europe needs to understand the threat posed to them by Iran (if Iran’s missiles can reach Diego Garcia, they can reach Europe) and help with the war effort. Europe is much more dependent on the Strait of Hormuz for its oil than America is. It’s time for the NATO nations to step up to the plate. Otherwise, why should America be a member?

The Story Behind The Story

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On Monday, The Conservative Treehouse posted an article with a rather different viewpoint on the origins and purpose of the current war in Ukraine. It is a long, involved article, so I suggest you follow the link to read the entire article. I will try to provide some  highlights.

The article notes:

Current CIA Director William “Bill” Burns was the former ambassador to Russia and Jordan.  Bill Burns had a 33-year career at the State Department under both Republican and Democratic presidents and speaks fluent Russian. If the people in the background of Joe Biden wanted an intelligence operative to trigger a specific result from Russia, there’s no one more strategically perfect for the job than CIA Director Bill Burns.

The article by Beinart (Peter Beinart on substack {SEE HERE}) is mainly focused on pointing out the irreconcilable nature of Joe Biden implying Ukraine could join NATO, while his own CIA Director has a history of giving serious warnings emphasizing the “brightest of all red lines” about that specific point.

[…]  “Two years ago, Burns wrote a memoir entitled, The Back Channel. It directly contradicts the argument being proffered by the administration he now serves. In his book, Burns says over and over that Russians of all ideological stripes—not just Putin—loathed and feared NATO expansion. He quotes a memo he wrote while serving as counselor for political affairs at the US embassy in Moscow in 1995. ‘Hostility to early NATO expansion,” it declares, “is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.”

On the question of extending NATO membership to Ukraine, Burns’ warnings about the breadth of Russian opposition are even more emphatic. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” he wrote in a 2008 memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” (read more)

The article reports the following:

The CIA Director is crystal clear that Russia would be seriously triggered about any prospect of Ukraine entering NATO.

Yet, in December of 2021, the exact same time when U.S. backchannel intelligence was being shared with China about Russian troop movements on the border with Ukraine, Joe Biden was telling Ukraine that membership in NATO was in their hands.

The war in Ukraine now can be conveniently blamed for economic woes, the high price of gasoline, the empty supermarket shelves, other supply chain problems, etc.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article.