By Patrickneil – Own work based on: Blank map of Europe (with disputed regions).svg by Tintazul and Maix, CC BY-SA 3.0.
How many nations should America promise to defend from their adversaries? Every new addition to NATO is another commitment of American blood and treasure to defend a country that can’t defend itself. At the Cato Institute, Michael Chapman suggests America allow Europe to take the lead in its own defense. Chapman writes:
Many Western leaders, such as President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, say NATO expansion, including membership for Ukraine, is vital to Europe’s collective security. But an ever-growing NATO—spearheaded by the United States—seems to contradict what one of its principal architects, Dwight D. Eisenhower, envisioned for the organization. Further, proposed membership for Ukraine helped trigger Russia’s 2022 invasion, a war that has reportedly killed several hundred thousand Ukrainians and cost the US taxpayers $175 billion—so far.
A wiser policy for peace, as Cato and other libertarian scholars have advocated for decades, is to abandon efforts to expand NATO, resume the withdrawal of US troops from Germany, and let Europe take the lead in its own defense.
NATO started off in 1949 primarily to counter the Soviet Union and (in 1955) the Warsaw Pact. The USSR and the pact collapsed in 1991–some 33 years ago. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and a principal architect of NATO, wrote in 1951, “If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project [NATO] will have failed.” Today there are about 100,000 US troops in Europe.
Despite Eisenhower’s benchmark, the dissolution of the USSR, and the end of the Cold War, NATO, like nearly all national security/defense programs, did not end. It grew. In 1949 there were 12 NATO member nations and now there are 32. The latest members, Finland and Sweden, joined, respectively, in 2023 and 2024.
That expansion happened in spite of assurances from US leaders to Russia in the early 1990s that NATO would not move beyond the borders of Germany. As Marc Trachtenberg reports in a new Cato policy analysis, Is There Life After NATO?US Secretary of State James Baker told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990, that, “if the Soviets allowed a reunified Germany to remain in NATO and US troops remained in that country, the alliance’s jurisdiction would not move ‘one inch to the east.’”
Read more here.
If you’re willing to fight for Main Street America, click here to sign up for my free weekly email.
