If NATO Dies, Do We Really Have to Mourn?

The New York Times wonders what Donald Trump taking over Greenland would mean for NATO:

Over the past year, President Trump has pushed NATO with threats and coercion to make divisive changes. Now he is threatening to seize control of Greenland, potentially with military force, which has heightened concerns that he will destroy the trans-Atlantic security alliance…

There is widespread public support in the United States for the alliance, which was created after World War II to deter the Soviet Union. If the president tried to thwart NATO by controlling Greenland, “I think Congress will stop him,” said Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia.

NATO is history’s most expensive self-licking ice cream cone. Proponents spent much of the last three decades taking bold, often destructive policy actions to convince taxpayers of member nations the alliance needs to keep existing. We’ve redrawn the world map multiple times and even invented new forms of war just to give it something to do. It’s madness, but few have been willing to say so.

Now we’re told the issue with Trump possibly occupying Greenland isn’t that it might be crazy or bad for Greenland, but that it might hurt the “trans-Atlantic security alliance.” Unless it’s the good part? A brief history of the mad policy gambits undertaken to save NATO since the Soviet collapse:

The Times is right that NATO has “widespread public support” in the United States, though the favorability gap (60%-37%) is due mostly to positive feelings among Democrats, who used to have opposite feelings. Why any American should care about NATO is a more elusive question. The ostensible reason for the alliance ended decades ago with the collapse of the Soviet Union, while the real reasons for maintaining NATO have rarely been articulated, and for good reason. If the world grasped the true dynamics of the Atlanticist dream, the citizens of member countries would demand it be taken behind a shed and shot.

Most people assume NATO was created as a bulwark against Soviet expansion, in response to events like the 1948 communist takeover of Czechoslovakia. In reality NATO always had a multi-layered mission centered around America’s belief that a combination of bureaucracy and money could not only help keep Europeans from killing each other, but save the U.S. from having to go in later and clean up. The First Secretary-General of NATO, Lord Hastings Ismay, is credited with a famous quote: NATO existed to “keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down.”