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Sept. 27, 2019 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
42:37
'NATO’s Destructive Tentacles' - David Stockman

Former Reagan Administration official and RPI Board Member David Stockman joins RPI's 2019 Washington Conference with a blistering critique of NATO and of US interventionist foreign policy.

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Time Text
David Stockman's Zen Presence 00:03:41
Our next speaker said, Don't give me a long introduction.
He doesn't need an introduction.
But I'm going to tell one story.
David Stockman is cool as a cucumber.
I mean, I can't believe this guy is so great.
I watched him once on MSNBC.
I think it was.
It was Mika, wasn't it?
And they had five or six people.
They were just grilling him, putting him to a cheese grater.
I think it was seven in the morning or something.
They were brutalizing him.
And he had the same serene smile on his face that he always had.
He didn't get flustered.
And I'm over here chewing my nails.
I can't believe I've ever.
And here's David.
He's just, and I dropped him a little note saying, I admire that so much, that ability to keep the Zen, keep the smile.
It's so effective.
It's so disarming.
And it's such a great way to get your point across.
And that's why David Stockman is such a great communicator.
And we're so thrilled and privileged to have him join us.
David is great because he's on the nexus of economics and foreign policy.
He's so knowledgeable about both.
He seams them together.
He sews them together in a way that helps us understand the connection between the two.
I don't need to tell you about his background.
It's in there, and you all know it, I'm sure, anyway.
So I will say, let's give a warm welcome to David Stockman.
Well, thank you very much, Dan.
After that introduction, I kind of would like to meet this David Stockman guy, too.
I mean, he sounds pretty terrific.
I am really encouraged to come here this morning and look out at a full house, a sold-out crowd, as Daniel said.
And I say that because I'd almost given up and beginning to believe that the warfare state had won.
But as I look out here today, I can see that the insurrection is alive and well right here in the Imperial City.
So I want to thank you for your service, you know, of the good kind.
We're doing the real service that's needed.
I also am delighted to be on the program today with Congressman Duncan because we have a real kinship that is unusual.
I voted against the Chrysler bailout in Michigan, and he voted against war in Tennessee, and we both survived to tell about it.
So it's kind of you got to stand up for what's right and what's appropriate, regardless of the political consequences.
It also reminds me, being with Congressman Duncan today, that time does fly when you're having fun or when you're worried about the world.
52 years ago today, I was here in Washington, D.C., on the barricades at the Pentagon, protesting the Vietnam War as leader of my SDS chapter from Michigan State University.
And the reason that I bring this up is that two years later, I was a young aide on Capitol Hill and I met Congressman Duncan, but it was his father.
And I spent the next 15 years as a colleague of Congressman Duncan, who then spent 30 years in Washington.
And here we are 50 years later, and I can't believe how far things have gone to hell in a handbasket.
We actually thought in the spring of 1968 that the tide had turned, the country had turned against the war in Vietnam.
We had been part of that.
Denmark's NATO Dilemma 00:07:36
The 1970s were a great time when big questions were raised, great debates were had.
We had the church committee, all these investigations of the abuses and the lies that were told that got us into Vietnam and so forth.
And yet, when we look at it today, there's no debate.
It's one hand clapping.
They all agree with each other.
It's bipartisan.
And that's why what we're trying to do and what you're doing, I think, is really so very important.
Now, just to be clear, so you're clear on where I'm coming from, I would like to announce that the formal title of my speech is that there is something rotten in Denmark.
But it ain't Greenland.
I'll tell you that.
Of course, I mean no disrespect for our dear leader in the Oval Office, who apparently, in between his daily dose of Fox and Friends, has been binge-watching the Vikings on the History Channel.
And somehow he thinks maybe he's a modern-day Ragnar, if any of you ever watch that show.
Actually, the Greenland idea is so completely stupid that even the Donald could not come up with it on his own.
In fact, by his own boast, it's the brainchild of the truly stupidest man in all of Washington.
That is Senator Tom Cotton of Mississippi, who is a neocon nitwit so in love with war that just in case all of Washington's wars everywhere around the planet peter out, we can retain the option to take on the Chinese commies on the great Greenland ice flow if push comes to shove.
Anyway, seriously, what I really think is that the Donald did strike another blow for world peace, albeit inadvertently, when he became infatuated with the world's largest iceberg, albeit one that was teeming with green meadows when the Vikings, who were definitely not colorblind, colonized it in the late 9th century.
Now, we don't exactly blame Denmark's prime minister for dismissing Trump's offer to buy Greenland as absurd, but we were more than delighted with the Donald's repost.
You recall he said, I thought the prime minister's statement was nasty.
You don't talk to the United States that way, at least under me.
Actually, I think it's about time someone did.
You know, what's rotten in Denmark is not the Prime Minister's rebuke to the Donald's ludicrous idea of replicating Seward's ice box in the 21st century.
What's haywire is the fact that Denmark wastes its fiscal and moral resources supporting the obsolete Cold War relic known as NATO and thereby kowtows to Imperial Washington's destructive pursuit of global hegemony.
Now, self-evidently, Denmark knows that the old Soviet Union, with its 50,000 tanks lined up on the Central Front, slithered off the pages of history 28 years ago.
That's why it doesn't fear an invasion from the decrepit rump state of Putin's kleptocracy and therefore spends this is Denmark, spends the minuscule sum of 3.5 billion or just 1.2% of GDP per year on defense.
And folks, I think that tells you all you need to know: 1.2% of GDP on defense.
What NATO really is in the present world is a cover story for Washington's global adventurism and its misbegotten missions of invasion and occupation all around the world.
So what the Donald is actually accomplishing with his unhinged insults to most of NATO's heads of state is a kind of international wake-up call.
Perhaps next time that Washington starts a jolly little war in another irrelevant corner of the planet, no one will come, especially the war party's Brussels-based Patsys in NATO.
Indeed, if you want to understand NATO's real mission in a world in which there are no industrial states which militarily threaten the peace and security of Europe, just consider the twisted rebuke that Donald received from a 33-year-old Washington examiner, neocon war-mongering SNP by the name of Tom Rogan.
Here's what the guy said: Trump's words are immoral.
Denmark has fought alongside us in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Seven Danes gave their lives in Iraq.
In Afghanistan, 43 Danes died, and hundreds more were wounded.
We should thank Danes for giving their sons and daughters lives for our common cause.
I say, heavens, no.
To the contrary, we should urge them to just say no, not only to the sale of Greenland, but to its national self-abasement in pimping for the Washington War Party.
What we are saying is that in the year 2019, it is evident that Imperial Washington is the greatest threat to peace, stability, and prosperity anywhere on the planet, and that the $1.1 trillion per year true cost of the warfare state, if we count everything from veterans all the way through DOD and international security assistance and all the rest of it,
the $1.1 trillion true cost of the warfare state is bankrupting the fiscal accounts of the American homeland as well.
So what needs to happen is the dismantling of NATO, which is the linchpin of the empire's global girth, and slashing of the defense budget proper to something like $250 billion per year.
That's all that's required.
And this is, thank you.
That's all that's required, believe me, and I've gone through the numbers in great detail, and I spent five years fighting the Pentagon, and I still have the track marks on my back from the M1 tanks they sent my way.
But anyway, I can tell you that that's all, $250 billion, that is required for nuclear deterrence and the defense of the shorelines and airspace of the homeland in today's multipolar world.
Now, I think it would be fair to say that the gods of history work in strange ways, or at least it's said.
And that's especially the case with the Great Disruptor.
You know, the Donald is an exceedingly unpleasant bully who has already emitted more baloney, bombast, brimstone, bellicosity, and bile than any previous political figure in American history.
Seeking Rapprochement With Russia 00:08:17
And none has ever matched his overweening narcissism and pathetic egomania.
Strong words to follow on that.
Still, he was elected for a deeper purpose, and this is the point I want to get across today.
The major, perhaps only redeeming virtue of the Donald Iersatz campaign platform was his clear intent to seek a rapprochement with Russia, revamp America's commitment to NATO and other Cold War relics, and discard regime change as the core tenant of foreign policy.
In essence, America First was to become the new route to domestic security and safety.
But after 30 months, I think it's fair to say that it's not happening.
The eminently sensible notion, these eminently sensible notions, struck the deep states raison d'être to the quick.
So by hook and crook, it has thwarted at every turn the Donald's halting, inconsistent, and often impetuous actions towards his primitive, albeit directionally correct, notion of America First.
Clearly, for example, he meant to withdraw America's 29,000 military hostages now stationed in South Korea in return for some sort of peace treaty, economic normalization, and denuclearization arrangement with King Kim Jong-un.
And he has made Herclean efforts toward that end via his personal diplomacy with the latter.
But his own incredibly bad choices of deep state stalwarts like Pompeo and Bolton have frustrated any real forward progress on the Korean file.
Likewise, he sensibly suggested that demonizing Russia and Putin has accomplished nothing and that they should be invited back into the G8.
And yet the mere revival of this suggestion that he made a few days ago sent the so-called progressive Democrats into frenzied apoplexy.
Democratic Congressman Jeremondi, who's on the Foreign Affairs Committee, for example, told the CNN War Channel, and that's what it is, I think all of you agree, told the CNN War Channel that we shouldn't reward Putin's bad behavior.
Why?
Because he sent little green men, little green men into the Donbass.
He stole Crimea, and he denied Hillary her divine right to the U.S. presidency.
Needless to say, Bobby 3S Moeller has killed the Russian hoax debtor than a doornail.
And anyway, in the case of the election meddling meme, there are few more hypocritical instances of the pot calling the kettle black than all the grave harumphing in the beltway about $100,000 worth of Facebook ads.
As some of you may know who've investigated this, I've written about it.
These were written by $4 per hour drones in the St. Petersburg troll farm who were apparently practicing English as a third language.
They got utterly lost in the noise of 33 trillion Facebook messages during the same period.
Now, over against the troll farm that even a U.S. judge has recently ruled has no ties to the Kremlin, and he actually forbid Tim Moeller from even talking about it, we have the total U.S. intelligence community budget of upwards of $80 billion per year.
Now, the reason I bring this up is that that's 25% more than Russia's entire military budget, including ships and planes and ammo and fuel and rations and operations and maintenance and even spare booths.
Our intelligence community spends more than the entire kit and caboodle, and a big part of that giant IC spend goes to, well, we know, meddling, hacking, and sabotage of foreign nations.
Likewise, and as we will see soon, the Ukraine narrative is upside down.
It was Washington's deep state operatives who organized, funded, and recognized the coup on the streets of Kiev in February 2014.
Subsequently, the Donbass region in the east of the Ukraine revolted not owing to the coercion of these little green men from the Kremlin, but because the population is 75% Russian-speaking and didn't cotton to the Russophobic crypto-Nazi regime Washington famously installed in Kiev under the leadership of quote,
Yachts is our man, if you remember that one from Victoria Newland, the neocon assistant secretary of state under Obama.
Now, as for Crimea, Catherine the Great bought it with honest gold money in 1783.
It remains 80% Russian-speaking and deeply integrated with the Russian economy and is core to Russian national security because the blacks, the great Black Sea Fleet, has been homeported in Sevastopol on the tip of Crimea for more than 200 years under Tsars, commissars, and kleptomaniacs alike.
Besides, Crimea's only historic connection to the Ukraine was via the dictate of the Soviet Presidium in 1954.
In 1954, what happened was the latter was transferred, in 1954, they transferred this thoroughly Russian territory, which some of you remember is the very place where Russian patriots famously defeated the English invaders in the charge of the light brigade.
It was transferred to Nikita Khrushchev's chums in Kiev because they had supported him in the bloody struggle for succession to Stalin.
So why?
Well, in gratitude for their support in winning the bloody power struggle after Stalin's death, as I indicated.
And what that means is that the Democrats and official Washington apparently believe that enforcing the dead hand of the Soviet Presidium 65 years after the fact is vital to America's security.
Now, I tell you, you just can't make this stuff up, and that's exactly what's involved here.
The ironic fact of the matter is there has never been anything at stake in the Ukraine that matters.
During the last 700 years, it has been a meandering set of borders in search of a country.
In fact, the intervals in which Ukraine existed as an independent nation have been few and far between.
Invariably, its rulers, petty potentates, and corrupt politicians made deals with or surrendered to every outside power that came along.
These included the Lithuanians, the Turks, the Poles, the Austrians, the Muscovites, and the Tsars, among others.
Indeed, in modern time, the Ukraine largely functioned as an integral part of Mother Russia, serving as its breadbasket in iron and steel crucible under Tsars and Commissars alike.
Now, given this history, the idea that the Ukraine should be actively and aggressively induced to join NATO, the real reason for Washington's 2014 coup is just plain nuts.
U.S. Military Capacity and Foreign Policy 00:15:37
Now, on that same score, we also know that Trump had initially been hounding the national security bureaucracy about the utterly ridiculous presence of U.S. troops in Europe.
But he has been rebuked, thwarted, and ground down so completely by his own officials that he is now apparently just acquiesced to the status quo.
But still, you can't blame him for trying.
After all, 74 years after Hitler descended into Hades from his bunker, and 28 years after the Soviet Union got photoshopped off the map of modern nations, there are still 35,000 troops in Germany.
Yet hardly a soul in Washington gets the joke.
That's because the defense of Europe and the perpetuation of NATO is what feeds millions of souls in the U.S. military-industrial surveillance complex and stuffs the campaign coffers on both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill with prodigious amounts of re-election goodness.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the mainstream press is always harumping about Trump's obvious minimum low regard for NATO.
But the fact is, it doesn't represent the European people or enhance their security one bit.
NATO is simply the European branch of the U.S. warfare state and is an echo chamber of its misbegotten talking points and interventionist missions.
The truth, however, is that NATO is absolutely the most useless, obsolete, wasteful, and dangerous multilateral institution in the present world.
But unlike the proverbial clothesless emperor, NATO doesn't dare risk having the purportedly uninformed amateur in the Oval Office pointing out its buck naked behind.
So the NATO subservient think tanks and Daniel spot on and establishment policy apparatchiks continue harumphing up a storm, even though by their policy actions, Europe's elected politicians show that they are in on the joke.
That is, the petty politicians of Europe are fiscally swamped paying for their massive welfare states and are not about to squeeze their budgets or taxpayers to fund military muscle against a non-existent threat.
Indeed, our dear departed Justin Raimondo once noted: Vladimir Putin isn't going to march into Berlin in a reenactment of the Red Army taking the Führer bunker, but even if he were so inclined, why won't Germany defend itself?
And I say exactly.
If their history proves anything, Germans are not a nation of pacifists.
Meekly, we can see that.
Meekly willing to bend over in the face of real aggressors.
Yet they spent the paltry sum of $43 billion on defense during 2018, or barely 1.2% of Germany's 3.9 trillion GDP, which happens to be roughly three times bigger than Russia's.
In short, the policy action of the German government tells you they don't think Putin is about to invade the Rhineland or retake the Brandenburg Gate.
And This live-action testimonial also trumps, as it were, all of the risable alarms emanating from the Beltway think tanks and 4,000 NATO bureaucrats talking their own book in behalf of their plush Brussels sinecures.
So, overcoming the self-interested inertial forces of the deep state and its vast syndicate of contractors, weapons suppliers, military pork barrels, and think tank supplicants, of course, is its own monumental challenge.
Yet the Donald's pathway to America first is further obstructed by the fact that the Dems are way off sides for purely partisan reasons.
That is to say, Democratic politicians, including most of the so-called liberals and progressives, have turned themselves into servile handmaids of the warfare state.
And that's owing to their inconsolable grief and anger over losing the 2016 election to the very worst candidate the GOP GOP has ever fielded in modern times, including Barry Goldwater in 1964 or even Alf Landon in 1936, if you want to go way back in the pages of history.
Consequently, they are virtually incapable of thinking rationally about Russia or of even thinking at all.
In effect, they have become beltway saboteurs, witting or otherwise, who will stop at nothing to keep the current utterly unnecessary and pointless Cold War revival cranking at full steam.
Needless to say, this democratic bereavement ritual, in combination with the incorrigible warmongering of most of the GOP neocon infested rank and file on Capitol Hill, has the deep state tickled pink.
To paraphrase the great Randolph Bourne, this revived Russian ogre is the health of the military, industrial, intelligence, think tank complex in a world that absolutely does not need it.
Thus, even a mild rapprochement, to say nothing of lasting peace with Russia, is an existential threat to the deep state.
It would necessarily pull the fiscal pins right out from under the hideous $900 billion per year we spend on defense, intelligence, foreign aid, and homeland security.
So, in the grand sweep of history, the significance of the regrettable post-Helsinki firestorm of attacks on Trump for trying cannot be overstated.
Had Trump been allowed to succeed in pursuing rapprochement with Russia, it would have been proof positive that America faces no large industrial state-based enemy.
That is to say, it would have mightily illuminated the hidden fact that neither Russia nor China even remotely possess the intent or the means to threaten the American homeland.
We often say that we can actually see Russia from our 19th floor balcony high above the East River in New York City, where I live, because where it counts, we actually can.
What I'm saying is we can see the GDP of Greater New York, it's 1.7 trillion, and that's actually greater than Russia's GDP of 1.5 trillion.
So we're supposed to believe that a country with a puny GDP, just 7% of the United States is 21 trillion, and which consists largely of aging hydrocarbon provinces, endless wheat fields, modest industrial capacities, and a shrinking vodka-favoring workforce, is actually a threat to America's security.
And we are also supposed to fear the military capacity of a country that has no blue water navy to speak of, a single 40-year-old smoke-belching diesel aircraft carrier, and no conventional airlift or long-distance air attack capacity at all.
Is that even remotely a threat to the New Jersey shores?
I don't think so.
Or one that spends in a full year less on its military than the Pentagon consumes every 35 days.
As for China's building sandcastles in the South China Sea, my question is: so what?
You know, if they want to waste their money making sandbars into a military strip, so what?
Were China to bomb America's 4,000 Walmart stores, the export-dependent, debt-entombed, malinvestment-drenched red Ponzi would collapse in six months.
And Emperor Xi and his comrades would find themselves hanging from the tallest empty tower in Beijing.
Likewise, the now largely thwarted U.S. withdrawal from Syria and incipient agreement with Russia to de-escalate tensions in the Middle East would have reminded America that regime change has been an utter failure.
Yet without an imperial foreign policy that is implicitly designed to either bully or remove recalcitrant lesser governments anywhere on the planet, whether or not they have the intent or capacity to harm the U.S. homeland, there would be no case at all for Washington's huge expeditionary forces.
That is, 11 carrier battlegroups, massive air and sea lift capacity, and the far-flung string of bases and occupations spread among more than 100 countries around the planet.
So all of this was riding in the balance when the Donalds sought to normalize relations with Russia, including the possibility that a strong success could have opened the door to real, far more systematic, and intellectually cogent America First policy over the long haul.
Unfortunately, it was not to be.
But still, we propose to dig a bit deeper and to tease out the full possibilities of an America First foreign policy.
If nothing else, an explication of a more sophisticated and thoroughgoing version of America First can help explain why the deep state and its collaborators in the Imperial City have gone to such extreme lengths to extinguish the Donald's presidency and his incipient lurch in that direction.
In the first place, it needs to be observed that lurking not far below the surface of the Donald's inchoate America First slogan is the ghost of Senator Robert Taft's profoundly correct case for non-intervention.
Back in the 1950s, the great statesman from Ohio fully understood that free enterprise prosperity, minimal government, and maximum personal liberty were incompatible with a permanent, fiscally debilitating warfare state leviathan designed to function as the world's boots and suits on the ground hegemon.
Consequently, Taft strongly opposed a big peacetime Navy, a large standing army with forward stationing and rapid global deployment capacities and the proliferation of foreign treaties and commitments.
To the contrary, he reasoned that in the nuclear age, a U.S.-based bomber and missile force of unquestioned striking capacity Would more than adequately protect the homeland from foreign military aggression.
And he also understood that it could do so at a fraction of the cost of what amounted to permanent imperial legions assigned to patrolling the fairest part of the planet.
Today, Taft's vision of a homeland defense would be more apt than ever.
It would constitute an even cheaper and more efficacious guarantor of the safety and security of the American people than even in his time.
That's because there are now no rival superpowers with even a fraction of the military and economic might relative to the U.S. that was possessed by the former Soviet Union.
Moreover, missile technology has become so advanced that a relative handful of submarine and hardened domestic missile launch sites can deter any conceivable foreign military threat, which is inherently a nuclear one to America's homeland security.
That is to say, in this day and age, there is absolutely no conventional military threat anywhere on the planet to the safety and liberty of citizens in Omaha, Nebraska, Spokane, Washington, Springfield, Massachusetts, or anywhere else.
That's because there is no nation on earth that could mount a giant naval and air armada sufficient to invade the American homeland.
Or if it were foolish enough to try, could it survive the guided missile blitz that would send its forces to Davy Jones's locker long before they crossed the blue waters which surround the North American continent?
Stated differently, nuclear deterrence, the great ocean mode, said a modest territorial military defense is all that would be needed to keep America secure in today's world.
And as we have shown elsewhere, that would cost about $250 billion per year, not the hideously bloated and wasteful $750 billion we now spend on the DOD alone.
In short, there is no need for Pax Americana, even if it could cede, which it manifestly has not, and even if it could be afforded, which clearly it can't be.
To be sure, the Donald is full of, too full of egotistical bluster and too infatuated with military trappings to go the full Taft non-intervention route, but give it a fair chance he might have at least shimmied policy in that direction.
Clearly, a rapprochement with Russia would have enabled a de-escalation of Washington's imperial presence in the Middle East and avoided a dangerous military buildup of tensions and expense in Eastern Europe.
As crude and bombastic as Trump's articulation of the America First proposition sometimes has sounded, it does amount to a frontal attack on the intellectual superstructure which keeps the Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf,
35,000 troops in Germany, 29,000 America's personnel in harm's way on the Korean Peninsula, 11 carrier battle groups on the ocean, a continued expeditionary force of 100,000 troops in dependence and support personnel in Japan, and military operations and economic and military aid to more than 100 nations around the planet.
Underneath this vast empire, of course, lays the utterly bogus notion that America is the, quote, indispensable nation and that quote, Washington leadership is always and everywhere the sign of non of stability, order, and peace all around the planet.
Ironically, therefore, the very obnoxious nature of the Donald's personality and modus operandi has done much to tarnish the idea of Washington leadership, and that is a considerable step towards global peace in its own right.
Washington's Self-Assigned Leadership Role 00:04:49
That's because, as we have suggested at the onset, the best way to stop more American wars is for no one to come next time Washington puts out the call, and for this so-called coalition of the willing to shrink to a quorum of none.
That prospect surely terrified the foreign policy establishment.
Even though to date the Donald has been throttled at nearly every turn by the War Party in his combobulated and amateurish pursuit of America First, that has not stopped the leading spokesmen and institutions from lambasting him for allegedly sullying Washington's self-assigned leadership role in the world.
In that respect, there are few grand poo bahs of the War Party who better embody the arrogant pretensions of the American Imperium than the odious president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haas.
According to the latter, the trouble with Trump is that after 30 months in office, he still doesn't get it.
He's turned his back allegedly on the core predicate that animates the Imperial City.
As Haas said, quote, Trump is the first post-war president to view the burdens of world leadership as outweighing the benefits.
The United States has changed from the principal preserver of order to a principal disruptor.
Well, exactly what haywagon does he think we fell off from?
How, pray tell, to name just a few instances of Washington's putative world leadership, quote unquote, did the following have anything to do with preserving order on the planet?
The genocidal war in Vietnam, the first Gulf War to save the Emir of Kuwait's oil wealth, the feudal 18-year occupation of Afghanistan, the destruction of Iraq, the double cross of Qaddafi after he gave up his nukes,
the obliteration of much of civil society and economic life in Syria, the U.S. supplied and supported Saudi genocide in Yemen, and the Washington-sponsored coup and civil war on Russia's doorstep in Ukraine.
And exactly, how did the benefits of these serial instigations of mayhem outweigh the burdens to American taxpayers, to say nothing of the terminal costs to the dead and maimed citizens in their millions who had the misfortune to be domiciled in these traumatized lands?
Likewise, have the refugees who have been flushed out of Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Middle East by Washington's wars done anything for the peace and stability of Europe where Washington's victims have desperately fled in their millions.
Yes, there would have been no long-lasting civil war in Syria without the billions of cash and weapons supplied to the so-called rebels and the outright jihadis by Washington and his Persian Gulf vassals.
Nor would Yemen be sinking into famine and cholera plagues without the American bombs, missiles, and drones dispatched by Saudi pilots essentially functioning as hired Pentagon mercenaries.
Indeed, the smoldering ruins of Mosul, Aleppo, Fallujah, Benghazi, and lesser places in their thousands throughout the Middle East hardly speak to a beneficent hegemony.
Yet had Washington never brought its fleets and occupying force to the Middle East after 1970, and had the region not come under the heavy boot of the Central Command and Washington's assorted pro-consuls and plenipotentiaries, the plague of radical Sunni jihadism would never have arisen.
Nor is it likely that the ancient rift between the Sunni and Shia confessions of Islam would have erupted in today's lethal armed conflicts.
Needless to say, we do not believe that either the Middle East or the planet Earth is chaos-prone absent Washington's administration.
After all, the historic record from Vietnam through Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Iran suggests the opposite.
And that's also why the case for the Empire's NATO outpost in Eastern Europe is so preposterous.
The history books are absolutely clear that in 1989, George H.W. Bush promised Gorbachev that NATO would not be expanded, quote, by a single inch in return for his acquiescence in German unification.
NATO's Silly Expansion 00:02:27
At the time, NATO had 16 member nations bound by the Article V obligation of mutual defense.
But when the Soviet Union and the Red Army perished, there was nothing left to defend against.
NATO should have declared mission accomplished and dissolved itself.
George, well, I got a better, hang on.
George Bush the Elter could have, the elder, could have even parachuted into the sprawling Ramstein air base in Germany to announce his closure.
That's what we should have done in 1981.
Instead, NATO has become a political jackhammer for empire-first policies by expanding to 29 nations, many of them on Russia's doorstep.
Yet, if your perception is not distorted by Washington's self-justifying imperial beer goggles, the question is obvious.
Exactly what is gained for the safety and security of the citizens of Lincoln, Nebraska, or Springfield, Massachusetts, or anywhere else in America by obtaining the defense services of the pint-sized militaries of Latvia, 6,000 troops, Croatia, 14,000, Estonia, 5,000, Slovenia, 7,000, or especially Montenegro,
whose 1,950-man military force is smaller than the police force of San Antonio, Texas.
Indeed, the whole post-1991 NATO expansion is so preposterous as a matter of national security that its true function as a fig leaf for empire fairly screams out loud.
Not one of these pint-sized nations would matter for U.S. security if they decided to have a cozier relationship with Russia voluntarily or not so voluntarily.
But the point is, there is no threat to America in Eastern Europe unless such as Montenegro, Slovenia, or Latvia were to become Putin's invasion route to effect the Russian occupation of Germany, France, the Benelux, and England.
Plain, Silly-Ass Crazy 00:00:05
And that's just plain, silly-ass crazy.
We need to get rid of NATO.
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