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NATO's Purpose Explored
00:04:24
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| Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the weekly report. | |
| When the Bush administration announced in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia would be eligible for NATO membership, I knew it was a terrible idea. | |
| Nearly two decades after the end of both the Warsaw Pact and the Cold War, expanding NATO made no sense. | |
| NATO itself made no sense. | |
| Explaining my no vote on a bill to endorse the expansion, I said at the time, NATO is an organization whose purpose ended with the end of the Warsaw Pact. | |
| This current round of NATO expansion is a political reward to governments in Georgia and Ukraine that came to power as a result of U.S.-supported revolutions, the so-called Orange Revolution and the Rose Revolution. | |
| Providing U.S. military guarantees to Ukraine and Georgia can only further strain our military. | |
| This NATO expansion may well involve the U.S. military in conflicts unrelated to our national interests. | |
| Unfortunately, as we have seen this past week, my fears have come true. | |
| One does not need to approve of Russia's military actions to analyze its stated motivation. | |
| NATO membership for Ukraine was a red line it was not willing to cross. | |
| As we find ourselves at risk of a terrible escalation, we should remind ourselves that it didn't have to happen this way. | |
| There was no advantage to the United States to expand and threaten to expand NATO to Russia's doorstep. | |
| There is no way to argue that we are any way safer for it. | |
| NATO itself was a huge mistake. | |
| When in 1949 the Senate initially voted on the NATO treaty, Senator Robert Taft, known as Mr. Republican, gave an excellent speech on why he voted against creating NATO. | |
| Explaining his no vote, Taft said, quote, the treaty is a part of a much larger program by which we arm all these nations against Russia. | |
| A joint military program has already been made. | |
| It thus becomes an offensive and defensive military alliance against Russia. | |
| I believe our foreign policy should be aimed primarily at security and peace, and I believe such an alliance is more likely to produce war than peace. | |
| Taft continued, if we undertake to arm all the nations around Russia and Russia sees itself ringed about gradually by so-called defensive arms from Norway and Denmark to Turkey and Greece, it may form a different opinion. | |
| It may decide that the arming of Western Europe, regardless of its present purpose, looks to an attack upon Russia. | |
| Its view may be unreasonable, and I think it is, but from the Russian standpoint, it may not seem unreasonable. | |
| They may well decide that if war is the certain result, that war might better occur now rather than the arming of Europe is completed. | |
| How right he was. | |
| NATO went off the rails long before 2008, however. | |
| The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on April 4th, 1949. | |
| And by the start of the Korean War, just over a year later, NATO was very much involved in the military operation of the war in Asia, not Europe. | |
| NATO's purpose was stated to be guarantee the safety and freedom of its members by political and military means. | |
| It is a job not well done. | |
| I believe as strongly today as I did back in my 2008 House Floor speech, NATO should be disbanded, not expanded. | |
| In the meantime, expansion should be off the table. | |
| The risks do now outweigh the rewards. | |