True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 212: NATO (Part 1)
Aired: 2022-03-09
Duration: 01:23:38


=== NATO: The Kiss of Death (04:00) ===

[00:00:00]  Liz, I love NATO.
[00:00:02]  I thought you were going to say I love you.
[00:00:04]  Oh, Liz, I love you.
[00:00:05]  Well, I love you because you're a member.
[00:00:07]  Liz is the only woman in NATO.
[00:00:09]  that's right oh my god I love you.
[00:00:34]  I love you.
[00:00:35]  The hood is right in front of my face.
[00:00:37]  How is it?
[00:00:38]  Dude, it's not even in front of my.
[00:00:40]  What is your depth perception going in here?
[00:00:42]  First of all, it's in front of Young Chomsky's face, too.
[00:00:45]  Kiss it.
[00:00:46]  Ew.
[00:00:47]  Kiss the camera.
[00:00:48]  That's disgusting.
[00:00:50]  It's dirty.
[00:00:51]  It's not dirty.
[00:00:52]  I just look, yeah, I walked around on my bare feet outside.
[00:00:54]  Oh, my God.
[00:00:55]  You don't wear socks at home?
[00:00:56]  You're going to get sick.
[00:00:58]  What?
[00:00:59]  Yeah.
[00:01:00]  Wait, no.
[00:01:00]  Hold on.
[00:01:02]  What do you think of health is?
[00:01:04]  You think if I don't wear socks, I'm going to become ill?
[00:01:07]  Yeah, you can get sick that way.
[00:01:09]  From what?
[00:01:12]  Just let me have my little things.
[00:01:13]  Okay.
[00:01:14]  Yeah.
[00:01:14]  Well.
[00:01:14]  Hello, everyone.
[00:01:15]  I'm Liz.
[00:01:16]  My name is Brace.
[00:01:17]  Shoeless, sockless, and ready to roll in the hay with any old foot lover that comes along.
[00:01:24]  Oh my God, that's disgusting.
[00:01:26]  Of course, we're joined by Young Chomsky, my footman.
[00:01:32]  And the podcast is called Truan On, and we're talking NATO.
[00:01:35]  Hello, we're talking NATO, N-A-T-O, or as I call it, OTON.
[00:01:40]  So I looked that up today, NATO.
[00:01:43]  Turns out it stands for North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
[00:01:46]  Yeah, what did you think it was?
[00:01:49]  Nasty ass, trashy European.
[00:01:54]  You know that like OE that's like combined into one letter?
[00:01:58]  So it's like nasty ass, trashy Europeans.
[00:02:02]  That's what I thought it meant because they're always being like, I want to, you got to go to the Lithuania to die or whatever.
[00:02:08]  I'm like, what?
[00:02:10]  The Balkans or the Baltic?
[00:02:12]  Which one is which?
[00:02:13]  Yeah, the North American Terror Organization.
[00:02:16]  Yeah.
[00:02:18]  The nasty ass, let's combine a nasty ass terror organization.
[00:02:23]  Brace, okay.
[00:02:24]  Serious moment for a second.
[00:02:26]  All right, let's talk.
[00:02:26]  Why are we talking about NATO?
[00:02:28]  We're talking about NATO because, well, because everyone else is talking about NATO.
[00:02:33]  There has been, I read this opinion poll the other day.
[00:02:36]  I think it made a lot of, it was all over the damn headlines, where a lot of Americans were both calling for a no-fly zone, which I guess would be an administrative thing that Americans don't know what that means.
[00:02:47]  That we should not.
[00:02:48]  Yeah.
[00:02:48]  There needs to be a massive education campaign on what that means.
[00:02:52]  But also don't want boots on the ground.
[00:02:54]  And it was, you know, and that got me thinking.
[00:02:57]  And I started looking up because there's been a lot of polling around this recently, support for NATO in various European countries.
[00:03:07]  I actually didn't look at America, but it doesn't really matter because it doesn't matter if Americans support NATO, the government does.
[00:03:14]  And it's through the fucking roof.
[00:03:16]  People love NATO right now.
[00:03:18]  People have NATO fucking fever.
[00:03:21]  Probably like the most ever in NATO's history.
[00:03:24]  Yeah, actually, yes, I believe so.
[00:03:26]  I mean, Germany was like 75%.
[00:03:28]  That's insane.
[00:03:30]  Yes.
[00:03:31]  It's insane.
[00:03:33]  Oh, my God.
[00:03:34]  And, you know, there's a lot of talk about closer integration with Sweden and Finland, who are not members of NATO, but are sort of, let's say, NATO adjacent.
[00:03:46]  And it's just, it's in the news all the time.
[00:03:48]  And looking at what people say, and I know I shouldn't gauge public opinion solely by this, but people, you know, I feel like it's probably correct.
[00:03:57]  People have insane fucking views on what NATO is.

=== NATO's Fungible Rhetoric (15:41) ===

[00:04:00]  What do you mean?
[00:04:01]  Well, I think a lot of people think that NATO is a purely defensive organization that just members just want to join.
[00:04:08]  They come and they go as they please.
[00:04:11]  And that it's never attacked anybody.
[00:04:15]  And that it's basically like a bulwark of peace.
[00:04:19]  I disagree.
[00:04:20]  Yeah.
[00:04:21]  I think too, like, at least for these couple episodes, we have our good friend Ben Howard here, friend of the pod, who has been on the show, I don't even know how many times now, a billion?
[00:04:33]  Look up in the show history.
[00:04:35]  And if you see any episode that is like four hours that isn't the Las Vegas one, it's with Ben.
[00:04:41]  Yeah.
[00:04:43]  We have him here to help guide us because we basically we want to talk about NATO and we have to kind of start from a history lesson a little bit and give the context for NATO's formation out of kind of the post-war situation and why kind of American interests were, you know, pushing it so hard in Western Europe and pushing this alliance.
[00:05:12]  And I think that like, I basically think at the present moment, there's like also a risk of NATO, like I'm saying NATO as like in quotations, like the word NATO becoming like just simply a political object or like a like fungible rhetorical discursive tool.
[00:05:34]  Okay, you lost me on that one.
[00:05:35]  Okay, a meme, basically.
[00:05:36]  I think it's like, it's like, it's, you know, there's a risk of it becoming a meme that is going to become detached of its actual like significance in both the like current political conjuncture to sound like a stupid person, but also like in the historic, you know, In you know, the history, the formation of where we are now, right?
[00:06:01]  Yeah, and so I think that like if we're gonna unpack like what is NATO, what was the NATO, what is the NATO project, you know, that one of our tasks is to kind of like take that as an object and you know, throw it in motion or break it open to kind of reveal these historical, you know, both international and national class dynamics that are at work with the development of this organization.
[00:06:30]  And there is, at least, you know, at the point of formation, which was what we're talking about in this episode, although there'll be more, you know, the exportation of Fordist production and the building of a large European market and service of American industrial and Atlantic finance capital, interests that were, in the wake of the World War II, threatened by both the strength of the Soviet Union in the East and the labor bases and crucially,
[00:06:58]  the communist parties of the Western European countries after World War II.
[00:07:03]  Yeah, you know, one thing I've seen is, and this is just some bullshit on the internet, but I've seen like some left-wing kind of people, I'll say like maybe soft left kind of people defend NATO and essentially defend NATO in NATO's own terms.
[00:07:20]  That is a defensive alliance that provides for the security of its members.
[00:07:23]  And I think what we want to show here is that that's not the truth.
[00:07:26]  I mean, it's, you know, rarely are such, you know, sort of short, pithy phrases or descriptions actually fully truthful.
[00:07:34]  But in this case, that's in fact very untrue and the opposite of true.
[00:07:37]  In fact, I would say it's a lie.
[00:07:39]  And so we'll talk about it.
[00:07:41]  It's the big lie.
[00:07:42]  It's the big lie.
[00:07:43]  Yeah.
[00:07:44]  And so we're doing a little NATO series talking about the past, you know, and present of the organization.
[00:07:51]  I think to really try to understand ourselves, but to try to help people understand what exactly is this giant fucking organization's purpose?
[00:08:01]  What's the point of this bullshit?
[00:08:04]  And I think we figured it out actually within three minutes in the first episode.
[00:08:08]  But yet we recorded so much more.
[00:08:12]  Anyways, I think we should land the F-35 now and eject the pilot and then arrest him.
[00:08:18]  Can't land it.
[00:08:19]  Exploded.
[00:08:19]  No, no.
[00:08:20]  You see, no, did you see?
[00:08:21]  You see the Israelis?
[00:08:24]  The Israelis put out a video of them shooting down, they say, a drone with one.
[00:08:28]  I'm like, I need to see with my own eyes.
[00:08:30]  Yeah, fake.
[00:08:31]  Fake.
[00:08:31]  Fake news.
[00:08:32]  Fake news.
[00:08:32]  Even if it's real, fake.
[00:08:34]  There's something weird going on there.
[00:08:36]  All right.
[00:08:38]  Let's get to it.
[00:08:48]  Here at Truanon, we love any transnational organization.
[00:08:53]  If you have headquarters anywhere in Belgium, really anywhere in the northwest of Europe, we're a fan of yours.
[00:09:00]  We love the IMF.
[00:09:02]  We love the WHO.
[00:09:03]  We love the other one where they go to Davos, all those guys, every single one of those, because we believe that people should come together.
[00:09:11]  And so in the interest of that, we have flown independent researcher Ben Howard out here to our secret bunker in the national redoubt of Switzerland and are holding him at gunpoint until he swears allegiance to a 200-year-old Nazi general who we've kept alive with baby's blood.
[00:09:31]  And frankly, we're thrilled to have him.
[00:09:33]  Ben, welcome to the show.
[00:09:34]  Thank you.
[00:09:35]  I wish the circumstances were slightly different, but it's always a pleasure to be here.
[00:09:39]  Honestly, it's not every day you get to touch a piece of history like this.
[00:09:44]  It's so great to have you back.
[00:09:46]  It's been a minute.
[00:09:48]  I'm very glad this is a very opportune moment to talk about NATO.
[00:09:51]  Everybody's talking about NATO, so it feels good to set the record straight, you know?
[00:09:57]  Yeah, we're here to debunk the debunker.
[00:09:59]  That's right.
[00:10:00]  Yeah, I got to say, everywhere I go, from the patisserie to the brasserie, everybody's talking about NATO.
[00:10:08]  And I think there's some pretty obvious reasons why, right?
[00:10:12]  I mean, from A, you know, one of Putin's stated goals of the invasion was that, you know, NATO, Ukraine had the possibility of joining NATO.
[00:10:20]  But B, more than that, people have been talking about NATO in position of a no-fly zone, which thankfully NATO has vetoed.
[00:10:28]  I didn't think that was really ever a possibility anyways.
[00:10:32]  But Article 4 was invoked by eight NATO nations, I think, either last week or maybe a week and a half ago.
[00:10:39]  And more than that, NATO is just in the news.
[00:10:41]  I don't think a lot of people, though, really know what NATO is.
[00:10:46]  America's got NATO fever.
[00:10:48]  Yeah, it really, I think that it's, particularly in the post-Cold War situation, it's taken on a totally different role in many respects.
[00:10:56]  In other respects, a continuation of what it's always done.
[00:10:59]  But I think that it's it really accomplished many of its most important goals, I would say.
[00:11:05]  And so in that respect, you know, we sort of live in the world that certainly Europeans live in the Europe that NATO created.
[00:11:12]  So it sort of has faded to the background to a certain extent.
[00:11:15]  Yeah, I think like, you know, for people of our sort of age demographic, growing up in the aftermath of the Cold War, when there wasn't this like unified, not just the USSR, but the entire Warsaw Pact for Western Europe to be sort of divided along this line.
[00:11:30]  This is the military alliance on this side.
[00:11:32]  This is the military alliance on that side.
[00:11:34]  All of a sudden, after the 90s, there was no military alliance on the other side.
[00:11:37]  There was just one giant military alliance that slowly and then more quickly doubled in size, essentially, to take over.
[00:11:47]  Well, I don't know if that's necessarily the correct word to use, but let's say to take up space, bodies and spaces throughout all of not only Western Europe, but like it has before throughout Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and sort of Southern Europe to, let's say, the southern tip of Eurasia with Turkey there.
[00:12:09]  And I think it's time, yeah, but we set the record straight on what exactly this organization is.
[00:12:15]  I want to start by talking about one of the big reasons that NATO has been all up in the fucking news lately is because eight different countries invoked Article 4.
[00:12:24]  So there's 14 articles in the North Atlantic Treaty, most of which you'll never really hear mentioned and don't really matter.
[00:12:31]  They're ancillary to basically the two main ones.
[00:12:34]  Article 4 essentially lets any, I mean, I don't necessarily have to read it out here, but it basically means that any NATO nation can invoke what is essentially like a meeting of all other NATO nations to assess it, any kind of threat that it feels that it faces.
[00:12:50]  Now, the number one invoker of Article 4, which has not been invoked very often, has been Turkey, which has invoked it five times in the past 15 years, or I think maybe even longer than that.
[00:13:04]  But with the recent news that a bunch of Eastern European nations and Central European nations have invoked Article 4, that has set into motion the first deployment, I believe, of the NATO, it's the NATO Readiness Force.
[00:13:21]  It's a task force, right?
[00:13:22]  Yeah.
[00:13:23]  To assess the need of whether they should, you know, pursue more research into organizing a possible response in retaliation.
[00:13:37]  I mean, it's just, it's all a lot of meetings, let's say.
[00:13:40]  Yeah, but the NATO response force, it was essentially like a group of, well, it's NATO, essentially.
[00:13:48]  And all these soldiers have been deployed.
[00:13:50]  I think it's like 8,500 American troops have been deployed throughout Eastern Europe.
[00:13:55]  And essentially forces go on alert.
[00:13:57]  Now, I don't think that necessarily means anything is going to happen.
[00:14:00]  In fact, I don't think it means anything is going to happen.
[00:14:02]  But I think it's pretty important to pay attention to what it actually looks like when, let's say, the situation gets a little hotter in Europe itself.
[00:14:11]  Yeah.
[00:14:11]  And I would, obviously, NATO is a military and political alliance.
[00:14:16]  That's what they'll tell you, right?
[00:14:17]  It's a union of all of these European countries who are united together in the defense of Europe.
[00:14:22]  And the Article 4 and then Article 5 is the real big one that is really the reason that NATO exists, according to NATO itself.
[00:14:31]  It's not really the reason NATO exists, but it is the stated reason that NATO exists.
[00:14:35]  And it essentially means an attack on one is an attack on all.
[00:14:39]  So if you attack any NATO member, you have invited all of the other NATO members to declare war on you, essentially.
[00:14:45]  None of us are free until all of us are free, Ben.
[00:14:48]  It should be noted, though, that no one really knows what Article 5 looks like in practice.
[00:14:54]  It's been invoked once, obviously, after 9-11.
[00:14:59]  But it really, when it says that in the actual text of Article 5, it says, you know, that if any such armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of the individual of collective self-defense, will assist the party or parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with other parties, such action as it deems necessary, which includes the use of armed force, but not necessarily.
[00:15:24]  And I think like, you know, like any kind of alliances or treaties or, you know, I don't know, deals, yes, between nations, legally, legally binding deals, whatever we want to call those.
[00:15:41]  You know, all of that is, you know, essentially political and up to interpretation.
[00:15:48]  And over the years, particularly, I mean, up until like very, very recently, there's been a lot of pushback from European nations on whether or not even this has any teeth anymore.
[00:16:00]  Right.
[00:16:01]  Yeah, if you look even back at what Macron was saying in 2019, he did an interview with The Economist where he essentially said that this is a dead letter in many respects.
[00:16:10]  And there has been a lot of criticism, in particular from some of the Eastern European countries who are concerned that they're essentially second tier NATO members.
[00:16:19]  For instance, I mean, just logistically speaking, how could NATO defend Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia from a Russian invasion?
[00:16:29]  Would it actually be possible?
[00:16:31]  So then would, you know, would they even attempt to defend it?
[00:16:35]  So the question of does Article 5 really certainly if France or Germany or the United States or UK were attacked, that's one thing.
[00:16:45]  But for some of these Eastern European countries, it's much less certain.
[00:16:49]  So in theory, if a Russian soldier steps foot into Lithuania, that means that there's a massive mobilization.
[00:16:58]  But is that actually going to happen?
[00:17:00]  And when you consider the fact that Article 5 is the bedrock of NATO's defense mission, that's a big open question to have.
[00:17:10]  Yeah, I think for much of NATO's existence during the Cold War, which we'll get to, and I promise this, we will get to this later.
[00:17:18]  There has been quite a few questions on what its actual capabilities in terms of like real material, you know, boots on the ground defense of the countries that are NATO members.
[00:17:29]  And I'm, you know, not even talking about a country like Lithuania, which I agree.
[00:17:32]  I think that would be, I mean, I think Lithuania is basically the size of like the Donbass.
[00:17:37]  Like it's not the most defensible place in the world.
[00:17:41]  But even at the height of the Cold War, there were real questions.
[00:17:44]  And actually, I don't even think it was much of a question.
[00:17:46]  It was basically a statement of fact that like there was basically no way that NATO could hold on to Germany in the event of a Soviet invasion.
[00:17:56]  And I think that for as dumb and insane as the military leadership of, well, most countries are, I doubt that anyone really believes that that's a possibility in, especially the Baltics, but even in a place like Poland.
[00:18:11]  Could I just add on to that that NATO's explicit policy for many years during the Cold War with respect to a Soviet invasion was that they would use tactical nuclear weapons pretty quickly.
[00:18:23]  And, you know, that it's one of the reasons that Article 5 has been called the nuclear clause because once you introduce tactical nuclear weapons, it very rapidly can escalate to a full-scale strategic exchange.
[00:18:35]  And that's basically closes the book on a lot of nations.
[00:18:40]  Yeah.
[00:18:41]  And with the talk of a no-fly zone, especially, I mean, I didn't really ever think that was a possibility that NATO would do that.
[00:18:48]  That is such an immense escalation or a possible escalation, almost certain escalation, that it seems totally out of the bounds of reason.
[00:18:57]  Although, again, not the best at predictions these days.
[00:19:01]  But they themselves have said they're not going to do it.
[00:19:04]  I think a lot of people don't really necessarily know what that would mean in reality.
[00:19:08]  And yeah, you're right to talk about use of nuclear weapons because that is that would be a real possibility in like a real shooting war between NATO and Russia.
[00:19:19]  I mean, people like to point down the fact that there's been fire exchange between, well, American, Russian, Turkish troops in Syria, but it's nothing on this level.
[00:19:31]  There are de-escalation stations.
[00:19:33]  They have direct lines to one another.
[00:19:36]  It is nothing like this.
[00:19:38]  And so I think it's really important to keep that in mind.

=== Moving Toward NATO (15:19) ===

[00:19:41]  You put in, Ben, a quote here by Lord Ismay that people, if you read about NATO, you really can't escape this quote.
[00:19:49]  And I think this sums up essentially one of the main missions of NATO more than anything else we could say.
[00:19:57]  Yeah, I think we've talked about the nominal self-defense role, but this gets into some of the other elements.
[00:20:03]  So Isme, he was basically taken into the, he was the first Secretary General of NATO, essentially under duress.
[00:20:10]  Churchill basically forced him to.
[00:20:12]  He didn't want to do it.
[00:20:13]  Yeah, he didn't want to do it.
[00:20:14]  And he didn't even want to do it for the five years that he did it.
[00:20:16]  He agreed to a couple of years maybe until they find somebody better, more willing.
[00:20:20]  But he said that the purpose of NATO is to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.
[00:20:27]  And that is, you know, you could rearrange, variously rearrange the order of those three statements, which is the most important.
[00:20:33]  I would argue that.
[00:20:33]  Depending on what point in history, probably achieved.
[00:20:35]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:20:37]  I would argue in terms of its, you know, the beginnings of it, it was really about keeping the Americans in and keeping the Germans under the thumb of the Americans.
[00:20:45]  And then keeping the Russians out was kind of a second, almost a secondary, you know, despite the stated purposes of NATO.
[00:20:52]  But I do think that that quote, while not being completely correct, is basically the level of cynicism with which we should approach NATO with respect to its stated purposes versus its actual reason for existing.
[00:21:03]  Well, let's take a little trip back in time to a place that all men know every single thing about World War II.
[00:21:12]  The big one, the even greater war than the first one.
[00:21:17]  The war that rocked Europe and also Asia and also some other parts of the world, but not as much.
[00:21:25]  World War II ended 1945.
[00:21:29]  And I tend to think that people understand somewhat the basic contours of history, but I'm always shocked that a lot of people do not.
[00:21:43]  1945 saw Europe basically totally devastated from war from the east to the west.
[00:21:49]  I mean, even, you know, some of the Western European countries got off a lot easier, but by no means were they doing well.
[00:21:56]  And the economic situation basically everywhere in the world except for America was dog shit.
[00:22:02]  Yeah, to the point that the very fundamental basics of capital relationship, like the labor relations, all of that was seriously under threat.
[00:22:11]  I mean, it was a total, beyond just the physical industrial capacity of the countries being destroyed, I mean, the social fabric was essentially ruined.
[00:22:22]  And it created an opportunity for both the left and the right to shape a new Europe and decide what Europe was going to look like.
[00:22:32]  But for the big, obviously the 800-pound guerrilla in the room who had not been destroyed by the war was the United States, which unlike Europe and unlike the not industrialized at this point, rest of the world, was basically the only industrial economy intact on Earth at this point in time.
[00:22:55]  And this was understood by Americans while the war was still happening, that the outcome of this was going to be that Europe was going to be completely destroyed, essentially.
[00:23:03]  And so there was already planning even before the U.S. entered the war, like the people, the various groups who were agitating for U.S. entry into the war were already anticipating what the post-World War II economic order was going to look like.
[00:23:19]  And it essentially was, and this is all, this is all cribbed from Case Vander Pyle's book, The Formation of an Atlantic Ruling Class, which I think is really good on these topics.
[00:23:30]  Yeah, and he talks about, his book goes all the way back to, you know, even the Gilded Age.
[00:23:35]  Yeah.
[00:23:36]  But there was this rise of what I would, you know, what he would call and what I would agree, you know, is called liberal internationalism.
[00:23:42]  The idea that, and this comes from Wilson's idea in the League of Nations and the idea that everybody should be independent, that there should be independent nations that should emerge from these colonial, first off the, you know, first off like the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
[00:23:58]  Yes.
[00:23:59]  But also, during World War II, it came to include the liberation of the European colonies.
[00:24:08]  And this was, you know, there were sort of progressive elements, you could say, you know, part of Roosevelt's New Deal coalition who were idealists and believed that these countries deserved independence, in particular given their role in fighting against the Japanese and the Germans on the European front, on the Asian front rather, of the war.
[00:24:29]  But there also, of course, were industrialists and economic, people who had great economic interests.
[00:24:36]  Because if as long as, for instance, Algeria or Vietnam or Ghana or what have you is a European colony, it's going to have almost exclusive economic links with the mother country back in Europe.
[00:24:49]  And for these American liberal internationalists, they wanted an order where you would have free trade between nominally level playing field nations.
[00:25:00]  In reality, of course, not.
[00:25:02]  But you would have a free trade regime and that this would naturally come to benefit the United States, which had a roaring economy.
[00:25:07]  And with the loss of demand for wartime materiel was going to need export markets for all kinds of heavy industry goods, capital goods, places to park financial capital and invest it.
[00:25:21]  So they wanted to create this new world order post-World War II that would essentially liberalize the international political and economic scene to their great benefit.
[00:25:33]  It also had, as I said, many progressive elements who were aligned with it, and it became essentially the basis for the UN in essence.
[00:25:42]  But I would say that the most, probably the founding document or maybe the turning point document was the Atlantic Charter, which was signed in the summer of 1941 between Roosevelt and Churchill.
[00:25:55]  And basically the most important elements were the end of the colonial spheres of influence and the corollary economic protectionism.
[00:26:05]  Moving in the direction of this free trade regime, this open door policy.
[00:26:09]  There were lots of unresolved issues about how quickly should decolonization happen and what would be the ultimate political settlement there.
[00:26:16]  Roosevelt favored total decolonization more or less.
[00:26:20]  He was a classic landback guy.
[00:26:22]  Yeah, exactly, exactly.
[00:26:25]  And the Western Europeans ended up basically endorsing this.
[00:26:28]  And it became big elements became the basis of the United Nations Treaty that was signed that sort of formally allied all of the various countries that were fighting against the Nazis and the Japanese during World War II.
[00:26:41]  So it became kind of the founding document of this alliance, which would go on to win the war.
[00:26:46]  The U.S. too, you know, during World War II and specifically, or most importantly, really, in the immediate period afterwards, basically did an about face from the way that the government had acted in the aftermath of World War I, where there was no doubt in anyone's mind that the U.S. was staying in Europe and that it was going to exercise great economic, political, and military control over at least the western half of the continent.
[00:27:16]  You know, you mentioned here the issue of decolonization, and I think that really can't be discounted.
[00:27:21]  And it really actually plays really into the history of NATO as well, because there were a lot of issues surrounding disposition towards the colonies, or especially around countries on the periphery, even if they aren't exactly what you would call classical colonies.
[00:27:40]  But I think a lot of American strategic planners, and I'm not talking about necessarily militarily here, far-sighted Americans could see that Britain was over.
[00:27:49]  The British Empire was done.
[00:27:52]  The French Empire, you know, on its way out too.
[00:27:56]  And it didn't take a lot of reading the tea leaves to see that.
[00:27:59]  These countries were economically devastated.
[00:28:03]  And it would take a long time for them to, I think it took a really long time for Britain to get back on its feet.
[00:28:08]  And so there was a sense that the world order was going to change and that America was finally sort of able to reassert its, or to actually assert itself on the world stage in a way that really no liberal democracy of the American type had before.
[00:28:28]  Yeah, I think an important component here, too, is that after the war, basically with the kind of German industrial base totally hollowed out, that American capital basically had an incomparable position in the world with regards to its like massive productive resources and accompanying that, its productive techniques.
[00:28:50]  But in order, like you say, in order for basically American industry to take advantage of that competitive position, it needed to liberalize the world market.
[00:29:02]  And part of that meant, like, as, you know, the great quote that we began this discussion with, was keeping down the kind of German industrial base, because that really threatened, you know, any kind of American export of Fordism to Western Europe.
[00:29:22]  Now, you know, I have disagreed with American foreign policy many times throughout my career.
[00:29:28]  But there is one, well, I guess I disagree with it the way it actually turned out.
[00:29:32]  But I still truly, to my core, wish that America had gone through with the plan to break up Germany into 300 basically like independent, not independent, but interconnected states to make it a totally decentralized country that could never get back on its feet again.
[00:29:50]  Because look at where that's gotten us.
[00:29:53]  Yeah, I think, I mean, to speak of NATO, you know, and in general, the European institutions, you know, you can imagine post-World War II, the question of Germany is a highly contentious one for everybody who had just been, you know, killed and had their countries destroyed by fascism.
[00:30:12]  Right.
[00:30:12]  And of course, for the French in particular, all the way going back to World War I, you know, the Low Countries going back to World War I as well.
[00:30:19]  So the question of Germany becoming what it is now, which, I mean, Germany is the preeminent power in Europe.
[00:30:25]  You know, France is, I think, probably on a terminal decline ultimately.
[00:30:32]  And how do you get people in Europe, particularly the European left, to accept this?
[00:30:39]  And I mean, the model was let's integrate it into these European institutions, which will essentially make European reindustrialization of the armament acceptable.
[00:30:48]  And I think NATO, that's why I think that, you know, saying about keeping Germany down, it's not quite right.
[00:30:54]  It's about keeping Germany under the American thumb in particular via these institutions.
[00:31:02]  Yeah, I think that, yes, absolutely.
[00:31:05]  I mean, the kind of post-war establishment of American hegemony was directed then simultaneously, I think, against, you know, as we noted, the Soviet Union, right?
[00:31:18]  But also the threat of like national self-contained reconstruction of the Western European economies.
[00:31:26]  And so there was kind of this like dual threat to American hegemony.
[00:31:30]  And it was able to kind of like launder essentially its, you know, Fordist economy and its productive capacity through this idea of like a European continent, right, to reindustrialize the Western nations in the American image.
[00:31:53]  Yeah, I think this quote from Walter Lippmann really puts those, you know, he's considered the father of neoliberalism and has many other unofficial titles.
[00:32:03]  And he said in 1943, very prescient, once the potential antagonism between the West and the USSR is recognized by dissolving the alliance which exists in order to wage this war, Second World War against the Nazis, one or all three victors will inevitably move towards arrangements with the defeated powers.
[00:32:20]  As this arrangement develops, the former victors will become competitors for the revival of power of their former enemies, German and Italian reindustrialization, rearmament.
[00:32:29]  For unable to enforce the disarmament of the vanquished because they have now antagonized one another, and as I say, the West and the USSR have antagonized one another.
[00:32:36]  They will see that the next best form of security will be to make allies of the rearmed vanquished.
[00:32:41]  Now, I don't think we should take this just at face value seriously.
[00:32:44]  I think what he's essentially saying is, you know, he takes it as a given.
[00:32:49]  We're going to be antagonistic towards the USSR.
[00:32:51]  That's our policy.
[00:32:52]  We're not going to, you know, and this is basically comes from, you know, capitalist opposite.
[00:32:56]  It's not geopolitical.
[00:32:57]  I think this is basically capitalist opposition to socialism, to communism, to forms of economic arrangement that are not favorable towards these capitalist interests.
[00:33:07]  So given that that's our policy, that means that we have to rearm these and reindustrialize these countries, these fascist countries, so that we can essentially direct them against the USSR.
[00:33:18]  I mean, that's essentially what he's saying here.
[00:33:20]  And that was already, I think, based on the fact that he wrote it in 1943 in his book, I think that was probably a pretty common idea in the U.S. and in Europe already at that point.
[00:33:29]  Yeah, because see, the idea of like national reindustrialization by these countries themselves, right?
[00:33:36]  It's not just that American hegemony was threatened by national interests of these countries or national capital or regional capital or whatever, although that's true, but also that what would have been required, as we saw in the UK after the war, was like a massive and threatening compromise between labor and capital in order to reindustrialize.
[00:33:59]  And the communist parties were very strong in post-war Europe.
[00:34:04]  They like had like great, I mean, people loved them because of their staunch and like very obvious and powerful resistance to the Nazis.
[00:34:15]  And so they enjoyed a good reception nationally.
[00:34:20]  And any kind of industrialization would have to include strong labor requirements in order to really expand the industrial bases.
[00:34:29]  And that would threaten any kind of American hegemony moving past the war.
[00:34:35]  Yeah.
[00:34:36]  And something that we see shades of throughout, well, you'll understand, but throughout the history of NATO is the fact that these Western European Communist parties and Eastern European Communist parties as well, though that's sort of dealt with differently, these Western European Communist parties came out of the war, like you said, to huge acclaim from large parts of the population, almost all of them more popular than they had ever been at any point in their history.

=== Oftentimes Collaborationist Resistance (02:48) ===

[00:35:00]  And more than that, they were armed.
[00:35:03]  You know, in almost every country, the communists had formed, if not the backbone, then oftentimes the totality of the resistance movement to occupiers.
[00:35:14]  Oftentimes it was also like a small, Sometimes collaborationist monarchist resistance movement functioning alongside it.
[00:35:22]  But, you know, in Italy, in France, in particular, in Greece, especially, obviously, we saw in Albania, which to everyone's surprise, they not only won, but took over.
[00:35:36]  And then Yugoslavia, too.
[00:35:38]  You know, and Belgium, for that matter, these resistance movements had a huge amount of public sway.
[00:35:46]  And that created a really sticky situation with rebuilding.
[00:35:51]  The economies of these countries are totally devastated.
[00:35:54]  And then you suddenly have these large armed and popular communist parties actually able to exercise power.
[00:36:00]  And sometimes in, like, I think in the case of France, in coalition governments.
[00:36:04]  Yeah.
[00:36:05]  And this anti-communist turn amongst the Allies, it happened even before the war was over.
[00:36:13]  I mean, if you look at the Greek example, you have the British, because Greece had been in the British sphere of influence for a long time.
[00:36:19]  Yeah.
[00:36:21]  And they were- The British have a Greek king.
[00:36:23]  Yeah.
[00:36:23]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:36:25]  And the British were supporting these Greek fascist death squads, which were formerly a part of the collaborationist government that was collaborating with the Nazis in Greece.
[00:36:37]  And they were killing communists and socialists and other anti-Nazi partisans before the war was even over.
[00:36:42]  And this was supported by the British.
[00:36:44]  You had in Italy, northern Italy, which was not yet liberated in 1944.
[00:36:49]  There was Alan Dulles actually went and negotiated an agreement between the Italian industrialists and the Nazis who were occupying northern Italy to try and keep the Yugoslav army and the Red Army out of northern Italy, which would have been pretty devastating for their purposes.
[00:37:07]  So even before the war was over, this anti-communist turn had already begun, which I think shows you the level of anti-fascist commitment among the liberals in Europe and the U.S. Needless to say, the Western powers and the USSR's relationship frayed very quickly in the aftermath of World War II.
[00:37:32]  I mean, like we said, there were already signs that it was beginning to disintegrate essentially all throughout the war.
[00:37:37]  It is actually sort of startling to look back on all these conferences and these treaties signed and these sort of like accolades given to each other, knowing that like this was so tenuous.

=== Anti-Communist Turn Begins (15:29) ===

[00:37:49]  And indeed, it fell apart.
[00:37:51]  I mean, basically immediately in the aftermath of the war, because both sides had very different goals for the countries that essentially came under, well, I mean, I think, yeah, occupation by both.
[00:38:05]  The Americans, I think most listeners will probably have, if you're American or European, you'll probably have a good idea of at least what the general outline of this is.
[00:38:15]  But a huge component of the American America asserting itself in Western Europe was the creation of the Marshall Plan.
[00:38:24]  And the Marshall Plan was a hugely, I would say successful American effort to really mold Western European political and economic culture into its, not necessarily its own image, but into an image that it found suitable to stand next to.
[00:38:42]  Yeah, there were a lot of factors that led to the Marshall Plan.
[00:38:47]  I think the big one is something that Liz mentioned, which was in the immediate aftermath of the war, there was a return to the older, what you might call like state monopolist model of development, where you have national economies in Europe, which are oriented towards their own colonies chiefly, as well as in sort of Eastern European markets that they would put their poor financial capital into.
[00:39:11]  So there was a brief return to that.
[00:39:12]  And part of that had to do with the U.S. suffering problems immediately after the war.
[00:39:17]  The New Deal compromise had some trouble, particularly with wage controls, which put serious pressure on this labor capital alliance that had existed immediately before the war and then was strengthened during the war.
[00:39:29]  You had that turn against the USSR because people like Roosevelt had thought, given the USSR is going to be in the same position, arguably worse than Western Europe, we can do the same thing to the USSR that we're going to do to Europe, which is make it an element of this liberal international order, essentially condition aid to them on them obeying American diktats.
[00:39:48]  That didn't work out, but that had been the idea.
[00:39:51]  So when that state monopolist model begins to develop and you have these relatively strong communist and socialist parties, which was a complicated alliance because state monopoly involved colonization, keeping the colonies and how does that work with the left?
[00:40:08]  But that caused in the United States a real consternation.
[00:40:15]  Like, you know, we're going to lose, essentially we're going to lose Europe.
[00:40:18]  We're not going to be as prominent in Europe as we had planned to be.
[00:40:22]  So a major component of this is the question of decolonization, which we've already discussed.
[00:40:26]  But there was real resistance to this.
[00:40:28]  And I think sort of emblematic of this was the Suez Crisis where this nationalist government, this was in 1956, this was after the Marshall Plan, but I think this is emblematic of the kind of tensions that were occurring here, where the U.S. was willing to accept an independent NASA and wanted to deal with him.
[00:40:45]  They certainly didn't want it to weaken this national movement, of course, but they didn't want Egypt and other countries in Africa and Asia to be colonies because that would mean an exclusion of American capital to the benefit of European capital.
[00:40:56]  And they did not want to have strong national capitals.
[00:40:59]  They wanted to have a globe, you know, a transatlantic, it wasn't global at this point, but they wanted to have a transatlantic ruling class.
[00:41:06]  And so that meant liberalizing these colonies.
[00:41:08]  So that was a huge, that was a huge problem.
[00:41:10]  De Gaulle was very in favor of holding on to Algeria and holding on to Vietnam.
[00:41:16]  And there were elements in the US that also were particularly the most reactionary elements that were accepting of this.
[00:41:23]  But these more liberal international elements wanted that kind of decolonization.
[00:41:28]  So there was an understanding that we need to be aggressive here.
[00:41:31]  We need to go on the offensive.
[00:41:32]  And that was essentially what the Marshall Plan was.
[00:41:35]  It was an attempt to reshape the European economy in the American image, for one thing, in order to make the European economy much more integrated internally in terms of all the European markets becoming a common market, which they are now today.
[00:41:52]  It's been successful.
[00:41:53]  And then also to integrate the European markets with the American market and with the UK.
[00:41:59]  And there had been conversation during the war of a full-on political confederation between Western Europe, the US, and the UK.
[00:42:06]  That obviously was not workable initially, but that was one of the goals that they had.
[00:42:11]  And another, of course, was essentially a free trade zone, which still hasn't happened, but which many people wanted to happen.
[00:42:18]  So what we end up with is a massive influx of American capital, production techniques, labor discipline, again, a variety of things to recreate the European economy in the American image to the American benefit.
[00:42:33]  You mentioned really, just briefly, and I just want to highlight it because you mentioned a transatlantic capital alliance.
[00:42:40]  And we haven't yet mentioned kind of the force of Atlantic finance capital, which also was basically, you know, the vestiges of a British and American kind of finance capital, you know, money circuit that had really come to prominence like right before the turn of the 20th century.
[00:43:01]  But this is also a big, they really wanted a big European single market because it meant that the circulation of finance capital could really grow.
[00:43:15]  So you have these kind of these antagonisms between industrial capital and finance capital that are also kind of shaping these different movements.
[00:43:26]  What I think is so ironic about all of this, and we've talked about this on the show before, is that if you really want a picture of German hegemony over Europe, the goal of so many German nationalist leaders since German nationalism, the advent of German nationalism, look no farther than the EU.
[00:43:48]  The immense control that Germany holds in that organization is just astounding and really something that the Nazis and any Kaiser could have only dreamed of.
[00:44:00]  Yeah, I think a major consideration here, because another element of the Marshall Plan that was crucial was that receiving funding was conditional on only trading with other people who were receiving Marshall Plan funding.
[00:44:13]  And this is what created that, you know, we have this vision of the Iron Curtain as being a Soviet attempt to prevent people from fleeing the horrors of communism.
[00:44:24]  It really began with this Marshall Plan idea that we're going to make an economic blockade.
[00:44:29]  Because one of the most important, so if you look at the French economy was very oriented towards Eastern Europe prior to the war, lots of French financial capital, rather than being on this transatlantic circuit, Liz, that you mentioned, a lot of French finance capital was on this Eastern European circuit.
[00:44:44]  That was also the case with a lot of German capital.
[00:44:48]  And there was a lot of concern about, and this is still one of the animating concerns around Europe today is Germany and Russia.
[00:44:56]  Yes.
[00:44:57]  We cannot have a close economic relationship between Germany and Russia.
[00:45:01]  That's not tolerable for the U.S. and for the UK.
[00:45:05]  And that was really hammered here was that if you're part of the Marshall Plan, you can only trade with other Marshall Plan countries.
[00:45:12]  And that begins this economic blockade of Eastern Europe.
[00:45:15]  Yeah, John Foster Dulles in 1949, he said, if the treatment of Germany is such as to involve the Germans becoming more friendly with the Russians than with the West, we are wasting any money at all in Western Europe.
[00:45:26]  And if that sounds familiar at all, when you're thinking about Nord Stream 2, like there's a reason for that.
[00:45:32]  Because the biggest fear for American industrialists, American and Atlantic finance capital is the union between Soviet and now Russian gas and raw materials and the raw power of German industrial base.
[00:45:50]  I mean, the Marshall Plan too, we touched on this earlier, but a huge component also was essentially aimed at domestic communist parties too.
[00:46:00]  The rebuilding, the presence of not only American aid, but like this is something that you encounter a lot later when we talk about NATO, but in all the stuff I've read on NATO from both founding members and various bureaucrats throughout the years has been the strength of sort of the spiritual promise of America being present on the continent.
[00:46:23]  And the actual, if people can't actually see it with their eyes, this idea that America is not only there, but it's protecting them and it's aiding them.
[00:46:32]  And in the intervening years, particularly from like about 1945 to, I mean, lights were kind of out by 1949, but basically from 45 to 50, there was a real chance that communist parties in many of these Western European nations could, if not have outright majorities, within a coalition government or take power in some form.
[00:46:56]  And the Marshall Plan was really aimed with that in mind as well.
[00:47:00]  You know, it was not just this sort of like altruistic, well, I don't think any of us are claiming it was altruistic, but it was not an altruistic program of like helping these ruined nations reform themselves.
[00:47:12]  But it had pretty explicit political and economic goals that aligned with American foreign policy.
[00:47:19]  You know, in the so much shit happened right after World War II.
[00:47:24]  Obviously, that's to be expected, but it's just so insane reading about it because it was like every two months, sort of just an insane history-making, you know, event occurred.
[00:47:36]  I think some of the big ones in terms of the Americans or rather the West Europe and Americans thinking, particularly the Prague coup, where the Communist Party, and this is something I've said on this show before, if you are a communist and you and in coalition with other groups take power after a war, make sure you get the interior minister position.
[00:48:03]  Always want to get, you know what?
[00:48:04]  Even if you're not a communist, whoever's listening to this, this is just general life advice.
[00:48:08]  If you're offered any cabinet position, always take interior minister.
[00:48:13]  And that's what the communists in Czechoslovakia did.
[00:48:16]  And they were able to, with a popular mandate and also military and police support, take power in Prague in 1948.
[00:48:25]  And this caused a lot of concern in the West.
[00:48:28]  Oh, yeah.
[00:48:29]  Everyone freaked.
[00:48:30]  Yeah.
[00:48:32]  You take power in one little coup and everybody loses their mind.
[00:48:38]  Yeah, I mean, Czechoslovakia obviously had been in the German sphere of influence.
[00:48:42]  Oh, yeah.
[00:48:43]  Obviously, that was the whole, you know, one of the issues that led to the war.
[00:48:46]  Hein or whatever that guy's name was.
[00:48:48]  Yeah.
[00:48:48]  Yeah.
[00:48:49]  So losing that, you know, had a, I think, a pretty serious psychological effect for a lot of these people because it was, you know, that's a squarely Central European country that was assumed was going to be industrialized under German auspices.
[00:49:02]  And that did not work out that way.
[00:49:04]  And so that, I think, is really what kicked the defense planning in particular into overdrive.
[00:49:10]  It had already begun.
[00:49:12]  I mean, you had, but even if you look at 1947, the Dunkirk Treaty between France and the UK, that was nominally about Germany.
[00:49:20]  If you look at what, yeah, it's about Germany.
[00:49:24]  Yeah, that is what they were worried about was, you know, Germany coming back.
[00:49:28]  Will you explain really quick for people who don't know what that is?
[00:49:32]  So the Dunkirk Treaty was a treaty signed between really at Ernst Bevin's, who was the British foreign minister immediately after the war.
[00:49:40]  And yeah, it was a mutual defense treaty between France and Britain.
[00:49:46]  And It was nominally meant to, I think that people probably had other ideas in mind here, because again, creating these defensive treaties was understood by much of the populace to be one of the causes of World War I and World War II.
[00:50:01]  So I think it was part of it was a pretext.
[00:50:03]  But nominally, it was about reuniting militarily the UK and France in a mutual defense treaty as against Germany, a resurgent Germany at that point.
[00:50:14]  But I think very quickly, and I think the Prague coup had a lot to do with this, that pretext went away.
[00:50:21]  And this France-UK military alliance was then incorporated into a broader military alliance that included the Low Countries, which had themselves united into this Benelux customs union.
[00:50:33]  Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg had long had very close economic ties.
[00:50:39]  So they were pretty easy to integrate at that point in time.
[00:50:42]  And so I think that's really what kicks off the creation of this Western Union, which becomes the nucleus of NATO, which is formed a year later.
[00:50:50]  So I do think that Prague coup really had a big psychological impetus for the creation of this.
[00:50:57]  And of course, a lot of propaganda that went around, went along with that, which had an effect on the broader population as well.
[00:51:05]  Yeah, and it's sort of darkly funny to look back on that as the Prague coup being this like really shocking moment for the people in charge of Western Europe and America, because we were doing precisely the same thing, except maybe a little more nimbly behind the scenes in essentially every country that we had control over.
[00:51:27]  And that means keeping their guys out and our guys in through whatever means necessary.
[00:51:33]  Did not take a coup in many of these countries because we could just pump money into them.
[00:51:38]  So a flurry of treaties get signed around this time, 47, 48, 49.
[00:51:44]  This leads to the creation of something called the Western Union, which includes the U.S., Canada, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, but also Italy and Portugal.
[00:51:53]  And that turns into, what was it, the Western, something else, another Western Union.
[00:51:59]  Yeah, it starts with the Western Union, which is just France and the UK plus the Benelux.
[00:52:04]  And then it becomes the Western European Union, which incorporates a much broader Scandinavia.
[00:52:10]  Essentially, it brings in Scandinavia, Iceland, and then Italy and Portugal, who Portugal was still full-on fascist at that point.
[00:52:18]  And Italy was the first defeated power to now be incorporated into this Western European defense architecture, which I think is pretty significant, particularly given that time period, 1948, that's when the first American machinations began in Italy in earnest around that 1948 election.
[00:52:39]  So I think Italy's incorporation into that defensive union is a pretty important event.
[00:53:02]  So then to take a step back for a second, to kind of lay it out, the industrialization, or re-industrialization rather, with this formidable German labor base, which is massive, by the way.

=== Germany's Rising Threat (15:31) ===

[00:53:18]  is presenting a threat to the like continued, let's say, emergence of American hegemony after the war.
[00:53:27]  Because basically they're like, okay, Prague has fallen to communism.
[00:53:32]  That's like Germany's backyard.
[00:53:34]  We're totally afraid that this huge, massive labor base, which is already organizing, already has a lot of a socialist base and a communist base within it.
[00:53:49]  We're afraid that they could be next.
[00:53:51]  And that presents a huge problem for our future and our ability to kind of have influence over Europe.
[00:54:00]  And additionally, we have now the Soviets in the East looking westward towards Europe.
[00:54:07]  What are we going to do?
[00:54:09]  Yeah, and this was sort of the, at this point in time, the basics of the American Cold War posture were being established at this point.
[00:54:18]  And I think NSC 68 is a good document to look at, written by Paul Nitzi under the Truman White House.
[00:54:25]  And again, this is about creating a pretext.
[00:54:29]  This is their understanding and they're creating a pretext for this defensive alliance that they feel they need to create in Western Europe, essentially to make Western Europe safe for capitalism, along the lines that they wanted.
[00:54:40]  And the NSC 68 says Soviet efforts are now directed towards the domination of the Eurasian landmass.
[00:54:48]  The United States is the principal center of power in the non-Soviet world and the bulwark of opposition to Soviet expansion is the principal enemy whose integrity and vitality must be subverted or destroyed by one means or another if the Kremlin is to achieve its fundamental design.
[00:55:01]  So this idea is, again, this is the American perspective.
[00:55:05]  We are the upholders of freedom and essentially the guarantors of international capitalism at this point in time.
[00:55:11]  So therefore, going on, NSC 68 says the frustration of the Kremlin design requires the free world to develop a successful functioning political and economic system and a vigorous political offensive against the Soviet Union.
[00:55:22]  That is to say, NATO and economic integration.
[00:55:26]  So these in turn require an adequate military shield under which they can develop.
[00:55:29]  So this is essentially if the U.S. is going to be the bulwark of the international capitalist system, that's the vision.
[00:55:38]  That's the long-term vision, which was ultimately achieved.
[00:55:41]  Then that means that we have to make Europe safer capitalism.
[00:55:44]  And that means we need to create an American-directed defensive shield to protect Europe.
[00:55:49]  And this was, you know, I mean, this was controversial in the U.S. You know, after World War I, for instance, all U.S. soldiers left Europe.
[00:55:55]  You know, it was not our problem.
[00:55:57]  But at this point, this new economic vision pushed by the American bourgeoisie at this point in time necessitated that we create this defensive alliance that is going to keep, serve the dual functions of, you know, the stated pretext, which is prevent USSR from invading, but also to subvert the democracies of these countries to ensure that the domestic left never took power in any of these countries, which was not stated explicitly, but I think you can read between the lines and see a lot of that in here.
[00:56:25]  There's a similar British telegram to the U.S. State Department, also from 48.
[00:56:31]  It's kind of long, so I'm not going to read the whole thing, but the Brits say, I'm convinced, therefore, that we should study without any delay the establishment of such an Atlantic security system so that if the threat to Norway should develop, we could at once inspire the necessary confidence to consolidate the West against Soviet infiltration and at the same time inspire the Soviet government with sufficient respect for the West to remove temptation for them and so ensure a long period of peace.
[00:56:55]  Now, I think what he's getting at there is that one of the main purposes of NATO, and this is something that we'll get into with more details later, NATO was basically unable to stand up militarily against the Soviets, certainly for any period of time until it could get its shit together if the Soviets attacked.
[00:57:15]  Keep in mind, the Soviets, there's absolutely no indication, and historically, there's no evidence that the Soviets actually did have any designs on invading Western Europe or Norway or anything like that.
[00:57:28]  But really what the British are saying here is that we essentially need to give this illusion and to give this this, to make this alliance like itself a bulwark rather than the actual like military threat that it could represent.
[00:57:42]  Yeah, I think like if we can think of the Marshall Plan as the way of American capital exporting its system onto Europe to make sure that it reindustrialized in the American image and then was able to kind of birth these new European classes that mirrored the American ones as well,
[00:58:04]  then you can kind of think of Western Union and then what becomes NATO as the kind of second echelon of this assault, this American hegemonic assault on Europe as a kind of like the kind of like defensive or military wing when you had this Marshall Plan kind of as the productive arm of this kind of like two-pronged assault.
[00:58:32]  I don't know.
[00:58:32]  I keep saying assault.
[00:58:33]  Maybe that's wrong.
[00:58:34]  But there's like there's a quote from Paul Hoffman, who was the Marshall Aid Administrator in 1950.
[00:58:39]  And he said explicitly, he said, Europe would have been communistic if it hadn't been for the Marshall Plan.
[00:58:45]  And I think that it's like really important to understand that so much of it was, again, transforming productive capacity and like where those productive and like labor arrangements were going.
[00:58:58]  And then following that, creating a kind of, you know, this sort of organization, this defensive, but as we'll show, offensive organization that was able to then enforce, like violently enforce those labor arrangements and productive arrangements on these countries.
[00:59:17]  So we get here to 1949 and the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
[00:59:24]  And can I say for one second, what a just a dog shit.
[00:59:28]  The North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
[00:59:30]  I mean, NATO, okay, I guess it's nice that you have an acronym that you can also pronounce like a word, but come on, give me a break with that.
[00:59:37]  You could have come up with, think of the Axis.
[00:59:40]  That's such a great name.
[00:59:42]  I mean, they were, I think it was technically like the anti-common turn pact or whatever, but like the Allies.
[00:59:48]  I mean, these are really catchy.
[00:59:49]  NATO, I mean, it sounds like, it sounds like something that would do your taxes.
[00:59:54]  That's why you got to call it Oton, like everyone else in the world.
[00:59:58]  Well, Turkey and Greece joined in 52.
[01:00:01]  They are the first two countries that are added right after the, or they are the first two countries to be added after the initial founding members of NATO.
[01:00:09]  Now, Greece, like we'd mentioned, had just endured a pretty devastating civil war after World War II, where the resistance movement to the Nazis had basically been rounded up and shot by the British and then Greek royalists and current and ex-fascists, which developed into a large civil war between the communist and progressive forces and the British-backed Greek government that ended in a loss for the Greek communists.
[01:00:38]  There is a sort of a lot made about Stalin's sort of refusal to hand them arms.
[01:00:43]  The Yugoslavians tried to help, but they didn't have much to work with there.
[01:00:48]  And then Turkey also joined the same year.
[01:00:51]  Turkey's way of getting in was basically to be like, well, if you don't let us into NATO, we might be neutral from now on.
[01:00:58]  A tradition that still stands today.
[01:01:01]  I got to say, Turkey, the gods of neutrality.
[01:01:05]  Oh, my God.
[01:01:06]  How are you in NATO and you buy Russian air defense equipment?
[01:01:09]  They're so cruel.
[01:01:10]  They're so fucking, I mean, I hate Turkey.
[01:01:14]  Like Turkish soldiers have killed people I know, but you got to give them props for this.
[01:01:19]  I mean, they are just crazy that they're able to maintain the just like, it's complicated.
[01:01:24]  Like most NATO countries, too.
[01:01:27]  They've fought another NATO country.
[01:01:29]  I mean, Turkey is, and like I was saying, I think they're the only country besides Poland to have ever previously invoked Article 4.
[01:01:38]  And they just invoke it constantly.
[01:01:40]  Like, you got it.
[01:01:40]  By the third Article 4 invocation by Turkey, you know, the guys in here are like, all right, I get it.
[01:01:46]  There's like, you're afraid of a plane.
[01:01:48]  Like, it'll be fine.
[01:01:51]  But the next country to join NATO is my most hated country in the history of humanity, Germany, in 1955.
[01:02:01]  And this is when, what, what, what animal represents Germany?
[01:02:06]  That the lion?
[01:02:07]  I feel like Kaisers are like lion-like.
[01:02:10]  What?
[01:02:10]  Is that the lion?
[01:02:12]  The eagle?
[01:02:12]  The eagle.
[01:02:13]  Yeah.
[01:02:13]  I thought we just.
[01:02:14]  Is that where we took the eagle from?
[01:02:15]  Yes, a Russians are bear.
[01:02:17]  Yeah, Russians are bear.
[01:02:18]  I think we're the eagle.
[01:02:19]  I feel like the Condor?
[01:02:23]  That's kind of just like another eagle.
[01:02:25]  It's not like a horse or something.
[01:02:27]  No, that horse.
[01:02:28]  No country's animal is a horse besides the monster.
[01:02:30]  I feel like there's Scotland is a horse.
[01:02:32]  Yeah, it's a shetland.
[01:02:34]  Yeah.
[01:02:35]  Anyways, the fucking Germans come back.
[01:02:40]  Yeah, I think the context for this is that you have a massive, you have a country that has a massive labor force that's rapidly being reindustrialized.
[01:02:50]  How is that going to express itself at the political and military level in the context of this new post-war Europe?
[01:02:58]  And, you know, as we mentioned earlier, and as should be obvious, everybody's fucking freaked out about this.
[01:03:06]  Yeah.
[01:03:06]  Because the Germans have created two world wars on the continent.
[01:03:10]  They can't be trusted.
[01:03:11]  They cannot.
[01:03:12]  In like 20 years, too.
[01:03:14]  Let's be clear.
[01:03:14]  Like, I think when you actually look at the starting dates of World War, the ending date of World War I and the starting date of World War II, you're like, guys, you just, you wanted to do it again?
[01:03:25]  Yeah.
[01:03:26]  And the French would take you all the way back to the Franco-Prussian War as well.
[01:03:29]  I mean, you know, so there's a long history of German militarism.
[01:03:33]  And this was also concerning for the people who wanted Germany to be, you know, powerful in Europe again.
[01:03:38]  I'm talking about the Americans who wanted Germany to be powerful in Europe again.
[01:03:41]  But it became a, so in the same way that German economic reconstruction was sort of under the auspices of the European coal and steel community, which was this free trade zone, particularly between France and Germany with respect to coal and those formerly contested areas in the border between France and Germany.
[01:04:02]  But also that, yeah, the German steel industry would serve the American auto industry rather than the German military industry.
[01:04:10]  But now, you know, you have a, you Germany has a new place in Europe, given this economic transformation that's being undertaken.
[01:04:17]  And by 1955, has pretty well fully taken hold.
[01:04:20]  So how do you incorporate German militarism now into Europe?
[01:04:23]  And the way is to make it a part of NATO and make the idea was let's make the German impetus towards militarism serve in the defense of Western Europe as a whole.
[01:04:35]  I think really it's about trying to have your cake and eat it too, right?
[01:04:41]  If you have any powerful great nation, they're going to try and throw their weight around militarily and diplomatically.
[01:04:48]  So how do you build Germany up and simultaneously not allow it to become a threat to this new liberal order you're trying to create in Germany?
[01:04:56]  But along with the incorporation of the West German state into NATO, all of these Nazi elements get incorporated into NATO in a very, I mean, if the European public had known about this, I think it would not have gone this way.
[01:05:18]  But I mean, you know, some of the core elements of the Nazi intelligence apparatus were basically wholesale incorporated into NATO, the Gellen organization, for instance.
[01:05:32]  But you also had, you know, Hirsinger was one of the, you know, he was like a, you know, Bunseweh, you know, Landswehr general Nazi party member, and he became, you know, one of NATO's military general secretaries.
[01:05:47]  So this, this, it meant incorporating, you know, West Germany had not really been denazified.
[01:05:54]  And so incorporating them into NATO meant incorporating some of those fascist elements into the into the Western European security architecture, which I think should tell you something about what the intention of that organization was.
[01:06:07]  Well, the West Germans really had, I think they knew this sort of even coming out of the war.
[01:06:13]  I mean, you see indications of that with a Gellen organization, that the Gellen and sort of the group of people around him, and there were similar groups too, that may not have been as effective or may not have been just directly transformed into the German intelligence service.
[01:06:26]  But a lot of veterans of both the Wehrmacht and the SS too realized that their skills, they saw which way the wind was blowing.
[01:06:35]  And they realized that their skills and their anti-communist bona fides were going to become really valuable currency in a post-war environment.
[01:06:44]  Germany began talking about rearmament in around 1950, although I'm sure conversations that are unreported as of now occurred before then, was something called the Himmerod Memorandum.
[01:06:55]  That came out of a group of high-ranking Wehrmacht soldiers, generals, who gathered at Chancellor Adenauer's request.
[01:07:05]  And they had a few demands for German rearmament if they were going to become an effective anti-communist fighting force.
[01:07:14]  The first and foremost was that all war criminals be released, that you can no longer slander the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS, and there needs to be propaganda put out to restore faith in German might.
[01:07:26]  Now, this is basically in line with what Americans were already doing.
[01:07:32]  Now, there was some sort of competing and contradictory elements in the American occupation.
[01:07:39]  There was sort of this veneer of denazification, but at the same time, you had the CIC and all of basically every intelligence agency, Army, OSS, all of them, trying to pluck all the war criminals that they could out of either prison or out of hiding and turn them into agents and assets.
[01:08:01]  You know, we saw basically the farce of denazification and all the trials and the imprisonments really came to a halt in the 1950s.
[01:08:13]  I mean, nobody, at that point, nobody was even pretending that anyone gave a shit anymore.
[01:08:17]  Now, keep in mind, 1955, when Germany joined NATO, they had just finished doing the Holocaust 10 years before.
[01:08:26]  Like, they were gassing Jews and cremating them a decade prior to this.
[01:08:34]  And a lot of the people in the German political military intelligence structures were people who had, if not directly participated, actually, a lot of them had been not only direct participants, but actually had helped plan it.

=== German Patriots and Nazis (02:52) ===

[01:08:49]  You mentioned Gellen before, or Galen, however, the Germans pronounce it.
[01:08:54]  But he brought with him basically the most sadistic band of killers that you could have ever imagined.
[01:08:59]  A lot of these guys, General Hans Spiedel, for example, sort of tried to position themselves as just German patriots and conservatives.
[01:09:08]  Spiedel was somewhat implicated in the July 20 plot.
[01:09:11]  He was a Nazi general.
[01:09:13]  And then he headed up the Bundeswehr, which is the Wehrmacht's new name, the German army's integration into NATO, and then later served as supreme commander of Allied forces in Central Europe.
[01:09:24]  I mean, this is somebody who had been a Nazi general.
[01:09:27]  And you see this happen at high levels and at median levels and obviously at low levels with German integration into NATO just constantly.
[01:09:37]  Spiedel also was the leader of a stay-behind operation himself, which was set up by German veterans.
[01:09:44]  And then you can see the way this works with this example.
[01:09:48]  So he has this organization of like SS veterans, right, who are willing to basically kill left-wing politicians and serve as a stay-behind group for NATO.
[01:09:59]  They're supplied with weapons clandestinely by a former German general who is now in charge of a group of border guards.
[01:10:07]  And so there's this sort of hidden Reich that's being built behind the facade of Adenauer's government that is really that is not unknown to anybody in NATO and in fact is viewed as an asset.
[01:10:19]  Well, I say it's not it's not just unknown or viewed as an asset, but like the lines there are just really blurry.
[01:10:25]  Yeah.
[01:10:25]  Well, there is no line.
[01:10:26]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:10:27]  I mean, it's just, you know, they're almost all one in the same, right?
[01:10:32]  Yeah, and they serve a really important role.
[01:10:35]  I mean, a lot of the elements that became a part of Gladio were neo-fascist groups that emerged post-war, but you could say a lot of the core elements and particularly the leadership had just been fascists during the war.
[01:10:50]  And so, you know, if you're, if you're, as we've been saying, the purpose, you know, if you look at the Marshall Plan in NATO as this dual American assault on Europe and a big part of that assault is attacking the working class in Europe, you can imagine that having the chief assaulters of the working class, the fascists on your side becomes a critical component.
[01:11:12]  So rehabilitating them, I think, was just kind of taken as a given.
[01:11:16]  I mean, it had to be done in service of these goals.
[01:11:18]  Yeah, I mean, it's a real small pool for people to pick from, right?
[01:11:22]  I mean, it's like if you need people from the country that have a military background, but whoops, it can't be anyone who's sympathetic to any communist or a communist, then really the only pool you've got are the fascists.
[01:11:35]  It's not like there's like some massive liberal militarized army.
[01:11:39]  That's just called fascism.

=== Limited Pool of Fighters (02:52) ===

[01:11:41]  Yeah.
[01:11:42]  Yeah.
[01:11:43]  You know, it's, and, you know, my, my people, we're not, you know, that stuff's scary to us.
[01:11:50]  We don't want to be involved with planning a nuclear war or anything like that.
[01:11:54]  But I mean, that we see that throughout the whole Cold War is that the number one credential that you need, and sometimes the only credential that you need to join the U.S. in its fight against communism is to be an anti-communist.
[01:12:09]  And what was the main current of anti-communism besides, I guess, monarchists prior to the Second World War?
[01:12:15]  It was fascism.
[01:12:17]  And so you see this like sort of bleed out effect for the next several decades.
[01:12:21]  And so those people kind of age out.
[01:12:23]  And then you get the more, I guess, American style fascist killers that you saw emerge in like the 70s and 80s in particular.
[01:12:30]  To be fair, NATO did partner with some monarchists.
[01:12:34]  So they had that one too as well.
[01:12:37]  Equal opportunity anti-communists.
[01:12:38]  Yeah, that's all they had in Belgium.
[01:12:39]  No, yeah, yeah.
[01:12:40]  True, true, true.
[01:12:58]  So like we've sort of mentioned several times throughout this episode, the actual strength of NATO forces in Europe after NATO's founding, not so high.
[01:13:10]  I actually read in a long Rand report.
[01:13:13]  I got to say, Rand, for all that I don't like about him, they put out a lot of reports.
[01:13:17]  Some of them are pretty useful.
[01:13:18]  I mean, they got some good reports, those guys.
[01:13:21]  Yeah, great reporters over there.
[01:13:23]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:13:24]  One of my favorite journalistic outfits.
[01:13:27]  You're just calling people who write reports reporters.
[01:13:30]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:13:31]  At least Rand is honest about their allegiances, unlike most of the arms.
[01:13:34]  I will say, yeah, you don't, there's no, there's no, there's no sort of like vice style beating around the bush with Rand.
[01:13:41]  No, but that's why that stuff is the best to read.
[01:13:43]  It's like you read it from the horse's mouth.
[01:13:45]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:13:46]  Like, that's why I love reading DOD and all that kind of shit, too.
[01:13:49]  Yeah, he's one of my favorite writers Donald Oduck So after World War II You know how in war everyone has to fight A war and shit Everyone dies and it's all fucked up and you're like, your wife's at home and, you know, she's fucking American soldiers call the guys who fuck their wives Jodis.
[01:14:13]  And we can get into this at another time.
[01:14:16]  This is the year of the Jodi.
[01:14:18]  If you live near 29, listeners, if you live near 29 palms, there are thousands of Marine wives out at bars right now that you need to sidle up next to and purchase a little tequila sunrise for.
[01:14:30]  Oh, that's so sad that he's gone.
[01:14:32]  He must not care about you.

=== Soviets Don't Invade? (07:17) ===

[01:14:34]  They're not in 29 palms.
[01:14:36]  They're in 29 palms.
[01:14:38]  Anyways, that was, believe me, they're in 29 palms, Liz.
[01:14:43]  This was the case in the aftermath of World War II.
[01:14:46]  Everyone who had been in the army was like, I don't want to be in the army anymore.
[01:14:50]  We're not fighting a war anymore.
[01:14:51]  So it was massive demobilization all across Western Europe.
[01:14:55]  I mean, this is also having an army is expensive.
[01:14:59]  And if your country is broke, like some of these fucking jokers over in France and the Low Countries and shit, and especially Britain, you don't really want to maintain a large standing army that's anything more than an occupation force.
[01:15:11]  So, you know, you have your guys in Germany and Austria, et cetera, but you don't necessarily want just a ton of guys hanging around collecting a paycheck and just sitting around.
[01:15:21]  And so there was basically a handful of pretty ill-equipped and really uncoordinated divisions.
[01:15:29]  I mean, there had been coordination between Allied armies, obviously, in the Second World War, but this had never totally worked itself out.
[01:15:36]  And frankly, the Americans really took a big brunt of the offensive on Germany.
[01:15:41]  I mean, on the western part of Germany, really, Soviets did most of the work.
[01:15:45]  But the Soviets still had a huge army.
[01:15:48]  There's estimates for this is from the RAND paper, ranging them at 10 to 1 advantage of NATO troops in Western Europe, which, you know, listen, I, I'm no desert fox Erwin Rommel over here, but even I can tell those numbers are not great.
[01:16:04]  Um, and a large part of American military command basically doubted and political, uh, doubted that Europeans actually wanted to fight, that they had any fight left in them.
[01:16:14]  I mean, with good reason.
[01:16:15]  Yeah.
[01:16:16]  Especially when you consider the political situation on the ground there, where you have, you know, coalition, you know, you essentially the model at that point in time was, you know, Christian Democrats in coalition with communists and socialists.
[01:16:28]  You know, realistically, I mean, are these people going to try to actually have the fight to the finish with the Soviet Union or more likely they're going to try to achieve some kind of, you know, negotiated political settlement with them?
[01:16:39]  And that's, that does not sit well with planners in Washington and the Pentagon.
[01:16:43]  And then in 1953, something happened that I don't even know if I want to talk about this.
[01:16:48]  Something happened that changed the world.
[01:16:51]  Things just sort of faded after that.
[01:16:56]  A Georgian, an Asian man who had occupied one of the highest offices in the world perished.
[01:17:04]  And they make funny movies about it now.
[01:17:06]  And it's ha ha ha.
[01:17:08]  But a man, a human being with a family, very young wife, but wife nonetheless, died in office and had his whole country and vision taken over by Khrushchevite revisionists.
[01:17:25]  But what I'm saying here is that Stalin died in 53.
[01:17:28]  And this actually really changed the game because as many people know, the Soviet Union started to suck ass after that.
[01:17:34]  And they went on something.
[01:17:35]  My whole thing is, and I've said this before, the Soviet Union should have invaded Western Europe.
[01:17:42]  Like, they're probably going to have given him a new lease on life.
[01:17:46]  Yeah.
[01:17:47]  Kind of like shored up the imagination at least in terms of won.
[01:17:52]  There's a reason they had a 10 to 1 military advantage.
[01:17:55]  I mean, ideology goes a long way.
[01:17:57]  If you have something you can believe in, as opposed to European, what are we going to fight to be taken over by the Americans?
[01:18:02]  That's really?
[01:18:03]  Oh, yeah.
[01:18:03]  As opposed to, you know, turning Europe into a worker's paradise.
[01:18:07]  That's a, that's a hell of a vision.
[01:18:09]  Exactly.
[01:18:10]  And so the Soviets did not invade when Stalin was alive.
[01:18:15]  Probably, I'm guessing he had some sort of Mao type traumatic brain injury from being old, and that caused him to forget to do it.
[01:18:24]  But after Khrushchev takes over, the Soviets go on one of the pussiest kinds of offensives, a peace offensive, where basically they try to be like, oh, all that shit, we were kind of kidding about that.
[01:18:36]  Like, we don't hate you guys as much anymore.
[01:18:39]  And they start really trying to put out all these diplomatic feelers to the West, but also start hosting like a lot of academics and sort of showing this like new post-Stalin Soviet Union.
[01:18:50]  Yeah, this is also basically like in direct contradiction to what Americans are taught.
[01:18:57]  I mean, you're taught that there was a kind of opening up and a diplomatic opening up for sure after Stalin's death.
[01:19:03]  Of course, de-Stalinization, people have kind of heard that term.
[01:19:06]  But the idea that the USSR was not interested in any kind of invasion of Europe is not something that, let's say, the Americans were happy about and still weren't.
[01:19:17]  I mean, I think still to this day, I don't want people to really understand about the Soviet Union.
[01:19:23]  So the Americans also at this point basically knew, I don't think I put the quotes in the notes.
[01:19:29]  Sorry about that.
[01:19:30]  I don't mean, I mean, my bad for rhyming there.
[01:19:32]  But I should just wrap the rest of this sentence.
[01:19:35]  I won't.
[01:19:36]  I don't think I put the quotes in the notes, but the American military establishment basically also didn't think the Soviets were going to invade, especially after Stalin's death.
[01:19:47]  They're like, there's no indication that they're going to do it.
[01:19:51]  You know, there is no, there's no like troop movements or anything that like, there's no, there's no sign that they're going to invade Western Europe whatsoever.
[01:19:58]  And so they started viewing the Soviet, let's say, diplomatic and cultural and political entry into Western Europe or sort of re-entry into Western Europe as dangerous, as actually the main threat.
[01:20:13]  Harold Macmillan, the UK prime minister and a really staunch anti-communist, basically concluded from this that Russian peace propaganda is a bit dangerous, meaning that it threatened that much of the West's reason for foreign and domestic policy.
[01:20:30]  And this threat, which to be clear, that NATO countries viewed as a massive threat had to be fought via other means.
[01:20:38]  And that means fighting it domestically, via politics, via money, espionage, and killing people.
[01:20:46]  Yeah, and the gladiostructures, these covert fascist paramilitaries, which were used for political purposes to suppress the left wing, those really got a new lease on life at this point in time because whereas before you could explicitly justify NATO's existence on the basis of we're trying to protect Europe from Soviet invasion, as we said, they didn't really think that was going to happen, but it was a good pretext and they were able to convince the population that that was true.
[01:21:16]  But in the face of this peace offensive, they needed something new to scare people.
[01:21:21]  And I think you can look at the, you know, these right-wing terror campaigns, particularly in Italy, as a key way of reinvigorating this sense of fear and danger, which would allow for this right-wing political control over the continent.
[01:21:37]  Now, if that sounds exciting to you, too bad, asshole.
[01:21:41]  The episode's over.
[01:21:43]  I cannot believe we just got through the early history of NATO, but we are about to get into next episode.

=== Next Episode: Paramilitary Squads (01:46) ===

[01:21:51]  NATO is one and only Cold War military operation that it undertook on a continent-wide scale, you might say.
[01:22:01]  We're going to be talking about one of the more overlooked, you know, people talk about NATO aggression.
[01:22:07]  They point to Libya, Afghanistan, Kosovo.
[01:22:12]  They don't talk about what NATO actually did during the Cold War, which was kill thousands of people, most of them civilians, for the purposes of keeping communism out of Europe.
[01:22:24]  And we are going to be talking about that next episode.
[01:22:45]  You know, I wish I was in the State Department again solely so I could do a thing like the Marshall Plan and have it just be named like the Belden.
[01:22:55]  Well, the Belden Plan.
[01:22:56]  Oh, yeah.
[01:22:58]  Wait, I guess I could do that.
[01:23:01]  Oh, my God.
[01:23:01]  I got good to work on the Belden Plan again.
[01:23:03]  Europe needs the Belden Plan.
[01:23:05]  Oh, yeah, you got to get to work on that.
[01:23:07]  They're not going to like it.
[01:23:08]  They're not going to like it at all.
[01:23:11]  Talk about deploying cruise missiles.
[01:23:14]  Well, we've got more about NATO coming up.
[01:23:17]  Next episode, we got to talk about the paramilitary fascist squads that aren't just a tool of NATO, are basically NATO itself.
[01:23:27]  Yeah.
[01:23:29]  But until then, I'm Liz.
[01:23:31]  My name is Brace.
[01:23:32]  We are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:23:35]  And this has been Truinon.
[01:23:37]  We'll see you next time.