I agree with Jonah Goldberg. There are problems with NATO. The core concept, however, is solid and vital, and NATO exists for one reason and one reason only: to keep the Russian bear caged.
Goldberg, writing in A New World Disorder for The G-File, muses:
If you’re getting a little sick of all the metaphors and abstractions, let me get to a more concrete point. People are losing their minds.
Look, I get that NATO has its problems. For years, we’ve been subsidizing European welfare states by picking up a chunk of their defense costs. Arguably worse, European elites have acted as if the peace and prosperity that they’ve enjoyed over the last 70 years were invented around fancy conference tables in Geneva and Paris. I remember in 2002 reading a quote from Karl Kaiser, of the German Society for Foreign Affairs. “Europeans have done something that no one has ever done before: create a zone of peace where war is ruled out, absolutely out,” Kaiser wrote. “Europeans are convinced that this model is valid for other parts of the world.”
It’s not that Kaiser was entirely wrong; it’s that he left out the fact that this miracle would have been impossible without NATO and, by extension, the protection of the United States of America. Europe was allowed to cultivate its garden because we kept the totality of nature at bay. NATO was effectively a wall, and Uncle Sam was Colonel Jessup. The Europeans needed us on that wall.
And they still do. But here’s the thing: We need that wall, too.
We need that wall, Goldberg continues, because:
The point of NATO is twofold: to remove uncertainty about what would happen if someone attacked one of our allies and to raise the expected price of screwing with us to something unbearable. Weaken the first, and you lower the second.
Containment was first a 19th century British idea but in the wake of a Europe devastated by war, President Harry S Truman, inspired by the writings of George Frost Kennan, made containment the central idea of his foreign policy.
To landlubbers, both policies would appear to be about containing the vast and crushing Russian army. Soldiers, however, were not the real problem, sailors were. The Russian navy has never enjoyed the reach and power of the 19th century British Navy or the present-day American Navy because it has always lacked what they had: all weather ports.
Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin couldn’t care less about Crimea. The port of Sevastopol, home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, however, is very much on his mind. Like Russia’s other all-weather port—Vladivostok—however, ships passing in and out must pass through choke points not controlled by Russia.
Which brings us to the tiny country of Montenegro with its two ports on the Adriatic Sea—Bar and Risan. While they’re still not blue-water ports like Portsmouth in England or Norfolk in the United States, they do offer superior access to the Mediterranean Sea and the soft underbelly of Europe and, most strategically, possible control of the Suez Canal.
That’s why when tiny Montenegro joined NATO last year, Putin was not happy. Yes, Russian forces would have to cross around 2,000 kilometers and pass through Ukraine, Moldova, Serbia and Romania, to take Montenegro, but that was not a real problem as long as NATO wasn’t directly involved.
That’s why Montenegro, and NATO, matter. Goldberg continues:
I think letting Montenegro into NATO was a good idea. The fact that the Russians worked so hard to prevent it — they almost toppled the government in a coup d’état to stop the country’s accession to the NATO — suggests that they understood the stakes better than many Americans. Among other things, it goes a long way toward denying Russian access to the Mediterranean—at very low cost to us. As John Podhoretz notes on the Commentary podcast, if it is in our strategic interest to block Russian ambitions in that direction, including Montenegro in NATO is a lot cheaper than positioning U.S. aircraft carriers and troops in the region.
You often hear the argument that Montenegro only has a couple thousand troops, as if the idea were to rely on the “very aggressive” Montenegrins to defend us. That misses the point entirely. Think of it this way. When a Mafia family enlists some penny-ante crew on the outskirts of its turf, the revenue from the crew is relatively inconsequential. The main advantage from the arrangement is that it prevents a rival family from encroaching on its territory. And in exchange, the Corleones agree to make the crew’s enemies the Corleones’ enemies.
There are reasonable arguments against including Montenegro in NATO. There are literally no reasonable arguments for even hinting that we might not hold up our end of the bargain once they’re already in NATO. This is why Vito Corleone chewed out Sonny for hinting to Sollozzo that he might be hot for the drug deal: “I think your brain is going soft.”
Such softness, is a very real danger, as Goldberg concludes:
There is this bizarre unstated assumption in so much of this nationalism talk that these U.S.-founded international institutions haven’t served our interests. That’s dangerous nonsense. Could they have served our interests better? Sure. There’s always room for better. But were we suckers for creating them? Of course not. To paraphrase the president, a prosperous and peaceful Europe is a good thing, not a bad thing.
There is zero evidence that wiping away these institutions would be a step forward to some utopian New World Order. It would more likely be a return to Old World Disorder of wars, protectionism, and the logic of a global prison yard.
I’m not saying that everyone rushing to come up with arguments to defend Trump’s cavalier blather about these issues is a utopian or a nihilist. Nor am I saying that every critic of NATO is wrong in every regard. I am saying this is a serious conversation that should be conducted seriously, because even having such conversations is dangerous. And if we’re not careful, this will get out of hand, and we’ll have an enormous amount of relearning to do.
Letting the bear out of the cage is never a good idea.
