{"id":19407,"date":"2016-04-01T19:20:00","date_gmt":"2016-04-02T00:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19407"},"modified":"2016-04-01T19:20:37","modified_gmt":"2016-04-02T00:20:37","slug":"nato-worse-than-obsolete","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19407","title":{"rendered":"NATO: Worse Than \u2018Obsolete\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"outer\">\n<h3 class=\"title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/original.antiwar.com\/justin\/2016\/03\/31\/nato-worse-than-obsolete\/\" target=\"_blank\">NATO: Worse Than \u2018Obsolete\u2019<\/a><\/h3>\n<p class=\"pagesub\">It\u2019s a tripwire that could lead to World War III<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"entry\">\n<p>Unlike many libertarians, I love presidential election season, because that\u2019s when generally ignored foreign policy issues are discussed beyond the small circle of Washington wonks. And that\u2019s why I\u2019m having such fun with Donald Trump \u2013 much to the annoyance of some of my readers, both libertarians and liberals alike: because he\u2019s provoking a much-needed discussion about who benefits (and loses) from \u201cAmerican leadership\u201d on the world stage. Most useful is his recent assertion that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/thehill.com\/policy\/national-security\/274175-trump-doubles-down-on-doubts-about-obsolete-nato\">obsolete<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>So it is. When the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union dissolved, the rationale for NATO disintegrated along with it. However, as libertarians know all too well, government programs (especially those that benefit the corporate sector) never die, nor do they fade away: they just keep growing to the degree that their constituency wields political clout. In NATO\u2019s case, this clout is considerable.<\/p>\n<p>When the citizens of Berlin did what Ronald Reagan urged Gorbachev to do \u2013 \u201cMr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!\u201d \u2013 the Soviet leader tried to negotiate with the West. And, to his mind, he succeeded:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.spiegel.de\/international\/world\/nato-s-eastward-expansion-did-the-west-break-its-promise-to-moscow-a-663315.html\">an understanding was reached<\/a>\u00a0with Washington that the Russians would allow German reunification on the condition that the NATO alliance would not expand eastward.<\/p>\n<p>That promise was not kept. Instead, the lobbyists, both foreign and domestic, went into overdrive in a campaign to extend NATO to the very gates of Moscow. It was a lucrative business for the Washington set, as the\u00a0<i>Wall Street Journal<\/i>\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/SB118066857163421159\">documented<\/a>: cushy fees for lobbyists, influence-buying by US corporations, as well as political tradeoffs for the administration of George W. Bush, which garnered support for the Iraq war from Eastern\u00a0 Europe\u2019s former Warsaw Pact states in exchange for favorable treatment of their NATO applications.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NATO: Worse Than \u2018Obsolete\u2019 It\u2019s a tripwire that could lead to World War III Unlike many libertarians, I love presidential election season, because that\u2019s when generally ignored foreign policy issues are discussed beyond the small circle of Washington wonks. And that\u2019s why I\u2019m having such fun with Donald Trump \u2013 much to the annoyance of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[8350,13220,7813,3769,553,10476,694,742,862,865,891],"class_list":["post-19407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-anti-media","tag-gorbachev","tag-justin-raimondo","tag-libertarianism","tag-nato","tag-reagan","tag-russia","tag-soviet-union","tag-war","tag-washington","tag-world-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19407"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19409,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19407\/revisions\/19409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}