75 years after it was set up to protect Europe from the Soviet Union (and 35 years after the Soviet Union ceased to exist), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance may finally be coming to an end.
NATO Could Effectively Die This June | Reason | Matt Welch:
February 28, 2025 - "Libertarians, progressives, and national conservatives who've been pining for a de-Americanization of European military security are experiencing their most newsworthy week on that front in at least three decades. The Trump administration's ongoing negotiations and public messaging around a potential Russia-Ukraine peace deal, along with the weekend electoral victory of Germany's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), have led to the bluntest talk since April 1993 about a future without Washington's mutual defense commitments to the easternmost members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
"'My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the U.S.A.,' presumptive German chancellor Friedrich Merz said just after his long-prominent CDU ... beat out the White House-favored Alternative for Germany* (AfD).... 'I never thought I would have to say something like this… .But after [President] Donald Trump's statements last week at the latest, it is clear that the Americans — at least this part of the Americans, this administration —are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.'
"Trump's recent statements and actions have included blaming NATO expansion for Russia's invasion of Ukraine ('That's probably the reason the whole thing started,' he said Wednesday), rejecting a G7 statement criticizing Russia as the 'aggressor,' joining a rogue's gallery of international authoritarians in voting against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia and supporting Ukraine's territorial integrity.... Washington has already floated Russian sanctions relief and diplomatic normalization while ruling out U.S. peacekeeping troops and Ukrainian NATO membership.
"Vice President J.D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fanned out to European capitals this month delivering what Hegseth characterized as a 'stark' message to America's treaty allies: 'Now is the time to invest [in defense], because you can't make an assumption that America's presence will last forever'.... [T]he message appears to have sunk in. Prior to each embarking to Washington this week for Ukraine-focused meetings with Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Kier Starmer announced significant ramp-ups in defense spending — from 2 percent to 5 percent (conditionally) in Macron's case, and from 2 percent to 2.5 percent up toward 3 percent in Starmer's.
"'[The] transatlantic relationship, former NATO secretary-general (2009-2014) Anders Fogh Rasmussen wrote in The Economist this week, 'is crumbling before our eyes'…. But the details of this aspirational burden-shifting are filled with more land mines than Ukraine's farmland, beginning with the three-headed beast of putative policy deciders (France, Germany, and the U.K.) that make the trolls in The Hobbit look cooperative by comparison..... Then there is the not-insignificant problem of an eight-decade buildup of American-led dominance on strategy, military technology, and nuclear weapons....
"'Europe must … ensure it can act independently of America. This will require significant investments in capabilities such as air [defense], refuelling and other logistics that sustain military operations — and for which Europe is almost entirely reliant on America,' Rasmussen wrote. 'Roughly 80% of its [defense] procurement is from outside Europe — primarily from the United States. Europe's [defense] companies, spread across different countries and reliant on small national orders, lack the scale required to compete with their American counterparts. As a result, the continent produces less of what it needs — often at a greater cost. This must change quickly'....
"[T]hose changes could happen more quickly than people think. Having effectively granted Moscow a veto over its independent neighbors seeking to join the only multinational organization that has thus far been able to provide the security guarantee of a mutual defense pact, the president could conceivably walk back from NATO's Article 5 assurances of defending members from attack, which is already sending tremors across the Baltics and other Russia-bordering nations....
"Germany's Merz, for one, is talking as if Article 5 is indeed dead. 'I am very curious to see how we are heading toward the NATO summit at the end of June,' Merz said after the election. 'Whether we will still be talking about NATO in its current form, or whether we will have to establish an independent European defense capability much more quickly.'"
Read more: https://reason.com/2025/02/28/nato-could-effectively-die-this-june/
End Of NATO Alliance Could Be ‘Days Away’, Warns Former Commander | World DNA | WION | March 1, 2025:
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