Ron Paul: NATO working against U.S. interests

"It has become much clearer these past few months just how far NATO has shifted away from US interests," writes Dr. Ron Paul, "even though the United States funds a whopping 70 percent of NATO’s cost."

Suddenly, Leaving NATO Is On The Table | Eurasia News | Ron Paul: 

March 3, 2025 - "Over the weekend, President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency head Elon Musk made quite a stir with just two words posted on his social media platform, X. Responding to a post that, 'It’s time to leave NATO and the UN,' Musk replied, 'I agree.' The comment immediately made the rounds on social media and also on mainstream and alternative media.

"Was this the Elon Musk who owns X speaking, or was it the Elon Musk who has become one of President Trump’s closest advisors? Does it even matter? Having someone so close to the US president who advocates finally extracting the US from these international organizations is a significant and very positive shift for the United States.

Ron Paul in 2012. Photo: David Carleon.

CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.

"With the truth coming out about how USAID has been working against US interests for decades, the disinfectant of public scrutiny is now turning to our membership in – and generous funding of – international organizations like NATO and the United Nations.

"I have long advocated our exit from NATO. At the end of the Cold War,  with its very reason for existence gone, NATO decided to look for other ways of stirring up trouble. First NATO involved itself in the first Gulf War and then it decided its mission should be to bomb Serbia to smithereens – in the name of 'human rights'.... 

"It has become much clearer these past few months just how far NATO has shifted away from US interests. Even though the United States funds a whopping 70 percent of NATO’s cost, our own NATO 'allies' are working against the United States as President Trump attempts to pull us back from the brink of war with Russia.

"A simple telephone call between Presidents Trump and Putin was met with hysteria among NATO member countries, and just as US and Russian high-level delegations were meeting in Saudi Arabia to look for way to walk back from a war footing, our 'allies' decided to hold their own summit.... In Paris our 'partners' pledged to continue their failed Ukraine policy and to ridicule the United States.... To add insult to injury, right at the center of the table in Paris was none other than the Secretary General of NATO himself, former Dutch politician Mark Rutte!...

"Also over the weekend Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rep Thomas Massie (R-KY) echoed Elon Musk’s sentiment, with Sen. Lee posting a chart showing the wildly disproportionate amount of US taxpayer dollars that go to funding NATO with the statement, 'Get us out of NATO.' Rep. Massie added to Lee’s comment, 'NATO is a Cold War relic that needs to be relegated to a talking kiosk at the Smithsonian.'

"As in the time of Sen. Robert Taft, the sentiment against NATO membership is coming from the conservative end of the US political spectrum. With President Trump’s clear mandate to pursue his 'America first' agenda we have the best opportunity in decades to sever our damaging and expensive entangling alliances across the globe. Let’s start with NATO!"

This article was originally published by the Ron Paul Institute.

Read more: https://www.eurasiareview.com/03032025-ron-paul-suddenly-leaving-nato-is-on-the-table-oped/

The beginning of the end for NATO?

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: 

Ukrainians want draft-eligible refugees sent back

Ukrainian government officials are calling for NATO countries to extradite Ukrainian war refugees eligible for conscription. The Polish government is willing to do so (subject to court approval), but the governments of Czechia, Austria, and Hungary have indicated they will not comply. 

Poland May Start to Extradite Ukrainian ‘Draft Dodgers’ | Kyiv Post:

September 4, 2023 - "On Sept. 1 David Arachamia, leader of Ukraine’s Servant of the People party, said that Ukrainian law enforcement agencies should demand the extradition of men of military age who had illegally left Ukraine to escape mobilization and prosecute them. 

"The Polish news outlet, Rzeczpospolitej reported on data provided by Poland’s Border Guard that 2.87 million Ukrainian adults had crossed into Poland between Feb. 24, 2022 and Aug. 31 this year. It was estimated that around 80,000 men aged 18-60, who were potentially eligible for military service, had entered the country; the whereabouts of whom are currently not known. A spokesperson for the Polish Border Guard, Lt. Anna Michalska, is quoted as saying that it was not known how many actually met the exemption requirements.

"Ukraine shares borders with five countries where Ukrainian men may have entered: Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Moldova. It is feared that the number of those who have fled may run into the tens of thousands. Fedir Venislavsky, a member of Ukraine’s National Security, Defense and Intelligence Committee said the numbers of those who illicitly avoided going to war and took refuge abroad is hugely significant. 'These people could be mobilized and increase the ranks of our armed forces, thereby strengthening our defense and security'....

"Inspector Mariusz Ciarka, a spokesman for the Poland’s Police Headquarters indicated that there had been a number of instances of individuals intercepted trying to cross the border illegally without an exemption.... In the case of those who appeared to have an exemption and crossed apparently legally, the inspector said it ... would be necessary for Ukraine to issue an international arrest warrant for each individual case. The details would be entered into Poland’s National Police Information System (KSIP) and shared with Interpol. If a Ukrainian was stopped for something such as a traffic offence, KSIP would flag the fact and the person would be detained. However, the police could not act on the warrant until a Polish court had approved extradition.

"In July the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) charged the MP Lyudmila Marchenko and her assistant with corruption or demanding a bribe to provide a man with a permit to leave Ukraine as well as registering him on the Shlyakh system, which allows men of military age to leave the country."
Read more: https://www.kyivpost.com/post/21242

Ukraine Demands Extradition of Its Draft-Age Men | European Conservative | Zoltán Kottász:

September 9, 2023 - "Neither the Austrian, nor the Czech government is willing to bow to Ukraine’s demands and extradite Ukrainian men who have fled the war-torn country. 'That would be a massive interference in our sovereignty, we would never do that,' a spokesman for the Austrian Interior Ministry said to Exxpress on September 7th. 'Such a request would likely contravene Czech law, making it impossible to approve it,' the Czech Justice Ministry stated in the Prague Monitor....

"With the war against Russia costing thousands of lives, the Ukrainian leadership is stepping up its efforts to recruit soldiers. But there are more and more reports of men fleeing the country to avoid military service.... The number of Ukrainian men who have successfully avoided mobilisation and sought refuge abroad could be in the tens of thousands, but there are no official statistics. What Eurostat’s statistics do tell us is that 17.7% of the 4 million Ukrainians who have been granted temporary protection in the EU since the start of the war are men aged 18-64....

"According to Exxpress, there are around 14,000 Ukrainian men aged between 18 and 54 who have been registered as refugees in Austria. The government in Vienna has clearly stated it will not deport any of them. Prague has also emphasised that extradition treaties do not apply under Czech law to crimes of a military or political nature. Polish authorities estimate that 80,000 Ukrainian men of military age may have entered Poland since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the German Interior Ministry has registered more than 200,000 men in the same age group since the start of the war. Tareq Alaows of the human rights organisation Pro Asyl, told Deutschlandfunk that evading conscription is a human right, therefore, the German government shouldn’t give in to Ukraine’s demands, if such demands were made.

"While people with disabilities and illnesses are mostly exempt from the draft, Hungarian-language Ukrainian news website, Kárpáti Igaz Szó reports that the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence recently updated its list of illnesses that are no longer considered debilitating enough to stop men from serving in the army. These include clinically cured tuberculosis, viral hepatitis, asymptomatic HIV, mental and neurological disorders that cause only minimal pain and rare physical manifestations."
Read more: https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/ukraine-demands-extradition-of-its-draft-age-men/

Germany just told Ukraine to F*CK off, along with 3 other E.U. countries | Redacted News | September 15, 2023:

NATO’s $1 Billion monument to irrelevance

NATO’s $1 Billion Monument to Irrelevance | Cato @ Liberty - Ted Galen Carpenter:

November 15, 2013 - "A November 13 article in Reuters discusses the growing controversy over NATO’s new headquarters being built outside of Brussels. The price tag — some $1 billion — has raised more than a few eyebrows. 'When defense budgets are being cut and in general when governments are under so much pressure from taxpayers to save money, it looks terribly extravagant,' opines Daniel Keohane, head of a leading think tank in Belgium. Several members of the British parliament also have questioned the cost.

"NATO officials, though, defend the project, asserting that the existing headquarters, built in 1967, has outlived its usefulness. Of course, the same point could be made with far greater validity about the NATO alliance itself. After all, it was created during the depths of the Cold War in 1949 to, as Lord Harold Ismay, NATO’s secretary general at the time, pithily observed, 'keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.' Given the collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia’s manifold demographic, economic, and military limitations as a successor state, that mission now seems to be more than a little obsolete. The past two decades, the alliance has been conducting a frantic search for relevant new missions, resulting in a dubious decision to add members in Eastern Europe and wage even more dubious wars in places like Kosovo and Afghanistan."

Read more: http://www.cato.org/blog/natos-1-billion-monument-irrelevance
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