Get America out of NATO

Post Reply New Topic

Here is where I agree with a possible direction of the Trump Administration:

http://www.conservativehq.com/article/2 ... -europeans

It's time for America to focus more on its problems back home than doing all the heavy lifting for Europe's defense on its own dime.

Yet in the other thread you are expecting some other country to govern you as a protectorate, presumably at their expense.

NATO serves no purpose at this juncture, it was an anti-Soviet alliance and the Soviet Union no longer exists. Russia is not the enemy of the United States, they're not an enemy of Europe, it is time to let go of prejudices from previous centuries. The US would benefit greatly from befriending Russia and vice versa, it is a mutually beneficial relationship if we want it to be and the alternative puts us on the path of nuclear war. China is rising fast and it is time for the US to stop trying to lord over it's strategic allies because they see an alternative approaching on the horizon. Getting out of NATO would go a far way in untangling our alliances and returning to the foreign policy our founders intended.

I think America's leadership role is becoming a burden to this country and is one of the reasons why we're having such huge domestic problems, so I'd like to see us disentangle from that. Let someone else take the lead, see if they can come up with anything worth emulating.

Except for invading, occupying, and annexing parts of Ukraine and Georgia (geographically Georgia is Asian, culturally it is European). If Putin was the POTUS then there would be American soldiers in Quebec.

I otherwise agree that co-operation is the way to go. Until Crimea, it very much looked like the way we had gone. I don't want to see a WWI situation, but I also don't want to see a policy of appeasement towards Russian imperialism.

It's in America's interests to maintain peace in Europe because a large part of your economy depends on transatlantic trade.

Given the choice between Russia and China, I'd go with China. Yes, they have a similarly poor human rights record and are occupying Tibet, and dispute a few small islands, but they recognise the autonomy of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, allowing them to become three of the best places to live in the world. Their economy is also much stronger than Russia's and they have a larger military. Yes, Russia keeps Belarus under control, but China keeps North Korea under control. I also think there's more prospect of social change in China. China will naturally become more liberal as more citizens are exposed to the world and the leadership see the benefits. Russia is deeply socially conservative and that affects government policy, rather than the other way around.

Y'all need to pull your weight more, then. Thanks to not having to spend on your defense, you're able to spend money on generous welfare states that Americans can only dream of on our own dime. Also, by depending on us for your defense, we have to maintain the socially disastrous military-industrial complex of this country which has warped our society and politics and made us more militaristic, because otherwise how can we lead in your guys' defense? Americans are getting tired of it. We want to be able to tamp down on the militarism and imperialism and focus on fixing our own backyard.

This article I think touches well on the distortions pushed by America's military industrial complex, which rationalizes the current military arrangement by painting every rising peer as the next Hitler. This article deals with the alarmism over China's lone aircraft carrier:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ivan-elan ... 66636.html

Crimea rightfully belongs to Russia and Georgia provoked it's little war, I wouldn't consider Ukraine or Georgia 'Europe either. Maybe NATO wished they could expand into those areas which is part of this effort to box Russia in but if you research the actual causes of those two conflicts then you will see that Russia simply responded the way they should of been expected to respond. I'm not saying that the US should be adversarial with China, Russia and China are pretty the #2 and #3 military powers in the world at this point and I think there can be some level of understanding made between these new world powers and the US

I don't think saying there's some Russian speaking people there so now it's Russia is ok.
Georgia was an internal affair Russia had no right to involve its self in. They'd. Pissed if another nation invaded Russia to protect Chechen rebels.

Imagine if the USA and England said from now on anyone who speaks English are us and U.K. Citizens and well move to defend them wherever they are regardless of what nation they live in. Russia would be throwing a fit. Their annexing parts of Eastern Europe is illegal. I would like to see coprpation with Russia and china but that s**t has to stop.
Same with china trying to claim all the ocean including up to the beaches of other nations. They don't own the seas anymore then Vietnam, Japan, Philippines, India Korea owns them. Yet they claim to and build bases.
Russia is just trying to stay relevant and stretch their muscles. That's how ww1 got started, they were worried Russia was becomeinf irrelvant.

I think you might be overestimating the amount that is spent on welfare.

British unemployment benefits are £73 a week. In the US, it's $235-$742 per week.

I would be more than happy to see the US cut its spending on defence to 2% of GDP, the level of the UK and France.


Georgia might be debatable but Ukraine isn't, it is very firmly European.

There are considerably more than two conflicts here. I won't deny that Abkhazia and South Ossetia are complicated situations but if the US was occupying an analogous territory then you'd be criticising the imperialism and say that you shouldn't be being the world's police. Same if Georgia invaded Chechnya. There's a clear hypocrisy by both the far left and particularly the far right when it comes to Russia's foreign policy.

It's hard to hold a legitimate referendum when you're occupied by a military power with a vested interest in that referendum. While I support Crimean self-determination, there needs to be a clean referendum.

(I'd also like to see international recognition of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria as well as other de facto states, but Russian imperialism makes that harder)

NATO is the American empire in Europe. It was created and maintained to serve American interests and it still serves those interests today.

It's a relatively benign empire and places a light and easy yoke on members, but it's still quite clear what it is.

It's probably a testament to the inadequacy of the American education system that so many citizens don't understand this.

If it is disbanded, it will have to be replaced by something of similar size and membership that performs the same functions. That would be a colossal waste of money.

Most people who have an opinion that it is somehow a financial drain on the US have no idea what it does, how it works or what the US would have to do to compensate if it lost NATO.

Ukraine and Georgia are strategic pivot points which the US and it's NGO's poured billions into fomenting these conflicts, George Soros played a big role in all of this. I feel Russia's action in both were in rational responses to aggression. It's more the imperialistic ambitions of the US and the NWO being projected onto Russia, I feel when you learn the context of these situations this becomes very clear. I believe in self determination and staying out of the domestic affairs of other countries, it is our playing around trying to overthrow governments that causes so many of these problems to begin with. I think it is possible to repurpose NATO but I think what we need is for Russia to be apart of it and I don't see that happening so it would be better to just start from scratch.

You need to distinguish the establishment elite of America and the ordinary American. It may work great for the former, but my concern is for the latter, and so I still stand by my points above.

Yes, it sucks that Americans keep supporting their own oligarchy, despite all the tools at their disposal to effect peaceful change in their own government, but is NATO really an issue there?

Would the average American citizen from the 99% somehow gain from the dissolution of NATO? What would be gained and what would be lost? What does NATO do that impacts the lives of ordinary citizens?

NATO sets standards for interoperable equipment. This means they have standards for things like cartridge (shell) size, cargo pallettes, refueling probes, runway lighting, radio procedures and naval signals. This allows commanders of joint forces to assign units from any NATO country to operate with units from other NATO countries to make better use of their operational specialties. This allows aircraft from different nations to take fuel from tankers launched by other nations.

NATO units regularly train together and in the process iron out communications issues so that they can operate together effectively in multination missions. This means the US doesn't need to assign units with every needed capability for an operation if that capability exists in local NATO forces. That means the US spends less, not more, on those operations.

Those operations are important because they secure the shipping routes to our major trading partners. Europe is the US's primary export market, rivaled only by the combined exports to China, Korea and Japan.

Those exports mean jobs for Americans, not just profits for the 1%.

Americans also like to buy a lot of European goods.

People take for granted the security that NATO has provided, and forget that that security is what allows them to carry on buying and selling stuff internationally. We wonder how it happens that other, less fortunate areas have problems with piracy, forgetting that the reason we aren't plagued with those problems is what we get with NATO.

What would happen to US workers if our trade with Europe was disrupted? America or Europe are the primary trading partners for every other region on earth. If something seriously disturbs the European/American economies, the whole world will suffer. US workers would suffer greatly.

Securing our major trade routes is not just a gift for the 1%.

These ideas about NATO being a drain make no sense economically. More than that, there is some sort of implied relationship between US participation in NATO and US defense spending. Anyone who thinks that disbanding NATO would result in changes in US defense spending has no idea how defense procurement works in the US.

UN first.
UN is long past its usefulness.
It wants global world government

Maybe that bad idea deserves a thread of it's own.

Why does the UN exist? So there is some mechanism for hostile nations to engage diplomatically without resorting to war. It's a response to World War 2.

It's often annoying and always highly dysfunctional, but not having it when the stuff hits the fan somewhere would be a heck of a lot worse. We know, because it used not to exist and very bad things happened. Since it was created, that level of war has not happened.

There are more nuclear states than ever. The next time India and China or India and Pakistan or Israel and any one of its hostile neighbors really gets into it, having the UN as a forum for solutions that don't involve global thermonuclear war will still be useful.