Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
NATO is Done
For the last 75 or so years, the world has been more peaceful because of the North American Treaty Organization. It deterred aggression in Europe, and it helped bring an end to the Soviet empire without a war. In the last few weeks, or months, that alliance has been strained because the President of the United States is an egomaniac with no sense of how the world works. His demands for sovereignty over Greenland has united Europeans against the US, something unthinkable even a year ago. The alliance still exists, but the trust is gone. Whether the parties will still work together is hard to say, but the view in Europe is that America is untrustworthy and unreliable. If there is cooperation in future, there will be much less of it.
Speaking at the World Econmoic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said,
We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.
This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
That is as clear-eyed and concise as it can be. The post-World War II arrangement is done. Nations will no longer seek mutual defense to the same degree, and they will build up their militaries as a result. As Paul Weller sang in the 1980s, "you'll see kidney machines replaced by rockets and guns."
Mr. Trump is in Davos as well where he bored the press and attendees with his rambling foolishness about the state of global politics, which he has done so much to ruin. He stormed in late owing to a small electrical problem with Air Force One, a perfect metaphor for America today. One of the things he said struck home to many in NATO. He said, "The United States is treated very unfairly by NATO. We've so much and we get so little in return."
Intellectual honesty (something alien to the American president) requires one to point out that the only time the Article 5 guarantee of mutual defense was activated happened after the US was attacked on September 11, 2001. NATO troops died in the stupid war George W. Bush fought in Afghanistan.
The up-ending of the rules based world order is an own-goal that is hard to rival. Not even the British idiocy in leaving the EU comes close. The UN system and the global trading arrangements (the latter based on the US dollar) were created largely to benefit the US. Tear that up, and America becomes weaker and poorer by definition.
Prime Minister Carney was right that that system was rigged, but it was also a system that could have been reformed sufficiently to last another generation or two. That will not happen now. Instead, there will be fortresses built. Mr. Carney noted, "A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable. And there is another truth. If great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate."
The decline under the Trump administration continues to accelerate.
© Copyright 2026 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
|
|
|
