U.S. Troops Will Be Leaving Europe As Well
Personally, I would have thought NATO would have packed up long before now.
Maybe it is time for them to give this up?
It's certainly lost it's significance.
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February 24, 2007
U.S. Troops Will Be Leaving Europe As Well
From Pat Buchanan's column yesterday:
NATO is packing it in as a world power. NATO is little more than a U.S. guarantee to pull Europe's chestnuts out of the fire if Europeans encounter a fight they cannot handle, like an insurgency in Bosnia or Kosovo. NATO has one breadwinner, and 25 dependents.
At the end of the Cold War, internationalists like Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana declared, "NATO must go out of area, or go out of business." What Lugar meant was, with the Soviet threat lifted from Europe, NATO must shoulder more of the global burden.
But the Balkan crises of the 1990s showed that Europeans are not even up to policing their own playground. The Americans had to come in, gently push them aside and do the job. The message Europe is today sending to America, with the withdrawals from Iraq and the refusal of Italy, Germany and France to fight in Afghanistan:
"We are not going out of area again. If you Americans want to play empire, go right ahead. We will not again send our sons overseas to fight in regions of the world from which we withdrew half a century ago. You're on your own."
Where does this leave NATO? This leaves NATO as little more than a U.S. guarantee to go to war for the nations of Europe, while Europeans can be freeloading critics of U.S. policy around the world.
NATO is an expensive proposition. We maintain dozens of bases and scores of thousands of troops from Norway to the Balkans, from Spain to the Baltic republics, from the Black Sea to the Irish Sea.
What do we get for this? Why do we tax ourselves to defend rich nations who refuse to defend themselves? Is the security of Europe more important to us than to Europe?
In the early years of World Wars I and II, Europeans implored us to come save them from the Germans. We did. In the early Cold War, Europeans welcomed returning GIs who stood guard in the Fulda Gap.
Now, with the threat gone, the gratitude is gone. Now, with their welfare states eating up their wealth, their peoples aging, their cities filling up with militant migrants, they want America to continue defending them, as they sit in moral judgment on how we go about it.
Don't be surprised if 90% of U.S. troops in Europe today are gone ten years from now.
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>>Source<<
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"...End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path...one that we all must take.
The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all change to silver glass...and then you see it...
...white shores...and beyond...the far green country under a swift sunrise."
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kinda like in Afghanistan where Americans cut down their total troop numbers in favour of Canadian, French, British, etc. troop to fight their mess so they can have more troops for Iraq campaign. Whether American troops stay or leave these NATO bases, in the end it will still be an American-funded, organized and supported organization and quite frankly I dont see it folding in the near future ... or ever, because Americans have been seen encroaching onto Russia's borders to keep her in check, and judging by Putin's recent criticism of NATO I dont see them fold.
