Ally Your Thinking

NATO has never been "an alliance of democracies". Whatever else Salazar's Portugal may have been, it was not a democracy. It was, however, a founder member of NATO, which was a cold strategic alliance, and those are not necessarily objectionable in principle. 

NATO, though, was a cold strategic alliance to wage war on the Soviet Union, the simple failure of which to keep on marching all the way to the Atlantic in 1945 had shown that it had neither the means nor the will to invade Western Europe. 

NATO welcomed anyone who was opposed to the Soviet Union, on whatever grounds. Key figures in its foundation included recent Nazi officers, such as were also prominent in the foundation of West Germany, and in the foundation of what was always intended to become the European Union. 

Over the Wall, one of the East German Bloc Parties, complete with reserved seats in the Volkskammer, was the NDPD, specifically for former Nazi Party members and supporters, although it was often observed that there were in fact more former Nazi Party members in the Communist Party than the entire membership of the NDPD.

In 1968, long after East Germany professed to have eradicated all trace of Nazism, the new Constitution still felt the need to commit it to doing so. No one in West Germany even pretended, not really. The obituaries of Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl were as frank as they themselves had always been. And then there was Austria.

The EU gives the frankest of Fascists more power than anything else in the world. They are routinely in the governing coalitions that make up the Council of Ministers, and they are always a bloc in the European Parliament, meaning that they have at least some say over the legislation that binds more than half a billion people. Since we remain in the Single Market and the Customs Union, that includes the people of the United Kingdom.

Today, NATO membership commits us to the defence of Islamist Turkey, with NATO's own barmy strategic terms making Turkey the second most important member. NATO membership commits us to the defence of assorted neo-Nazis in Eastern Europe, with plans for more to be added. And NATO membership will soon commit us to the defence of Latin American caudillos.

Get the message. However bad Kemalism, or Arab nationalism, or anything else in that vein may be, the Islamist alternative, centred on our dear friends in Saudi Arabia, is even worse. However bad, or at best disappointing, the expressions of Latin American Leftism may be, the Fascist alternatives, technically so named, are even worse. 

And the political divisions of much of Eastern Europe remain defined by the sides that were taken during the German Occupation. Guess which of those sides identifies with NATO and the EU, both of which have always been very good to that side. As we saw in Ukraine. And as we now see with the return of the white, red and white flag to the streets of Belarus.