Greater Danger

Although he is a bit sentimental about what NATO ever was, Peter Hitchens writes:

Nato is a bluff. It always has been. Put simply, it depends on an American president being willing to sacrifice Chicago for Berlin in a nuclear exchange, the likely conclusion of any full-scale Europe-wide conflict.

Well, good luck with that. The reasonable fear has always been that no US president, even one who hasn't forgotten where Chicago is, will take this risk to save any part of Europe. And the bigger Nato gets, the weaker the pledge is.

The much-touted Article 5 of Nato's charter is not quite the magnificent guarantee of armed support from the strong to the weak that it appears to be. Each member pledges to assist an attacked nation 'by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force'.

This means if a Nato member does not 'deem' armed force to be 'necessary', it can send a note of protest instead, or make a fierce speech at the United Nations. The US would never have signed a treaty that obliged it to go to war, which is why the clause is so flabby.

Nato worked reasonably well – though there were tensions – when its ambitions were modest, to defend Western Europe against Soviet attack. It was a defensive alliance, the best sort. But since it attacked Serbia in 1999, and since it became the means for a huge eastward expansion of US and EU power, spread rather thin over vast territory, it has been morally weaker and much, much riskier.

Far from making us safer, it exposes us to greater danger. I wish we had politicians who knew enough history to grasp this. As it says in the Good Book: 'And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.'