In terms of America’s genuine national interests, the central takeaway from the G-20 Summit in Germany has almost nothing to do with what went on in the Summit’s discussions and declarations. The Summit produced what it always produces, hot air and political posturing. President Trump, however, did what he needed to do for America and calmed down our ties with the Russians.
I read this afternoon that the fossilized commentator David Gergen said that this was the first time that America was not the leader of the Summit and the Free World. My view, for what it is worth, is that that is simply great news. Being the leader of the free world means that U.S. citizens pay the freight for Europe’s security, and the defense of numerous Arab tyrants, with their taxes, and with their children in their wars. Losing the title of “Leader of the Free World” can only mean that the United States is safer, and that “America First” can yet be made a reality. One sure way of knowing how well Mr. Trump did in defusing tensions with Russia, is to listen to the attacks launched on his meeting with Putin by FOX commentator John Bolton and Senators Graham and McCain, each a Neocon, an Israel Firster, and a war-causing, democracy monger.
More important, however, was President Trump’s speech in which he said that the most important issue at hand was whether the West was willing to save itself. This theme encompasses the key issue: Is NATO is worth a tinker’s damn to the United States?
In Hamburg, Mr. Trump saw for himself the negative answer to that question appearing in the form of violent and dissolute youth destroying property on the streets of the city. He now knows that his national-security aides have lied to him about the willingness of the EU and NATO states and their populations to defend themselves. Those states may spend more money on defense, but save — perhaps — for Britain, Poland, Hungary, and Romania, most of the other NATO and EU countries have bred out of their populations patriotism, civic duties and responsibilities, and the willingness to defend liberty. Indeed, they have created educational systems that have taught three generations of young Europeans to hate Western civilization and to be ignorant of and/or hateful toward the history of their own countries.
Overall, the EU has been the engine that has made so many of Europe’s young people barbarians — witness the condoned barbarity of Hamburg’s young — and facilitated the admission of millions of Third World barbarians to join them in destroying Europe. (NB: Americans should take no comfort in the fact that there is an ocean between themselves and Europe. Their leaders in both parties, the media, the churches, and the academy are doing the same things the EU is doing, only they are about a generation behind the EU-created nightmare that is preparatory to civil war.)
No matter how much the non-English-speaking, NATO countries increase their military spending, they will never be able to field armies capable of defending anything without U.S. conventional, nuclear, and human power. And because the U.S. military has so few ground troops to apply conventional power, only the nuclear option is pertinent. The young criminals that Americans saw on Hamburg’s streets burning cars, looting shops, and throwing potentially lethal projectiles at the police and innocent bystanders would never rally to Germany’s defense; they would more likely support those who sought to invade and occupy it. The media report that these young gangsters wounded about 400 German police officers, and the police apparently were ordered not to respond except to squirt water and pepper spray at the violent thugs every once in a while. The correct response to this kind of mass violence, which endangered the security of a major city and port, and also put its law-abiding population at risk, is to shoot-to-kill anyone seen hurling or preparing to hurl a lethal projectile, burning a car, or looting a shop. The German failure to so ensures that the next time the criminal protestors take to the streets — whether in Germany or later this week in France — the carnage will be worse.
What Mr. and Mrs. Trump saw on the streets of Europe, then, was a microcosm of the EC’s military-age population, and in it there was not a potential soldier to be seen. That there are patriotic and liberty-loving youth in the EC is certain — note those who voted for Brexit, those who cheered Trump in Poland, and those who supported Marie Le Penn — but they seem to be small in number, and are either already in the military or routinely ostracized from society as far-right wingers or even fascists. For the United States, there can be no commonsense-based expectation that the EU could field an army that would not be overrun — along with our Europe-based forces — by a multi-army Russian invasion .
This situation ought to give pause to those who claim NATO is a strong and essential part of U.S. defense strategy. NATO is a hollow and so dangerously fragile egg; it has almost no military worth without the United States protecting it. If past is prologue, the recent defense-spending increases by NATO states will dry up in a few years, and to recreate a population that is civic-minded, patriotic, nationalistic, and liberty-loving is the work of generations. In addition, Neocon claims that America and Europe share the same values is another lie. Where do you see support in the EU for Adam Smith’s freedom troika of life, liberty, and property? Here are just a few examples of the attitude of the EU and NATO and their member governments toward those key Smithian elements of freedom.
The EU and Life:
- The death sentence British and EU courts issued to a deathly ill 11-month old, by refusing him continued life-support and not allowing the baby to be brought to the United States for experimental treatment.
- The refusal of most European governments to prosecute Muslims who rape and otherwise sexually molest young children and women, and a media that does not report such attacks.
The EU and Liberty:
- The imprisonment of the eminent historian David Irving, who questions the extent of the holocaust.
- The imprisonment of native Britons — like Tommy Robinson — who oppose their government’s welcome, economic favoritism, and special legal protection for Muslim criminals and terrorists.
The EU and Property:
- The German government either seizing private property and using it to house Muslim refugees, or inundating rural towns with Muslims who outnumber their populations.
- The British government reserving a share of new houses for Muslim refugees, preventing native Britons from purchasing them.
- The German government’s tolerance for the Hamburg violence which destroyed so much private property.
NATO is death trap for the United States. A massive Russian military incursion into the EU and NATO countries would quickly crush the small NATO forces that would oppose it; that is, if those forces did not run from the Russians. At that point, the U.S. — under Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, which surrenders America’s sovereignty and independence — would have no option but to use nuclear weapons in the defense of nations and peoples that, with a few exceptions, will not defend themselves against either internal nor external enemies. That seems like an insane situation for the United States to be locked into, especially when the values of Europe’s governments and peoples are so clearly antithetical to those of Americans.
Americans have been faced with this automatic-war option previously. In 1919, for example, President Woodrow Wilson tried to ram the League of Nations Covenant through the U.S. Senate — then, unlike now, composed of a goodly number of adult patriots — and suffered defeat at the hands of that body’s non-interventionists. Article X of the Covenant committed the United States to go to war if another member of the League was the target of an offensive war. In other words, the great Democrat Wilson wanted to remove the decision for war from where it was vested by the Constitution — in the hands of the citizenry through its elected representatives — and deliver it into foreign hands beyond Americans’ control. NATO’s Article 5 does precisely the same thing, committing America today, in fact, to nuclear war for Europe states to whom we owe nothing and with which we have little left in terms of common values.
One of the final nails in the coffin of Wilson’s republic-killing, pro-League agenda was a speech by Idaho’s Republican Senator William E. Borah, who was a resolute non-interventionist and, that rarest of God’s creatures, a successful one. The entire speech is worth reading, but the following paragraph, in particular, is as pertinent today as it was in the debate over the League of Nations in 1919.
But your treaty does not mean peace—far, very far, from it. If we are to judge the future by the past it means war. Is there any guaranty of peace other than the guaranty which comes of the control of the war-making power by the people? Yet what great rule of democracy does the treaty leave unassailed? The people in whose keeping alone you can safely lodge the power of peace or war nowhere, at no time and in no place, have any voice in this scheme for world peace. Autocracy which has bathed the world in blood for centuries reigns supreme. Democracy is everywhere excluded. This, you say, means peace. (1)
Neither the League of Nations’ Covenant nor the NATO Treaty meant peace for the United States. The former meant the end of American sovereignty and independence, automatic war, and foreign control in 1919, and so was properly scotched by the Senate. In today’s world, the NATO Treaty means the same things, and it is time to be ushered out the door as quickly as possible.
Endnote
- William E. Borah, “Speech on The League of Nations,” 19 November 1919, http://www.historycentral.com/documents/Borah.html