NATO: The Case To Get Out Now

The case for getting out of NATO encompasses four fundamental propositions:

• First, the Federal budget has become a self-fueling fiscal doomsday machine, even as the Fed has run out of capacity to monetize the skyrocketing public debt.
• Second, the only viable starting point for fiscal salvation is slashing the nation’s elephantine Warfare State by at least $500 billion per year.
• Third, the route to that end is a return to the “no entangling alliance” wisdom of the Founders, which means bringing the Empire Home, closing the 750 US bases abroad, scuttling much of the US Navy and Army and withdrawing from NATO and similar lesser commitments elsewhere.
• Fourthly, jettisoning NATO requires debunking its Origins Story and the false claim that it brought peace and security to post-war America when what it actually did was transform Washington into the War Capital of the World, dominated by a panoptic complex of arms merchants, neocon warmongers and a vast Warfare State nomenklatura.

Part 1

As to the impending fiscal calamity, just recall this sequence. When Ronald Reagan attacked the soaring Federal deficits in 1980 the public debt was less than $1 trillion and about 30% of GDP. But it had erupted to $20 trillion by Donald Trump’s first election, now stands at $36 trillion and will be hitting $62 trillion and 163% of GDP by the mid-2030s.

Yet even that figure embodies CBO’s most recent Rosy Scenario fairy tale under which—-

• Congress never again adopts a single new spending increase or tax cut.
• The $5 trillion of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts are allowed to expire next year.
• There are no recessions or other economic crises for the remainder of this decade and forever thereafter, world without end.
• And despite 7% of GDP deficits and annual interest expense of $1.7 trillion by 2034 the average yield on the public debt clocks in at a minuscule 3.4%.

Yes, and if dogs could whistle the world would be a chorus! Boost the average debt yield by a minimally realistic 250 basis points, however, and now you have $3 trillion of annual interest expense and a $4.5 trillion deficit by 2034.

In short, there is a doom-loop building inside the fiscal equation under which soaring interest expense will ignite a veritable budgetary wildfire, powering the public debt upward to $150 trillion by mid-century, even under CBO’s cheerful baseline.

Of course, long before the debt actually hits this staggering figure, the whole system would implode. Every remnant of America as we now know it would go down the tubes.

So slashing the national security budget by $500 billion per year is especially urgent since there is no chance whatsoever of getting similar giant slices out of the other two fiscal biggies— Social Security and Medicare, which are surrounded by a veritable wall of political terrorists on the left.

Fortunately, slashing the Pentagon by 50% is fully warranted. Today’s bloated Empire-serving Warfare State is not remotely necessary for homeland security or the foreign policy of a peaceful Republic.

When you add-up the current year $927 billion for the national defense function, $66 billion for international operations and aid and $370 billion for veterans disability and health care—you get a comprehensive national security budget of nearly $1.4 trillion. 

Moreover, three things stand out when this stupendous total is looked at in historic perspective. First, the disappearance of the heavily armed Soviet Empire into the dustbin of history in 1991 left no visible trace on national security spending.

In fact, at the peak of the Cold War in 1962 when JFK faced down Khrushchev in Cuba the comprehensive national security budget in today’s dollars stood at just $640 billion. That was barely 46% of the current level, and it was still only $810 billion by 1990 on the eve of the Soviet collapse.

So what transpired thereafter is astounding. An adversary armed to the teeth with upwards of 37,000 nukes and a 4 million man conventional armed force vanished from the face of the earth. And yet the national security budget kept rising skyward to the present $1.4 trillion without missing a beat.

The second point is that the largest military increases occurred not in the Cold War heat circa 1960, but during the Reagan era of the 1980s when the Soviet Union was already on its last leg economically and militarily. Still, the constant dollar US national security budget actually soared by +42%, from $570 billion to the aforementioned $810 billion.

There’s no mystery as to why. During the Reagan Era the neocons hijacked the Republican party and cast its historic fiscal prudence to the winds, claiming that massive defense increases were needed because the Soviets were on the verge of a nuclear first strike capacity.

That latter was an abject lie as proven by the fact that less than 10% of the Reagan defense build-up actually went to the strategic nuclear arsenal. Most of it was for conventional forces including the 600-ship Navy, massive air power increases, new tanks, expanded air and sealift and extensive new cruise missiles and electronics warfare capabilities.

All of these latter forces had but one purpose: Namely, overseas power projection and the conduct of wars of invasion and occupation in a world in which the US was not threatened in the slightest by any industrial power with expansive conventional warfare capabilities.

The real effect of the Reagan defense build-up, therefore, was to supply future administrations with the military wherewithal to launch serial adventures in Regime Change. That is, real defense spending should have been cut in half or by $400 billion (FY 2025 $) upon the Soviet demise but was actually increased by $600 billion, thereby enabling military interventions from the First Gulf War onward.

Thirdly, the Forever Wars have been a physical, medical and fiscal disaster. Currently 5 million wounded veterans receive disability compensation and 9 million receive health care benefits. That is, one out of every 30 adult Americans is a VA client.

Accordingly, the “deferred cost” of Empire has literally shot the moon. In today’s dollars, veterans benefits have risen from $57 billion in 1962, mainly representing WWII veterans, to $370 billion. This 6.5X rise represents the frightful human and fiscal tab for the Empire.

Part 2

So, how did a peaceful Republic secure behind the great Atlantic and Pacific Ocean moats, which until 1949 eschewed permanent “entangling alliances” abroad, end up with an global Empire that it doesn’t need and can’t even remotely afford?

The answer, we believe, lies in three strategic mistakes made on the banks of the Potomac in 1917, 1949 and 1991, respectively, that have enabled the rise of a self-fueling Warfare State. This fiscal monster, to repeat, can only be eliminated by returning to Jefferson’s admonition that America should pursue—-

Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.

For most of its history, of course, America had adhered to this advice yet had been invasion-free owing to the great Atlantic and Pacific ocean moats. These blessings of Providence, in turn, enabled America to remain a peaceful Republic because its favorable geography precluded the need for a large standing military, heavy taxes, a powerful central government and, most especially, the need for entangling alliances with foreign nations.

In fact, an early treaty with France was canceled by Congress in 1797, meaning that the nation was free of permanent alliances for the next 152 years. Even as late as 1919 Congress prudently rejected the entanglements of the League of Nations Treaty after Wilson’s foolish crusade blatantly failed to make the world safe for democracy.

The inexorable slide toward Empire thus incepted only in 1949 when the Senate ratified the NATO Treaty. But, as we will argue, that was based on utterly false lessons from the world wars and a misguided theory of collective international security.

To be sure, Jefferson’s admonition had preiviously been the default position of American governance. This was demonstrated by the radical demobilization of military forces even after America had uncharacteristically elected to go to war on the world stage in both 1917 and 1941.

Thus, the US military budget on the eve of World War I was just $11 billion when expressed in present day dollars and amounted to a slim 0.9% of GDP. But after Wilson plunged American forces into the stalemated trenches on the Western Front, constant dollar military spending soared 18-fold to $194 billion by war’s end.

That amounted to nearly 15% of GDP at the wartime peak but immediately upon the armistice a sweeping demobilization began. By 1924, 100% of the troops were home and military spending bottomed out at just $12 billion. That amounted to a 93% reduction from the wartime peak and just 0.8% of GDP.

The pre-war status quo ante had thus been fully restored, implying that the lurch into a foreign war had amounted to a one-off venture, and a bad one at that.

Indeed, US intervention in the Great War had been a calamitous mistake. On the date Congress declared war (April 6, 1917) there was not even the slightest chance of a German attack on America. By then the German Fleet was quarantined in its Jutland home-port by the Royal Navy and all sides to the conflict were running out of draftable men, materiale, morale and fiscal resources.

Yet that Woodrow Wilson had plunged the US into the stalemated carnage of the old world for the vainglorious purpose of acquiring a powerful seat at the post–war peace conference is indisputable based on the testimony of his intimate alter ego, Colonel House. So doing, Wilson tipped the balance on the Western Front to a victory by the Entente powers led by England and France.

That is to say, the natural end to this pointless “world war” would have left all the sides exhausted, bankrupt and demoralized, and their respective domestic “war parties” subject to massive repudiation at the post-war polls. But the arrival of two million fresh American doughboys and massive armaments from Washington literally rechanneled history, enabling a vindictive peace of the victors at Versailles—a travesty that sowed the seeds for the even more calamitous second world war.

Yet it can’t be gainsaid that Wilson’s foolish intervention encouraged a last futile offensive by Russia in the summer of 1917, the failure of which soon gave birth to the bloody revolution of Lenin and Stalin. Likewise, the parceling out of the parts and pieces of Germany to France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium and others by the victors at Versailles fostered the stab-in-the-back myth and revanchist campaigns on which Hitler rode to power.

More importantly still, the alleged “lessons” of the interwar period and WWII were falsely played and replayed in the years after 1945. To wit, the Wilson–enabled rise of Hitler and Stalin did not happen, as claimed, because the good people of England and America slept through the 1920s and 1930s. These monsters of the 20th century were not resident in the DNA of nations nor do they continuously lurk among the lesser tinpots who rise from time to time to authoritarian tyranny among the far flung nations of the earth.

To the contrary, they were aberrations—freaks of historical happenstance. That means that even after the two catastrophic world wars there was no baseline case for Empire as a requisite of America’s homeland security. Washington and Jefferson were still correct even in 1946 and beyond.

For a brief moment after WWII ended, in fact, Jefferson’s admonition had prevailed yet again when another massive post-war demobilization occurred, laying the ground for a return to the pre–1914 status quo ante.

Accordingly, the war-weary Washington policy makers were absolutely correct when they brought America’s 12 million-man expeditionary force home, reducing it to 1.3 million by 1948, and also abruptly closed the fiscal sluice-gates to what had become America’s Brobdingnagian war budget.

When translated into present day dollars there’s no room for doubt: Military spending in FY 2025 dollars dropped form $1.7 trillion in 1945 to just $125 billion by 1948, marking another stunning 93% reduction in the post-war military budget.

And well it should have. At that point there was absolutely no military threat anywhere on the planet to the homeland security and liberty of America.

Japan’s leading cities had been fried alive by horrendous nuclear and conventional bombing assaults and Germany’s industry had been laid waste by nightly bomber storms for months on end

That’s to say nothing, of course, of the prostate corpus of Stalinist Russia, which had suffered 27 million military and civilian deaths due to bombs, bullets, starvation, disease, pestilence, atrocities and other barely imaginable inhuman afflictions. And that was atop the destruction of 32,000 industrial enterprises and upwards of 70,000 towns and villages—all leaving tens of millions of Soviet citizens destitute.

In some kind of ghoulish absolution, therefore, the slate had been wiped clean. There wasn’t even a scant reason for American expeditionary forces to remain outside the homeland after 1945—nor for bases, alliances and commitments to intervene anywhere abroad that would put American servicemen in harms’ way.

Part 3

And yet Washington’s incipient “War Party” of military contractors and globe-trotting officialdom gestated in the heat of World War II was not about to go quietly into the good night. Instead, the Cold War was midwifed on the banks of the Potomac when President Truman fell under the spell of war-hawks like Secretary James Byrnes, Dean Acheson, James Forrestal and the Dulles brothers, who were loath to go back to their mundane lives as civilian bankers, politicians or peacetime diplomats.

So exactly 11 months after Hitlers’ demise at his own hand in his bunker and a mere eight

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Article from LewRockwell