Eloquent Op-Ed in Armed Forces Press by Colonel John Rosenberger on Ending NATO
NATO: Time To Turn Out The Lights
As President Trump and President Putin negotiate a lasting peace between Russia and Ukraine in the weeks ahead, the outcome now is indisputable. We, the U.S. and NATO, lost our proxy war in Ukraine, a war that will go down in history as one of our worst foreign policy disasters, even worse than our ignominious withdrawal from our 20-year war in Afghanistan.
Hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are dead, and even more are wounded and maimed. We fought to the last Ukrainian soldier, with no skin in the game. Sorrow blankets the land. Ukraine’s infrastructure has been decimated. Russia is substantially stronger economically and militarily, with stronger ties to Iran, North Korea, and China. Sanctions had little if any effect. The economies of Western Europe lie stagnant or contracting, the paucity of their military forces, capabilities, and industries starkly exposed. Political upheaval is in the air across Europe. $183 billion of our U.S. taxpayer money proved a foolish investment, enriching the corrupt Zelensky regime and the U.S. defense industry, and served no purpose other than protracting the war.
Lest we forget, it was all borrowed money increasing annual deficits and the U.S. debt, which now exceeds $36 trillion. Not surprisingly, the war’s political and military pundits are growing silent. The years of utter propaganda and untruthful narrative espoused by U.S. and NATO political elites and think tanks to justify and sustain the war appears for what it was. NATO’s viability and utility have been further diminished, having proved useless for deterring Russia for over a decade, much less demonstrating that its combat equipment and methods of training enable an army to defeat Russian forces on the battlefield. Calls for dissolving NATO and creating a new security arrangement for Europe become louder each passing day. An unbiased, objective look at NATO’s performance as a military organization since 1989 strongly supports the need.
For those who believe NATO is the most effective military alliance in history, I offer a more pragmatic, realistic view based on cold, hard facts. Since the Soviet Union collapsed some 35 years ago, new reasons were forged by the political elites of member nations to justify and sustain NATO’s existence. NATO morphed into an organization far removed from the purp
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