One of the major political accomplishments of President Vladimir Putin's rule in Russia has been the recommitment of the United States and, possibly, Canada to NATO's role in Europe. Peculiar isn't it? Particularly since the alliance would never have developed if one of Putin's predecessors, Joseph Stalin, hadn't invaded Eastern Europe and taken control of the Eastern European countries including half of Germany.
Some of Stalin's actions were understandable. Russia's involvement in the First World War was a disaster, with an estimated two million dead and eight billion rubles in war debt. Wanting to avoid a repeated blood bath, World War Two started with a secret agreement between Germany and Russia where Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland were to be taken over with the Soviet entry into the Axis Pact. Hitler betrayed Stalin and launched an invasion of the Soviet Union. When the war ended, Stalin kept control over his Axis Pact countries adding half of Germany as part of his empire. He wasn't going to be invaded again.
Waking up to Churchill's warning about the Iron Curtain, the United States created the Marshall Plan, which provided the equivalent of $130 billion to rebuild war-devastated regions, remove trade barriers, modernize industry, and stop Stalin.
At the end of the Marshall Plan, the Atlantic Treaty and its military component, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization were created in 1949 to give proof that the United States would not turn its back on Europe or on Stalin's communism.
NATO has since undergone significant changes and challenges. The first occurred in 1955 when the U.S.S.R. created the Warsaw Pact, a mirror image of NATO, in reaction to West Germany becoming a member of NATO. Then in 1966, Charles de Gaulle quit NATO because he objected to U.S. dominance in military command. France rejoined NATO after a 40-year absence when President Sarkozy wanted to calm President George Bush's 'with-us-or-against us' challenge to NATO over Iraq. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, NATO expanded to take in all the former Warsaw Pact countries. NATO military operations had, since then, focused primarily on conflicts arising from the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991 until the 9/11 attack. This led to shifting military operations to Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and counter-piracy operations off the coast of Somalia.
Now Putin has been making moves to recover his Warsaw Pact satellites. Clearly, it is not possible for European NATO countries to continue to support U.S. operations in the Middle East, cope with the burden of refugees and radical Islamic terrorism, and combat the return of Stalinism to Eastern Europe while limiting their military expenditures to two per cent of GDP. NATO will by necessity have to focus on its European members' security.
As for Canada, we have never been a comfortable military member of NATO. As a founding member our interests were primarily economic. While wanting to prevent the expansion of Russian communism, from the beginning we were equally concerned about potential economic battles between U.S.A., France and Britain and sought a transatlantic economic union so that we wouldn't have to choose sides. Unhappily the focus is now national security.
If we want to be part of NATO we should put up our agreed-upon share or leave.
Alan Murdock is a local pediatrician.
