Today in a "Morning Joe" appearance Barney Frank made an excellent fiscal case against our burdensome and disproportionate funding of NATO, whose original and quite reasonable raison d'etre is gone, said Frank. As he dryly observed, we don't need to protect France from Belarus.
Frank harbors an imposing intellect and perhaps the most formidable debating skills in the U.S. Congress, but here, on this topic, historically speaking, both failed him. We never had a military raison d'tre for NATO. Our reason was hysterics, politically motivated.
As a rule I refrain from quoting myself. Nonetheless on February 12 of this year I made the above case rather succintly, so I'll duplicate that commentary here but not the effort. To wit,
Stalin never regarded Western Europe as a legitimately targeted arm of the USSR's proper sphere of influence.... Yet American politicians, right and left, played into anticommunist hysterics of the wildest brands. Soviet bogeymen were everywhere, constantly pushing and prodding -- even militarily, given half a chance.
Much of this hysteria emerged from a (deliberate) misreading of the eminent diplomat George Kennan's 1947 Foreign Affairs article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," in which he urged that "the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."
Hence the United States' military "containment" policy -- a policy grossly misapplied from Kennan's urgings, since he had intended (too ambiguously) a more effective policy of political and economic containment of the Soviet Union; not, for sure, the military abomination of NATO, which only compelled in turn the military abomination of the Warsaw Pact.
There are assorted lessons to be learned from our NATO debacle: for sure, foreign-affairs and military-expenditure lessons, as well as the lesson of foolishly long-term commitments overseas; but in a much broader sense, the general lesson of political hysteria.
We rarely, that is, ever seem to learn. Demagogues and partisan propagandists and political mountebanks of varying ideological stripes have an almost magical ability to entrance us into foolish courses of action, after which we step back and shake our heads and vow, Never again. Yet in short order, we're back at the races.
Our deficit hysteria is but the latest instance of intensified foolishness. Sure, the deficit is a problem -- a long-term problem, one to be pondered now but acted upon only later. You'd find not one competent economist -- any, that is, not on a Republican payroll -- who would disagree with that assessment. Yet here we are, in the grip of a recession when spending is most needed and with a debt ceiling (constructed from past commitments) that requires raising, and yet we've thrust ourselves to the edge of an apocalypse, all because John Boehner knows not how to control feral tea partiers who've whipped the nation into deficit hysterics.
Such is democracy, I guess. But it seems uglier and more concentrated in its dark potential than usual, even uglier than when we collectively fretted about the Soviet bogeyman. Then, we possessed money and resources and singular power to throw around. No longer. What I'm saying further, I suppose, is that we can no longer afford to be so damned foolish and inexcusably gullible -- and yet even further, that we desperately need more than just one adult in the room.