NATO: Worse Than ‘Obsolete’

It’s a tripwire that could lead to World War III
by Justin Raimondo, April 01, 2016

"When the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union dissolved, the rationale for NATO disintegrated along with it. However, as libertarians know all too well, government programs (especially those that benefit the corporate sector) never die, nor do they fade away: they just keep growing to the degree that their constituency wields political clout. In NATO’s case, this clout is considerable.

When the citizens of Berlin did what Ronald Reagan urged Gorbachev to do – “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!” – the Soviet leader tried to negotiate with the West. And, to his mind, he succeeded: an understanding was reached with Washington that the Russians would allow German reunification on the condition that the NATO alliance would not expand eastward.

That promise was not kept. Instead, the lobbyists, both foreign and domestic, went into overdrive in a campaign to extend NATO to the very gates of Moscow. It was a lucrative business for the Washington set, as the Wall Street Journal documented: cushy fees for lobbyists, influence-buying by US corporations, as well as political tradeoffs for the administration of George W. Bush, which garnered support for the Iraq war from Eastern Europe’s former Warsaw Pact states in exchange for favorable treatment of their NATO applications."

"In short, NATO expansion was – and is – a crony capitalist’s dream, albeit not the sort that gets the same amount of attention from “libertarian” critics of such boondoggles as the Ex-Im Bank, who regularly remind us that Boeing is the Bank’s biggest customer. Forgotten (or evaded) is the fact that Boeing (or Lockheed-Martin, General Dynamics, etc.) gets billions whenever a new applicant is added to NATO’s ranks and has to modernizes its forces."
Link here.