NATO Must Go! The EDC Can Replace It

President Joe Biden is hosting the summit meeting of 38 government leaders as NATO celebrates its 75th anniversary. The President spoke to the world leaders and awarded outgoing NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg the Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of his tenure and leadership of the organization.

NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was founded 75 years ago to defend western Europe from the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). In the aftermath of World War II, the Red Army which had liberated eastern Europe from the Nazi yoke simultaneously installed regimes subordinate to the USSR. One-party Communist regimes ruled eastern Europe in a Soviet totalitarian fashion. Winston Churchill, speaking at Westminster College in Fulton, MO (March 5, 1946) famously announced “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent”. When World War II ended, it was hoped that the wartime alliance of the United States, the USSR and Great Britain would continue bringing peace to the scarred European continent. It was not to be. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin installed the Lublin Committee (Polish Communists) as the government of Poland and refused to allow the wartime Polish government in exile (London Poles) to have any role in post war Poland. As one eastern European nation after another fell under USSR control, it was obvious that post war unity and cooperation with the USSR was impossible. Poor relations with the USSR continued and the Berlin blockade and American airlift to that isolated city lasted from June 24, 1948 until May 12, 1949. The North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington on April 4, 1949. The United States and eleven other nations signed the treaty and thus were the founding members of NATO. Membership expanded slowly, but since the downfall of the USSR in1991, sixteen more nations joined, the last being Sweden in 2024.

As NATO has expanded eastward to the borders of the former USSR (now reverting to its former name of Russia), controversy regarding this expansion continues. After the collapse of the Soviet puppet state of East Germany (German Democratic Republic), representations made by West German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher, called for no further eastward expansion of NATO in return for no Soviet objection to German re-unification. Subsequent talks with American Secretary of State James A. Baker III and British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd may have led to such a commitment, but nothing was put into writing. Volumes can be written about this but it is only noted here that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is related to this ongoing dispute of eastward NATO expansion. At the current Washington summit, Ukraine is present and has been asking for some time for accession to NATO.

World War II ended seventy-nine years ago. American troops have been stationed in various European countries since 1945, and now, they too, have expanded eastward to Romania, Poland and the Baltic States. NATO is neither north nor Atlantic anymore but includes virtually the entire European continent. Of course, the politics and economics of Europe are drastically different from 75 years ago. Today, most of Europe is united in the European Union. This organization, created by the Treaty of Rome, consists of 27 member states and has a population of over 448 million people. The EU’s Gross Domestic Product in 2022 was $16.6 trillion. This compares to US GDP of $25.7 trillion. Two European nations (the United Kingdom withdrew from the EU) UK and France, hold permanent seats in the UN Security Council and are nuclear armed. The UK remains a NATO member. The European nations in NATO are strong economically, politically and internationally as well as militarily. It seems that the European nations are no longer dependent on an American military shield. NATO no longer has a reason to exist in its current form. The nations of Europe, in or out of the EU, have the ability to defend themselves against any threatening foe.

In 1950, French Premier Rene Pleven proposed the Pleven Plan which would create a European Defense Community (EDC) associated with NATO. The plan was established by the Treaty of Paris. However, at that time, there was still great fear of German militarism and ultimately the EDC did not come into being as the French National Assembly did not ratify the treaty. That was then. Today, Europe is totally different from the 1950s. Large, rich, powerful and with good intra- European relations, there is no reason to believe that a free standing European Defense Community cannot exist without NATO and without the United States. The Russian defense budget for 2022 was estimated at 4.7 trillion rubles or approximately $75 billion. 2023 estimates might reach $100 billion. If the proposed EDC spends merely the 2% prescribed by NATO, it would total over $300 billion. The brutal Russian attack on its neighbor Ukraine is horrible, but an active EDC should be able, easily, to solve this European problem. A peaceful Europe is in the hands of the Europeans. The Pleven Plan needs to be resuscitated and American troops need to come home.

Garry S. Sklar

Aruba,

July 9, 2024