The War in Ukraine has Underscored the Necessity of America Exiting NATO

January 4, 2023

With the passage of the ludicrous omnibus bill the total amount spent and committed to be spent by the United States in Ukraine since the Russian invasion is in excess of $110 Billion.  That amount exceeds the annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of 130 nations. Further, only America and its chief adversaries China ($239 Billion) and Russia ($154 Billion) spend more per year on their defense budgets.

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During this same period of time the 27 nations of the European Union plus Great Britain have spent or committed to spend $36 Billion in Ukraine or half of what the taxpayers in the United States have been obligated to contribute.   

Meanwhile the U.S. national debt is now $31.5 Trillion and will, due to unconstrained spending, increase at least another $15+ Trillion in less than ten years, thereby abetting uncontrolled inflation and potential insolvency.   (It took this nation 224 years to accumulate the first $15 Trillion, 13 years for the second $15 Trillion and less than 10 years for the third $15 Trillion.) The United States with less than 5% of the world’s population is responsible for 45% of global national debt.   

By comparison, the national debt of the 27 countries in the European Union plus Great Britain is currently $18 Trillion, and their debt is equivalent to 90% of their annual GDP ($20.4 Trillion). The national debt of the United States is equivalent to 137% of its annual GDP ($23.3 Trillion) as America’s national debt far exceeds its annual economic output. 

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Why is the United States, experiencing runaway inflation and unfathomable debt growth, footing the vast majority of the cost and not the nations of Europe who can afford it and are most directly impacted and threatened by the Ukrainian invasion?   Why, despite America’s unparalleled level of spending, is Volodymyr Zelensky unabashedly browbeating the United States to commit to unlimited as well as unaudited billions more?  Why, in response to this browbeating, is the feckless Joe Biden and members of both parties in Congress committed to spending American taxpayer money in Ukraine for an undefined “as long as it takes”. 

The answer lies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, an alliance in which America took upon itself the role of the military protector of Western Europe.  The ruling class in the United States, regardless of changing circumstances in Europe and incapable of restraining their lust for spending, fervently believes that it is their calling to protect the ancestral home of socialism and modern day globalism.    

The sole purpose of NATO was to protect Western Europe and, thus, the United States, against Soviet Union aggression.   History has shown that once the stated purpose of a military alliance no longer exists that alliance must be disbanded, or it will assume other purposes that inevitably lead to conflicts.   The American ruling class not only decided to avoid the process of turning over the defense of Europe to the Europeans after the collapse and irretrievable breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 but to expand and redefine NATO’s purpose. 

The divorce process should have been accelerated in 1993 when the European Union with unified economic, social and security policies came into being while Russia embarked on democratization.  Instead, the nations of Europe were determined to stay reliant on America and its massive defense commitments instead of spending their own money.  They and the American ruling class duplicitously continued to cast Russia as the same threat the old Soviet Union posed in order to keep NATO alive. 

An irrational fear of a non-existent empire and its satellites was conferred upon its much smaller and far less formidable successor nation-state, Russia.   The population of present day Russia is 33% of that of the Soviet Union with its satellites and the GDP of present day Russia is effectively less than 30% of that of the former Soviet Bloc.  

The combined population of the European Union plus Great Britain (512 million) is 3.5 times larger than Russia (146 million) and their overall annual GDP of $20.4 Trillion is 12 times larger than the GDP of Russia ($1.7 Trillion). After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Europeans were more than capable of defending themselves against an anemic and far less lethal Russia.

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Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites the United States has spent nearly $1 Trillion in direct expenditures within NATO while increasingly casting Russia as an implacable villain, particularly after the U.S. elections in 2016.

European duplicity, combined with American political myopia, kept an unnecessary American-dominated NATO alive.  It was not only maintained but expanded by adding 14 new countries all of whom were former Soviet Union satellites on Russia’s western border, thus, exacerbating Russian paranoia.  This centuries-old paranoia combined with rampant internal corruption undermined their democratization efforts and eventually led to a new Russian autocratic oligarchy headed by a megalomaniacal Vladimir Putin.

The overt discussions in 2021 between the Biden Administration and Volodymyr Zelensky about Ukraine immediately joining NATO combined with the disastrous American surrender and withdrawal from Afghanistan were the catalysts that precipitated Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.

If the United States and Western Europe had been publicly honest with the Ukrainians about their actual intention of never allowing them to join NATO despite tacitly agreeing to do so in 2008, and subsequently armed them with sufficient weaponry to thwart a potential invasion, war would have been avoided.  

After ten months and a stalemate reminiscent of World War I, the time has come for the United States to force Ukraine and Russia to the negotiation table and end the conflict before the fog of war inadvertently triggers an uncontrolled escalation.   Russia has been exposed as a military paper tiger with only its nuclear arsenal and immense fossil fuel reserves propping it up as a major player on the international scene.  Ukraine has been exposed to be what it has aways been since its independence from the Soviet Union: a nation with a quasi-authoritarian government rife with unbridled corruption. 

Once a peace treaty is signed, the United States, if it cares about its future, should announce that it is leaving NATO and the obligation to help finance and embroil itself in European security squabbles.  The nations of Western and Central Europe need to form a new alliance among themselves to deal with Russia and other European security matters as this nation must focus on its ever-growing and soon to be insolvable financial and domestic problems as well as the global threat of Communist China.  This one-sided dependent relationship must end before this nation is insolvent and effectively subservient to China.

The United States now confronts the two most lethal threats in its 250-year history: an inevitable economic and financial collapse and Communist China, which due to its size, ideology, implacable nationalism, economy, and renewed sense of manifest destiny motivated by retribution for Western-imposed subservience in the 19th and early 20th centuries, is the greatest external threat to the United States in its history.

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