A former New York Times station chief in Germany, Stephen Kinzer currently is a senior fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Affairs. Occasionally, his thoughts appear in the op-ed pages of the Boston Globe.
In his most recent Globe piece, Kinzer worries that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) is about to disintegrate. He focuses initially on the new anti-Western leanings obviously gaining prevalence in Turkey, a NATO member. Current Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan is hard at work reversing the cultural and political westernization introduced into his nation by Kemal Ataturk in the 1920s. Then Kinzer points to Turkey’s opposition to U.S.-led and NATO directed actions in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. Erdogan makes it clear that he prefers the Russian stance in each of these confrontations, not the actions taken by NATO and the United States.
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But Kinzer seems to have no awareness why the alliance has existed for more than 60 years. Instead, he repeats the attitude instilled into almost all Americans that “NATO was created to confront a single threat: the Soviet Union.” By 1949 when the pact was created, the USSR had swallowed up numerous countries in Eastern and Central Europe. The very existence of NATO is customarily credited with halting further Soviet advances into France, Italy, West Germany, and other still-free nations. But the underlying truth is that the building of NATO and the UN was always intended, and the erosion of national sovereignty everywhere was the long-range goal.
In the late 1940s according to then-Secretary of States Dean Acheson, NATO’s chief U.S. promoter, NATO was created to be “an essential measure for strengthening the United Nations.” That’s what Acheson stressed to senators when he encouraged them to vote for the pact in 1949. In his speech to the Senate published by the Washington Star on March 19, 1949, Acheson said that the pact’s brief introductory paragraph and 14 articles were all “subject to the overriding provisions of the United Nations Charter.” Indeed, the United Nations is mentioned six times in this briefly worded treaty. It won senate approval with only 13 dissenting votes on July 12, 1949. There can be no doubt that NATO has always been a division of the UN. Later, the 368-page NATO Handbook issued by the alliance in 1995 states very clearly that the alliance was “created within the framework of Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.”
How has NATO been employed? President Harry Truman cited it when he sent U.S. forces into Korea in 1950. Asked at a press conference whether our nation was now at war, Truman responded, “We are not at war; this is a police action.” He added that if he could send troops to NATO, he could send troops to Korea. The Korean “police action” constituted the first abandonment of the need for a congressional declaration of war. The last time that portion of the Constitution was employed occurred in the days immediately following the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941. America went to war on two fronts for almost four years. It should interest all to note that World War II was the last war won by U.S. forces. All struggles since then have been authorized and directed by obvious UN direction or by NATO and its SEATO clone. There have been no more victories.
In the June 1996 issue of the pro-world-government Atlantic Monthly, Benjamin Schwarz of the World Policy Institute gleefully noted that objections about U.S. involvement in NATO led by Senator Robert Taft (R-Ohio) had been building when NATO was being proposed. But the resistance had been defused when, according to Dean Acheson, the crisis in Korea “came along and saved us.” It didn’t save the more than 50,000 American dead from the Korean War, a conflict that never has been settled and could break out again at any time. But it did save steady progress toward watering down U.S. independence and “strengthening the UN,” Acheson’s stated goals.
Today, U.S. forces in Afghanistan are under NATO’s control. So are our military contingents in Germany, Turkey, and scores of other nations. The struggle in Vietnam was fought under the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), a copy of NATO no longer in existence. Vietnam cost America additional tens of thousands who died while serving under a UN command.
If Stephen Kinzer knows all of this and refuses to include it when writing about NATO, shame on him. If he doesn’t know it and would care to examine what we have stated, we shall be happy to help him. Claiming that NATO was created only to “confront” the threat posed by the Soviet Union is wrong. It was created to override the U.S. Constitution, build the power of the United Nations, and create a tyrannical new world order under UN control.
Our nation needs leaders who will restore undiluted U.S. independence. The clear way to accomplish this sorely needed restoration involves quitting NATO and withdrawing from the United Nations. Support H.R. 193 to Get US Out! of the UN before it’s too late.
John F. McManus is president emeritus of The John Birch Society. This column appeared originally at the insideJBS blog and is reprinted here with permission.
