Why Trump Should Not be 'Too Coy' to Openly Ask: Does US Really Need NATO?

"Trump has taken some hits for suggesting that our contribution to NATO has been disproportionately large. I will suggest what many of us may think but Trump may be too coy to openly state: America does not need NATO," Bruce Walker writes in his article for the magazine.

The author further recalls that the Alliance was created "at the instigation of an American superpower trying to find a means of containing global communism, led by the Soviet Union, by bringing together those nations in Europe who needed to be reassured that a Warsaw Pact invasion of West Germany would be resisted using conventional forces by those nations whose collective unity could cause the Soviets not to attempt a lunge through the Fulda Gap (an area in Germany where the majority of the US forces in Europe and one army formation of the Group of Soviet Forces Germany (GSFG) were stationed during the Cold War) or other weak spots."

The alliance succeeded in preventing war in Europe, he goes on to say, noting that the whole structure of the so-called "Soviet Empire" has dissolved: Germany has unified, the Warsaw Pact allies have disintegrated and joined NATO while ex-Soviet republics had proclaimed independence.

"We won a global war without firing a shot. What is the function of NATO today?" the author wonders.

Russia is not a "totalitarian power bent on global domination," he says.

"We know this, which is why the prospect of a tiny Iranian nuclear force is much scarier than a Russian arsenal many times greater," he adds.

The US has always retained the ability to stop any invasion of Western Europe by using tactical nuclear weapons against military and logistical targets in Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Hungary, and during the last decades of the Cold War, the democracies of Europe could have built military power equal to the Soviet bloc, he reasons.

"If NATO serves little purpose for America today, the prospect of NATO allies (aside from Turkey) becoming Islamic nations, as France may do in a few years, suggests that NATO may become a positive danger to American interests," he further suggests.

Fifty years ago, President de Gaulle pulled French forces out of NATO, with no harm to French national interests at all, he recalls, adding that the US has just elected its own President Trump, "whose loyalty to America is as fierce as de Gaulle's loyalty was to France."

Hence he suggests reviewing whether the Alliance serves the US interests. And if not, then President Trump "ought to do what President de Gaulle did in 1966 and put the interests of the nation he governs first," he finally states.