Great.

Just great.

We continue to gobble up former East Bloc nations; incorporating them into NATO.

Montenegro (with the double-eagle flag) is as of yesterday the newest member of the Western military alliance which was formed after World War 2 to contain the expansionist Soviet Union.

Used to be part of Stalinist/Communist Yugoslavia under strongman ruler Tito.

Go back to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Before that, Western Europe was protected by NATO and the Americans, and Eastern Europe was occupied by the Soviet Union and organized into the Warsaw Pact. These two forces faced off along what Churchill called “The Iron Curtain.”

When Germany was reunified, we promised Russia that in return for their allowing the new Germany (both East and West) to be a part of NATO, we would not expand the alliance to former Warsaw Pact nations, because that would remove the buffer on which Russia relies, geopolitically, for security. Unlike the US, they don’t have oceans on both sides and have been brutally invaded twice (Napoleon and Hitler) costing millions of Russian lives.

Well, we lied.

Now virtually all the former communist nations (Russia’s buffer states) have come into the American military orbit.

So foolish.

Russia and the US could be the best of allies. We both want the same things:

-To curtail Islamic extremism.

-To explore space together (we are the “space superpowers”)

-To keep our vast nuclear arsenals from getting into the wrong hands.

-For free trade giving us access to each other’s resources.

For whatever reason, insecure nations (like the US) don’t seem to be able to function without an enemy. A bogeyman.

And for that matter, NATO is clearly obsolete. Since about 1990 when the Soviet Union (the whole point of NATO) disintegrated.

“But we need NATO to fight terror together.”

Nope. Our mutual NATO interventionism in the Middle East has given us ZERO results in several decades of military meddling. In fact, you can make an argument that 9-11 would never had happened without the NATO led crusade to topple Saddam Hussein, which ticked off many Saudis, who manned the planes which destroyed the world trade center.

NATO is just an excuse for our military industrial complex to sell more weapons to more countries–and make the world less safe by doing so.

And, the scary thing is that the mission statement of NATO is “An attack on one member is an attack on all.” Are you really wiling to commit our nation to war over….Montenegro….or Latvia?