At the NATO summit in Madrid, Finland was invited to join the alliance. What does this mean for Finland?
If Russian President Vladimir Putin breaches the 830-mile Finnish border, the United States will rise to Helsinki’s defense and fight Russia on Finland’s side.
What does Finland’s membership in NATO mean for America?
If Putin makes a military move into Finland, the U.S. will go to war against the world’s largest nation with an arsenal of between 4,500 and 6,000 battlefield and strategic nuclear weapons.
No Cold War president would have dreamed of making such a commitment – to risk the survival of our nation to defend territory of a country thousands of miles away that has never been a US vital interest.
To go to war with the Soviet Union over the preservation of Finnish territory would have been seen as madness during the Cold War.
Recall: Harry Truman refused to use force to break Joseph Stalin’s blockade of Berlin. Dwight Eisenhower refused to send US troops to save the Hungarian freedom fighters being run down by Soviet tanks in Budapest in 1956.
Lyndon B. Johnson did nothing to assist the Czech patriots crushed by Warsaw Pact armies in 1968. When Lech Walesa’s Solidarity was smashed on Moscow’s order in Poland in 1981, Ronald Reagan made brave statements and sent Xerox machines.
While the US issued annual declarations of support during the Cold War for the “captive nations” of Central and Eastern Europe, the liberation of these nations from Soviet control was never deemed so vital to the West as to justify a war with the USSR.
Indeed, in the 40 years of the Cold War, NATO, which had begun in 1949 with 12 member nations, added only four more – Greece, Turkey, Spain and West Germany.
Yet, with the invitation to Sweden and Finland to join as the 31st and 32nd nations to receive an Article 5 war guarantee, NATO will have doubled its membership since what was thought – certainly by the Russians – to have been the end of the Cold War.
All the nations once part of Moscow’s Warsaw Pact – East Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria – are now members of a U.S.-led NATO – directed against Russia.
Three former republics of the USSR – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania – are now also members of NATO, a military alliance formed to corral and contain the nation to which they had belonged during the Cold War.
Lithuania, with 2% of Russia’s population, has just declared a partial blockade of goods moving across its territory to Kaliningrad, Russia’s enclave on the Baltic Sea.
To Putin’s protest, Vilnius has reminded Moscow that Lithuania is a member of NATO.
It is a dictum of geostrategic politics that a great power ought never cede to a lesser power the ability to draw it into a great war.
In 1914, the Kaiser’s Germany gave its Austrian ally a “blank check” to punish Serbia for its role in the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne. Vienna cashed the Kaiser’s check and attacked Serbia, and the Great War of 1914-1918 was on.
In March 1939, Neville Chamberlain issued a war guarantee to Poland. If Germany attacked Poland, Britain would fight on Poland’s side.
Fortified with this war guarantee from the British Empire, the Poles stonewalled Hitler, refusing to talk to Berlin over German claims to the city of Danzig, taken from her at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.
On Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler attacked and Britain declared war, a war that lasted six years and mortally wounded the British Empire.
And Poland? At Yalta in 1945, Winston Churchill agreed that a Soviet-occupied Poland should remain in Stalin’s custody.
Putin is a Russian nationalist who regards the breakup of the USSR as the greatest calamity of the 20th century, but he is not alone responsible for the wretched relations between our countries.
We Americans have played a leading role in what is shaping up as a Second Cold War, more dangerous than the first.
Over the last quarter-century, after Russia dissolved the Warsaw Pact and let the USSR break apart into 15 nations, we pushed NATO, created to corral and contain Russia, into Central and Eastern Europe.
In 2008, neocons goaded Georgia into attacking South Ossetia, provoking Russian intervention and the rout of the Georgian army.
In 2014, neocons goaded Ukrainians into overthrowing the elected pro-Russian regime in Kyiv. When they succeeded, Putin seized Crimea and Sevastopol, for centuries the home base of Russia’s Black Sea fleet.
In 2022, Moscow asked the US to pledge not to bring Ukraine into NATO. We refused. And Putin attacked. If Russians believe their country has been pushed against a wall by the West, can we blame them?
Americans appear dismissive of dark Russian warnings that rather than accept defeat in Ukraine, the humiliation of their nation, and their encirclement and isolation, they will resort to tactical nuclear weapons.
Is it really wisdom to dismiss these warnings as “saber-rattling”?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.
Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.
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NY state came up with an update of the duck and cover bromides of the ‘50s in a PSA. They needn’t worry if Russia launches a Poseidon torpedo against the East Coast it’ll turn New York into a radioactive cesspool instead of just a cesspool.
Nobody deserves it more. Picture AOC running down Broadway with her hair on fire.
Since WW1 , the Rothschild jewish bank conspiracy has always fomented wars & conflictts . This latter war is their final operation to jewish world domination . We are on the verge of the last totalitarian dictatorship over the whole planet . Poutine is the right man , he understood who are the ennemy , and how they use the stupid folks of western Europe . The wole of medias and information’s netwoek is within thes jewish army ‘s hands .
REAL PEOPLE OF THE TRIBES WILL WASH THEIR HANDS OF THIS ABOMINATION. WALKING WITH THE DEVIL COULD GET VERY HOT OR VERY WET. SOMETHING ABOUT CAMELS AND EYES OF NEEDLES AND ROCKS AND THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA.
You just can’t help yourself, but to put some of the blame to others! Putin never acted against West uprovoked!And if he is not happy that USSR dissolved doesn’t mean he wants to restore it! I too long for the days, when I was young!
If you still believe that Biden manages something in the USA, I have a bridge to sell you… (in installments, low interest…).
“In Sept. 2000 Zakheim signed onto the PNAC’s pivotal and controversial
manifesto—Rebuilding America’s Defenses—that served as a Pax Americana blueprint for the 9-11 attacks. In essence, this PNAC missive stated: we need a catastrophic and catalyzing event, reminiscent of Pearl Harbor, that will properly reconfigure the American mindset and mobilize them to accept another series of long, protracted wars in theMiddle East and *Eurasia*.”
Made in Israel, written by Victor Thorn
Imagine Joe Biden as America’s wartime president. What could possibly go wrong?
It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to describe just how bad President Joe Biden is at his job.
Biden should follow the Baby Bush model and just sit at his desk all day doing nothing. Let high pockets Harris finish out the term. She is basically harmless.
bow down america..
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