The Washington Post recently published Seton Hall University assistant professor Sara Bjerg Moller’s call for NATO to adopt China as its new enemy. Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation responded with: “I’ve got a better idea. Let’s just put NATO out of its misery and terminate it.”
While Moller’s suggestion would make war virtually inevitable, we can hope that it will not receive favorable attention in Washington. On the other hand, Hornberger’s conclusion is very appealing. But his claim that the 1949 rationale for NATO’s creation was to impede further advance westward by the USSR misses the far more harmful reason for NATO’s existence. That reason was stated in a speech delivered to the U.S. Senate on March 19, 1949 by Secretary of State Dean Acheson, one of NATO’s primary architects. Drumming up support for the creation of NATO, Acheson told the senators: “The United States Government and the governments with which we are associated in this treaty are convinced that it is an essential measure for strengthening the United Nations.” Moller doesn’t seem to know that NATO has always been a UN subsidiary.
