Is there any point in keeping NATO around?

Cheetah said:
There is no war against Sunni Islam, so no ally is needed.

Likewise, there is no conflict between NATO and Russia. There is a conflict where Russia tries to keep dominion over its former allies, whom would rather join the EU and NATO as they've decided that the grass is in fact greener on the other side.

There will be no war between NATO and Russia, at least not this time. And while the fear of Russian aggression is lessened in Western Europe, it's still very much alive in Eastern Europe.

It's less than thirty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Give it another thirty years, and Ukraine will probably be even more prosperous than Poland is at the moment. And by then, things should have softened up in Russia too.
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I wonder what would happen if a state suddenly decided to drop out of NATO? Would the US be so quick to execute "the will of the people" if that happened?

Public opinion is very easy to build up, because certainly the grass is greener on ther other side. What they don't mention is that the grass on the other side is green for completely unrelated reasons, and moreover there are patches of dead grass. If people were pointed out to that, I'm sure a lot of them would stop believing the EU is going to save them all and instead get it done by themselves.


Anyway, If NATO is truly a voluntary defensive pact among concerned nations it should have been disbanded on the day the Warsaw Pact was disbanded. But since it's merely a tool of the US for political and military hegemony, it never happened, because the US "won" the war.
 
Cutlass said:
Greece is one of the nations that feel the need for universal male conscription. So while each soldier is paid little, there's a lot of soldiers. It produces a lot of semi-trained manpower for the inevitable war with Turkey. They probably couldn't do that a lot cheaper than they already do.
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Useful to note that:

1) universal (ie mandatory) 1-year serving in the military is very unpopular. It is losing one year of your life, by and large (in peacetime).
2) there are other issues with paid military. For starters there isn't the militarism in the population of Greece to make such a thing realistic at all. Furthermore the entire population is around 11 million, ie the male one is half of that, and not all are eligible to serve as soldiers anyway. In theory if war comes there is an automatic draft of all those who have served for the 1 year (training), so obviously there would be more than 1 million troops around at any time, but not as trained as professional soldiers.
3) A professional army has the negative that it tends to be more isolated from actual society. The russian army is not paid/professional, so it is more societal/democratic in root and practise than most western armies.

I really doubt there will ever be actual war with Turkey. If there was it would be nasty, but it is not like any side can win easily, and Turkey has far more clear issues with half of it being majority-non-turkish at any rate (eg kurdish).

So i think we will just wait for the inevitable collapse and joining to Greece of the new Cosntantinople/Thrace Oblast ;)
 
LamaGT said:
I wonder what would happen if a state suddenly decided to drop out of NATO? Would the US be so quick to execute "the will of the people" if that happened?
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Are you being serious right now? If a member nation of NATO wanted to leave there is absolutely nothing the US could legally do about it even if we wanted to. Your assertion that NATO is some sort of puppet organization to exclusively advance the interests of only the US is delusional paranoia at best.

Kyriakos said:
1) universal (ie mandatory) 1-year serving in the military is very unpopular. It is losing one year of your life, by and large (in peacetime).
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Good. You guys should get rid of conscription even if you didn't have your current financial troubles. An army of conscripts is drastically less effective on the battlefield than an army of professional soldiers. An army of professionals also saves money by reducing personnel requirements since you can do a lot more with less. The US, in proportion to the number of military-aged citizens available, actually has a very small military, but the US government invests a lot of money into technology and training to maximize the effectiveness of each soldier so we don't have to rely on massive amounts of personnel to fulfill all of our military obligations.
 
Commodore said:
Are you being serious right now? If a member nation of NATO wanted to leave there is absolutely nothing the US could legally do about it even if we wanted to. Your assertion that NATO is some sort of puppet organization to exclusively advance the interests of only the US is delusional paranoia at best.
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We'd obv use our military bases as causus belli against Italy to protect all the English speaking nationals there. Duh, murican empire.
 
LamaGT said:
I wonder what would happen if a state suddenly decided to drop out of NATO? Would the US be so quick to execute "the will of the people" if that happened?
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No need to wonder, France did it right in the middle of the Cold War.
Still waiting for the American "volunteers", they are running into their 40 years late now.
 
Farm Boy said:
We'd obv use our military bases as causus belli against Italy to protect all the English speaking nationals there. Duh, murican empire.
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Sanctions, duh...
 
LamaGT said:
Anyway, If NATO is truly a voluntary defensive pact among concerned nations it should have been disbanded on the day the Warsaw Pact was disbanded. But since it's merely a tool of the US for political and military hegemony, it never happened, because the US "won" the war.
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Has it ever occurred to you that these options might not be mutually exhaustive?

In any case, I'm struggling to actually find a good reason to disband mutual defensive alliance. Except if one intends to attack its former ally/allies.
 
Aleksey_aka_al said:
Americans do not defend, they attack. When/if they face a war on their own soil, they'll use conscripts just like everyone else.
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You obviously don't understand how our military is set up if you think we would immediately jump to using conscripts the moment we are invaded. I won't waste time writing a wall of text explaining how our strategic personnel reserves work, but suffice to say the use of conscripts is the absolute last resort for the US government. Once we get to that point it pretty much means all our professional soldiers are dead and we've just about burned through our National Guard and Reserve forces.
 
I'm just saying, NATO isn't the defensive alliance that rolled tanks through Prague and Budapest.
 
Phrossack said:
I'm just saying, NATO isn't the defensive alliance that rolled tanks through Prague and Budapest.
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Would you also say that less people have been bombed/killed by Nato than by USSR?

At least post-1990 it is clear that Nato/US (and some others) killed far or even hugely more, including civilians.
 
The argument that NATO is an evil empire that would crush anyone who left is without any basis but Russian antagonism and wishful thinking. In fact, France DID exit NATO under de Gaulle, and no war ensued. But Russia, which can do no wrong, ever, according to Russians, was not so friendly in Prague and Budapest...

Moreover, NATO didn't flatten a disobedient city in its own territory because it rebelled (Grozny).
 
Phrossack said:
The argument that NATO is an evil empire that would crush anyone who left is without any basis but Russian antagonism and wishful thinking. In fact, France DID exit NATO under de Gaulle, and no war ensued. But Russia, which can do no wrong, ever, according to Russians, was not so friendly in Prague and Budapest...
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France did never fully exit the NATO. It merely withdrew from the general command structure, the act which forced NATO commanders to hence onward first pass their orders through the French government (who may refuse) instead of ordering French units directly.

Had the Soviet Union attacked NATO, France would probably have joined the other NATO forces. If vice versa, not so much. All in all, France's decision in 1966 was a righteous one.
 
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