Loading ...NATO: While this treaty may have made sense in the late 1940s, it ceased to do so after the Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrated that while a confrontation between the United States and the USSR might well commence looking like a conventional-arms event, it would inevitably and probably quite quickly become a nuclear war. As this reality dawned on the world, the rest of NATO began spending less on their military, more on social services and the EU nightmare then aborning, and depending on diplomacy and the Anglo-American nuclear deterrent to keep the peace.
The United States thus became Europe’s sole defender and was, in essence, enslaved by the willingness of U.S. leaders to go to war automatically if any other NATO country was attacked. This reality deprived the United States of its independence of action and its sovereignty in foreign affairs in that Congress’s constitutional responsibility to declare war was negated because an attack on a NATO member put America at war automatically. It also contributed — obviously and massively — to the growth of the U.S. president’s unilateral war-making power, starting him down the road to the tyrant he is today.