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| The alternative |
It's a brief, interesting thesis and it shows where we went wrong at the end of the Cold War. Far from supporting reunification of Germany, once the Communist Menace was pronounced well and truly dead, the EU should have disbanded, then NATO should have expelled Germany as a member and demanded that it split into it's component states again.
Or else.
Well, the saying when I was a kid (b.1958, BTW)was that NATO's purpose was "to keep the French in, the Germans down, and the Russians out". Which reminded me of nothing so much as Metternich's acolytes before 1848.
ReplyDeleteWhen Le Grand Charles gave NATO the boot in 1965, and again when the Wall came down 24 years later, two years before the whole WARPAC dissolved and the USSR tanked, my thought was, "well, two out of three ain't bad". (Yes, in '65 I was one of those precocious seven-year-olds who drives the adults crazy.)
The objective of the EU was, and is, a European rendition of the United States with a centralized command-and-control regime' run by the "best and brightest", with no backtalk from the hoi polloi. (O has similar dreams about us.)
The trouble is, to enforce such a regime', they're going to end up with doing it with military/police forces designed for regime' protection, as opposed to field armies designed to defeat an external enemy on the battlefield.
The process of recreating the European armies in this way has been in progress since 1945, and has largely been completed today.(According to an ex-Army friend of mine, the only three actual field armies left in the area are Poland's, the UK's, and- surprise!- Germany's.)
When the Eu finally falls apart, it's going to be intersting watching the Brussels Sprouts trying to strongarm Berlin and Warsaw, to say the least.
London will just ignore them, as they so richly deserve. There's this thing called the Channel that sort of gets in the way of them doing anything stupid in that direction.
cheers
eon