re: #91 The Ghost of a Flea

In addition to sounding like a protection racket, this sounds stupid because NATO was about having US forward positions against the USSR—thus the defense of the USA. I mean, the calculation was all about the the most likely initial move for Soviet conventional warfare *and* about surveillance and first-strike options in a nuclear exchange.

What bugs me is how eerily this mirrors the ressentiment that the Russians have nurtured about “saving Europe” from Hitler, Napoleon, and the various “Tartar hordes.”

The European contribution to NATO was to act as bases. Their contribution to WWIII was to act as overlapping fields of fire.