NATO And The Conventional Wisdom
Just like that, Real Clear Politics ran comments on the Iran war today from both Roger Kimball and Victor Davis Hanson. As I've been saying, RCP reliably runs them as the conservative conventional wisdom, but they seldom add much insight to any issue, and sometimes they just get things wrong. Hanson's point today is that the non-US NATO nations haven't been playing fair: When NATO members in the past have operated unilaterally to defend their own national interests, they have often called on the U.S., as NATO’s strongest member, for overt help. For nearly 40 years, the U.S. had offered logistical, intelligence, reconnaissance, refueling, and diplomatic support to the French in their unilateral and postcolonial efforts to protect Chad from Libya and, later, Islamists. During the 1982 Falklands War, a solitary Britain faced enormous logistical challenges in steaming halfway around the world to eject Argentina from its windswept and sparse islands. ...