The importance of maintaining NATO and having the United States remain a member [letter] | Letters To The Editor

April 4 marked the 77th anniversary of the inception of NATO, when 12 countries banded together to counter Soviet aggression, declaring with one voice that an attack on one was an attack on all.

It doesn’t grab headlines, so it’s easy to overlook the “long peace” we’ve enjoyed since that moment. We have lived with the ability to blow ourselves to smithereens, but we haven’t. There have been terrible wars in the meantime, but no world wars, or even direct wars between superpowers. With all of our faults, humanity has done something right.

At the time, President Harry Truman likened NATO’s creation of a union of like-minded countries for common defense to our states coming together in part for the same reason. He said that if such an agreement had been in place in 1914 and 1939, we would have avoided both world wars.

Enter you-know-who, a singular menace who has seemingly been intent on eradicating NATO from the beginning, which would hand Russia an incredible geopolitical win.

No president has the power to pull us out of NATO. Only Congress has that power, but our president flirts with it consistently. But any president can defang NATO. By threatening other NATO countries and starting wars of conquest, we ignore the key lesson of the Nuremberg trials and become the aggressor that NATO was created to prevent.

Fortunately, we are bound to NATO, but unfortunately, the current occupant of the White House appears to be ignorant of history and bound only to his own disordered mind.

Since he seemingly believes that war is inevitable, he creates it while the sycophants he has surrounded himself with cheer him on. He seeks a budget of $1.5 trillion for next year for his wars of choice. These are not people to be trusted with that kind of power.

The president and his administration would do well to heed Truman’s words, spoken at NATO’s signing ceremony: “Men with courage and vision can still determine their own destiny. They can choose slavery or freedom — war or peace.”

Notice Truman’s focus on “choice.” Our leaders today can choose to live among civilized society with membership in NATO as a foundational tenet, or the people can choose to leave them in the dustbin of history, along with the rest of the scoundrels.

Ben Kreider

Lancaster Township