Why NATO is bad
It gives the US a false reason to station 100,000 troops in Europe.
NATO should be disbanded.
This isn’t because collective defensive treaties are bad or anything like that. NATO in fact has wide support among the populations of its European members. However the counterfactual to NATO isn’t nothing it is instead a European only collective defence treaty. This would likely include all EU members plus Britain, Norway, and Iceland. This alternate Europe-only alliance is likely to be as or even more popular than NATO.
What it wouldn’t include is the US and Turkey (and Canada, but they are not politically offensive here).
NATO gives the US a formal military role and heavy interest in security questions in Europe. This is significant for a number of reasons, among them that: the US (and NATO) doesn’t give a shit if a country is democratic or not, as long as it’s against communism (or Russia since the 90s).
The US is a state that is far more powerful than any other on Earth right now. Rather than, is commonly believed, this making the US a stabilising force on international relations it is actually the opposite: a destabilising force. Every country that isn’t deemed a friend of the US has to constantly worry about being labelled the enemy of the decade and being subject to either an invasion and toppling or massive sanctions.
Now you could say most of the countries that are targeted deserve it for some reason or another, but if you look at the reasons the US gives they are usually not those good reasons but rather some other weird reason. And in rare cases where they do give a good reason (Russia, 2022) a wide variety of other countries are also on board.
Then there are the very many cases where the US chooses to let things slide or even supports (Saudi war in Yemen, 2014). Should it really be up to only the US to decide the fate of every other country it can get away with bullying?
People just tend to keep doing the same things they’ve always been doing until they have a reason to stop or change. Sometimes they can be very stubborn over some issues but usually they will change to something better if introduced to it. Countries tend to be more stubborn than ready for change as it is inherintly harder to change the minds of a large group of people in a short space of time than one individual.
And so NATO continues to exist despite having no reason to. The Warsaw Pact ended long ago and even the USSR itself broke up. Russia has no ideology that could help it expand into other nations other than Russian nationalism, which can only take it as far as where there are significant Russian minority populations (and trying to reclassify certain closely related groups as actually Russians clearly isn’t working).
Why is Russia an enemy of the US? Because it has “always” been an enemy and the interpersonal ties between the top and middle leadership are not strong. There is a lack of trust. Compare Saudi Arabia, which, through its indirect (and sometimes direct!) support for terrorism has done more damage to the US than any other country in the Silicon Age. But Bush II was close to the Saudi’s and didn’t want to see them blamed (and after all the Saudi leadership didn’t intend for the plane attacks to happen, they only wanted to direct their population away from toppling them).
Compare also Iran, a case where American pride was severly hurt by, perhaps not so much their favoured brutal dictator being overthrown, but the hostage crisis, and maybe their failed rescue attempt. It showed the US in a weak light and Iran ended up being labelled an enemy. Iran is one of the US’s top enemies although there does not seem to be any particular reason to continue this enmity other than to keep doing what has “always” been done.
And here we reach the fundamental problem with the US: it is so unassailable that no-one else is able to seriously hurt it. That is to say it can’t suffer conquencences strong enough to make it change its mind. Insulation from consequecence is the root of all evil. Not that I think the US is evil.
The United States is an indifferent god.