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You still hear it every day in Washington: it is an article of faith repeated far more often and much more reverently than any liturgy or Mass in this indisputably post-Christian city. “We have an advantage that Russia and China cannot possibly hope to duplicate!
“Mighty Poland and Romania – and the irresistible moral force and human capabilities of invincible Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, North Macedonia and countless other global giants are On Our Side! “Controlling Eastern Europe Makes Us Stronger!” There is only one problem: it isn't true.
By expanding NATO to absorb all of Eastern Europe, the United States has condemned itself to an inevitable historical process of decline.
I first explored and exposed this myth five years ago. Back then, I documented, as I shall do here, how de facto control or possession of the endlessly feuding, tiny postage-stamp-size states of Eastern Europe first ended the expansion and growth of the dominant superpowers controlling them.
Then it pulled those powers into an infinite range of mind-boggling micro-commitments, which left them vulnerable and doomed to be dismembered by far more powerful coalitions of forces ranged against them.
I already knew this pattern of historical processes repeated itself inexorably for more than 100 years back to the beginning of World War I in 1914.
What I did not expect was that I could also easily trace the same process back further 200 years to 1717.
And since then, to my astonishment, I have found I can trace it back a further 900 years to the time of Charlemagne – founding father of modern Europe, himself.
In other words, by expanding NATO to absorb all of eastern Europe and taking seriously its imagined “Mission” to impose standards of US democracy, free trade and free markets, the United States has locked itself into an inevitable historical process of decline that now dates back more than 1,200 years!
In our own time, this process should have been clearly obvious.
When dominant nations from France through Imperial Germany, England, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and now the United States have poured their wealth and armaments into the little chaotic postage-stamp mini countries of Eastern Europe, they have been distracted from real problems and challenges and drained dry into bankruptcy.
Through the 1990s, during the terms of US President Bill Clinton, NATO relentlessly and inexorably expanded through Central Europe. Today, the expansion of that alliance eastward – encircling Russia with fiercely Russo-phobic regimes in one tiny country after another and in Ukraine, which is not tiny at all – continues.
Yet this NATO expansion – which the legendary George Kennan presciently warned against in vain – has only served to drive the other great powers of Eurasia – Russia, China and India now joined by Iran – against the United States, isolating Washington.
Instead of assuring world peace, NATO expansion has remorselessly pulled the world closer towards the threat of thermonuclear war. Far from bringing the United States and the Western NATO allies increased security, it strips them of the certainty of the peace and security they would enjoy if they instead sought a sincere, constructive and above all stable relationship with Russia.
NATO expansion across Eastern Europe has only caused a never-ending succession of wars in the former Yugoslavia, the Caucasus and now in Ukraine – and it now threatens the United States with being destroyed in a totally avoidable World War III.
It is argued that the addition of the old Warsaw Pact member states of Central Europe to NATO has dramatically strengthened NATO and gravely weakened Russia. This has been a universally accepted assumption in the United States and throughout the West for the past quarter century. It is the cruel and sinister but also false assumption behind the desire of the Washington political elite to “bleed Russia dry” even at the expense of sending the entire Ukrainian people to their deaths. Yet that assumption simply is not true.
In reality, the United States and its Western European allies are now discovering the hard way the same lesson that drained and exhausted the Soviet Union from the creation of the Warsaw Pact in 1955 to its dissolution 36 years later. The tier of Central European nations has always lacked the coherence, the industrial base and the combined economic infrastructure to generate significant industrial, financial or most of all strategic and military power.
In fact, the current frustrating experience of NATO and the long, exhausting tribulations that faced Soviet diplomats and generals for so many decades is entirely consistent with the previous historical record.
After World War II, the political consolidation of East Germany and Poland became strategically necessary for Russia’s security.
From 1718 until 1867, most of Central Europe, including even regions of Poland at the end of the 18th century, were consolidated within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Yet even then, the Habsburg multinational empire was always militarily weak and punched beneath its weight.
After Emperor Franz Josef recklessly proclaimed his famous Compromise of 1867, the effectiveness of the imperial army was reduced to almost zero. The autonomous and feckless conduct of the Hungarian aristocracy ensured a level of confusion, division, incompetence and ineptitude that was revealed in the army’s total collapse against both Russia and Serbia in the great battles of 1914 at the start of World War I.
The great US historian Geoffrey Wawro documents this fiasco in his classic work “A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire.”
Germany moved in to occupy and consolidate the region in both world wars. But far from making Germany a global giant and enabling it to maintain its domination of Europe, the Central European regions – whether as part of Austro-Hungary during World War I or as independent nation-states, allied to the Nazis in World War II – proved miniscule and worthless against the alliances of Russia, the United States, Britain and France that the Germans fought against in both global conflicts.
After the Soviet Union militarily destroyed the genocidal military power of Nazi Germany in World War II, Russia’s Great Patriotic War, the political consolidation of East Germany and Poland were strategically necessary for Russia’s security. But occupying and organizing the rest of the region was not. Far from strengthening the Soviet Union, those nations weakened and distracted it. Today, NATO has repeated the Soviet mistake: and that fatal move has inexorably drained the alliance of all its strength and credibility.
NATO also repeated the disastrous mistake that France made in 1920-21 when it created a “Little Entente” of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania to supposedly counterbalance the revival of Germany. The plan failed completely.
Today those very same nations – enthusiastically joined by Hungary, Poland and the three little Baltic states – are relentlessly distorting both NATO and the EU. They generate weakness and chaos in the alliances they are in – not unity and strength.
As I have noted before in these columns, the great British historian Lord Correlli Barnett drew the important distinction between militarily powerful nations, which are generators and exporters of security, and those, either tiny or disorganized, pacifist and weak nations that have to import their security from more powerful states.
One might call such small countries “feeder” or “parasite” states. They siphon off energy and strength from their protector partners. They weaken their alliance partners rather than strengthening them.
Habsburg Austria appeared to rise to military power when it defended Catholicism against the rise of Protestant Christianity across half of Germany in the Thirty Years War (1618-48) and served as the eastern wall of Europe against the expansion of the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Vienna, the Austrian-Habsburg capital, survived two epic sieges by the Ottoman Turks in 1529 and 1683.
But through all that time, the multinational nature of the empire with its endless feuding and rebellious minorities made Austria incapable of any further expansion. And the empire gradually but inexorably lost its direct control and then indirect influence over its wealthiest and most important parts: Italy, southern Germany and modern Belgium.
Austria could only survive by allying with powers militarily far stronger than it was, as its greatest rulers, Empress Maria Theresa in the 18th century and Chancellor Klemens von Metternich in the 19th century, understood very well.
The Ottoman Turks surged into Christian Eastern Europe in the 14th century, enslaving Serbia and completed their conquest 200 years later at the Battle of Mohacs, after which they occupied Hungary.
But this was the high tide of Ottoman Turkish expansion. They became obsessively preoccupied with imposing their own universally hated and resented system of military conscription: the seizure of beautiful young women for the harems of Constantinople and of young men to serve as Janissary elite stormtroopers and as castrated eunuchs in the Imperial court of the Sultans.
This absorbed all the energies of Ottoman Turk rulers and administrators as the far smaller nation states of Western Europe forced ahead in applied technology, basic science, control of global trade and applied military power.
Before the Turks and the Habsburgs, for 700 years from the time of Charlemagne in the early ninth century to the great Protestant awakening and revolts of the 16th century, the Holy Roman Empire dominated Central Europe. Yet it never became a coherent nation state, even in its German heartland, which should have been ideal for it unified by religion, culture, trade and race.
Instead, a succession of Holy Roman Emperors was endlessly caught up in the same kind of endless little intrigues that so infuriated Soviet policy makers and now confound successive US assistant secretaries of state for European and Eurasian affairs to this day.
As Russia once again raises its global profile we can expect Central European countries to reorient their loyalties accordingly.
Imposing American conceptions of human rights and democracy on the tribal mini states of the Balkans is proving as useless and frustrating today as imposing Catholic liturgies on the Orthodox Christian Slavic peoples of the region did for a thousand years.
The consistent lessons of more than 1,200 years of Central European history are therefore clear: incorporating most of the small nations in Central Europe into any empire or alliance has never been a cause or generator of military or national strength, regardless of the ideology or religious faith involved. At best, it is a barometer of national strength.
When nations such as France, Germany, the Soviet Union or the United States are seen as rising powers in the world, the small countries of Central Europe always hasten to ally themselves accordingly. They therefore adopt and discard Ottoman Islamic imperialism, Austrian Catholic imperialism, democracy, Nazism, Communism and again democracy as easily as putting on or off different costumes at a fancy-dress ball in Vienna or Budapest.
As Russia rises once again in global standing and national power, supported by its genuinely powerful allies China, India, Iran and Pakistan in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the nations of Central Europe can be anticipated to reorient their own loyalties accordingly once again.
