NATO Against the Monroe Doctrine

NATO is inherently un-American, and violates almost every geopolitical concept this country was founded on, and spits in the faces of the people who helped Americans become a world power to start with. The concept of American neutrality and non-intervention toward European regimes started early and was first articulated in 1823.

President Monroe established the USA’s sphere of influence, instructed European regimes to not violate it, and in return, promised to NOT interfere in European affairs. Less than a century later, President Wilson betrayed the promises of the Monroe Doctrine by attacking Germany and also interfering in Russia’s Civil War. Through his incompetent meddling, Wilson trashed the balance of power in Europe and World War II was a direct result of it. Roosevelt repaired American neutrality, only entering the war after Japan and Germany directly attacked American ships and territory. Roosevelt might have successfully avoided the Cold War, but we’ll never know because he died prematurely and Truman meddled even more egregiously than Wilson.

As the USA got larger and stronger over time, the consequences of violating neutrality got worse. By 1917 the USA was strong enough to swing the balance of power in a European war. That’s why European pressure against the USA has only grown since then, and they aggressively pander to American ego and insecurities to contribute lives and resources to wars that have nothing to do with us.

Military studies have shown that an armed person will on average act more aggressively if he is provided with a weapon, and that’s common sense. An unarmed person will avoid conflict, but give him a gun, then he will think he’s the toughest guy on the block. Without US intervention in WWI, there almost certainly would have been a truce as both sides were too exhausted to realistically break the stalemate.

NATO has the same effect today. By itself, a little country like Lithuania would be quiet, since if they get into a war with their larger neighbors they would have no chance of winning. But with the US military at their backs, Lithuania loudly and repeatedly threaten to do stupid things, like blockade Kaliningrad. A mutual defense pact between the USA and Lithuania is like giving an angry midget a team of US Navy SEALs to be his bodyguards. He’ll go around picking arguments with everyone because he knows if he gets in trouble the SEALs will save him.

By making such stupid promises, the USA puts itself at odds with other great powers when it’s totally unnecessary. Russia and China wouldn’t be angered by the USA if the USA hadn’t put troops and weapons along all their borders, well within their respective spheres of influence. Yes, of course random irrelevant countries like Estonia and Montenegro love getting free support from the USA, and I’m sure I’ll get at least a few of those people in the comments. I would be happy too if someone randomly gave me free money and security for no reason, but that doesn’t make it a sensible or good arrangement for him.

These NATO trolls in random small countries loudly insist “NATO is not just the USA.” Okay sure true, but these same trolls from random small countries take it for granted that the USA will always swoop in to save them from whatever stupid problem they get themselves into, which shows just how destructive NATO is to the American people. If there was no NATO, then these countries bordering Russia would just have to use diplomacy to avoid conflict, as that would be their only choice. But instead, they think “I can be as stupid and aggressive as I want because if Russians get pissed off and attack me for it, USA will save me!”

We claim to have all these “allies,” but the vast majority of these “allies” in NATO are totally dependent on the American military and give literally nothing in return. It’s a completely one-sided relationship. NATO obligations risk the possibility of the USA getting into a nuclear war with Russia, which has absolutely nothing to do with Americans and fighting them is pointless. But if Americans have a serious problem, like a war with Mexican drug cartels for example, are Latvia and Finland going to swoop in to save us? Of course not. Even if these little countries had the means to send a token force to the Mexican border, that would be useless and the USA would never ask them to. Why make mutual promises to someone who is entirely dependent on you and has nothing helpful to offer? It’s absurd to have such a mutual defense pact because it’s inherently not mutual or equal. Defense pacts absolutely must be at least somewhat symmetrical and local, otherwise it’s just a large country making stupid promises to faraway places in someone else’s backyard.

Like with everything else, defense pacts have the danger of mission creep. We swore to fight to the death for a bunch of faraway countries that don’t matter, and that somehow crept to also compulsively defending adjacent countries that aren’t even in the pact at all. Shoveling tens of billions of dollars to Ukrainian oligarchs does nothing for Americans’ welfare or security, but it does run the risk of nuclear war. Why is that sensible? It’s not. An additional problem is that the USA attempting to fulfill such obligations will always be asymmetric, due to the distance if nothing else. It takes far more effort for the USA to deliver an artillery shell to Estonia than it does for Russia.

Map of the USA’s sphere of influence. Green is the USA’s neighborhood, yellow represents European colonies we agreed to not meddle in, primarily the British, who had the naval power needed to establish America’s influence.

NATO is a violation of the principles of American sovereignty. Understanding American sovereignty requires knowing the history, and that history closely involves the Russians, which requires a little explanation.

At the close of the Napoleonic Wars, the USA wanted to be recognized as a great power, but was still light years away from this goal and faced huge obstacles. The disastrous war of 1812 with the British Empire was still fresh on everyone’s minds. Long story short, while the British were distracted by Napoleon, Americans declared war and attempted to annex Canada. The invasion was thrown back and British troops counter-attacked and actually SEIZED territory. Americans inherited the British knack for excellent seamanship, but the US Navy wasn’t anywhere large enough to pose a serious threat to the British. So British reinforcements arrived unopposed, scattered poorly trained American militia, and burned the White House.

The war with 1812 ended with a generous peace but in practical military terms, was a humiliating defeat for us. I compare it with the 2008 war between Georgia and Russia. Like how the Georgians felt about South Ossetia in 2008, Americans felt Canada rightfully belonged to us and we were strong enough to take it by force. This was a mistake. Like the Russians in 2008, the British in 1812 didn’t see a point in trying to re-annex the USA. They just gave us an ass-whooping and ended the conflict with a treaty.

Even not counting the British, European powers still controlled a vast amount of territory in the New World. And with Napoleon finally out of the way, the European powers were once again more or less in political and ideological alignment with each other, and this made things exceptionally dangerous.

Individually even one European colonial power was formidable, and the problem with opposing one European regime is that the other European regimes might dogpile you with superior numbers and resources. Tsar Alexander II found this out the hard way later on in the Crimean War when he decided to partition the crumbling Ottoman Empire. Since the Ottomans were notorious for the white slave trade and murder of Christians in the Holy Land, he assumed the other European “enlightened despots” would agree with him. But instead he inadvertently angered the British, and they assembled a huge coalition to destroy the Tsar’s ships and invade Crimea. The Crimean War is often colloquially called “World War 0,” as it was an early example of British brinkmanship and kamikaze diplomacy sparking a bloody war in Europe, which they repeated on a larger scale in WWI and again in WWII.

From the American perspective, European unity was particularly dangerous because they were all ruled by tyrannical monarchies, and the USA was explicitly NOT a monarchy. If European despots decided to crush the growing independence movements in the New World and reestablish the “divine right” of kings to rule the Earth, that would put the USA in serious trouble.

So in the early 1820s, President Monroe brain stormed a plan to gradually assert an American sphere of influence over the New World, prevent European expansion, and incrementally reduce their existing influence. This idea became known as the Monroe Doctrine – and as this sphere of influence solidified over years, the British and Russians would play a larger role in materializing it than any other European regime.

The British, at least initially, liked the Monroe Doctrine because for a couple of reasons. For one, the British no longer considered North or South America terribly important as they made India the crown jewel of their empire, and the Indians would be the subject of British exploitation and brutality for many years to come. For this reason, the British lost very little by at least paying lip service to the idea of the USA as a great power. Furthermore, respecting American sovereignty was a great excuse for the British to use their vast navy to bully other Europeans if they attempted to expand or create footholds in the New World. Monroe and future American presidents were careful to not make the British an enemy, but instead, gained them as a hammer to batter other Europeans into submission.

Russia’s participation is equally interesting. In 1821, Tsar Alexander I declared a ukase (указ — edict), establishing the Russian Empire’s own sphere of influence over the west coast of North America where they had colonies and hoped to solidify and expand. Shortly afterward in 1822 a Russian warship seized an American merchant vessel. This seizure provoked a complaint from Washington, and the Russians apologized, released the ship, and paid compensation. This incident became a partial basis for Monroe’s December 1823 state of the union address when he articulated the new Monroe Doctrine for the first time. Alexander I became the first European monarch to respect the Monroe Doctrine with a treaty in 1824.

Ultimately, the British respected the Monroe Doctrine out of pure self-interest as a way to harm other European powers and prevent them from creating new colonies. The Russians on the other hand, did genuinely acknowledge and respect the Monroe Doctrine, and they were actually the only European monarchy to do this. Russian support as absolutely crucial to the USA throughout the 19th Century, when “sophisticated” Europeans widely viewed Americans as backwards and primitive. It’s good for a new backwater republic to have the respect of a European monarch, even if he’s literally the only one to do so.

Maybe this seems trivial, but consider what happened to a revolutionary regime WITHOUT Russia’s support. Catherine the Great was contemptuous of French King Louis XVI, seeing him as an incompetent idiot, but still joined all the other European monarchs in condemning the revolution and waged war against it. The French murdered their monarch so the new government was inherently illegitimate in the eyes of the European system regardless of which tyrant happened to take power. Therefore, the French-Russian rift could not ever be fully repaired, eventually snowballing into the downfall of France. Alexander I opposed Napoleon’s continental system, leading to the disastrous invasion of Russia and the eventual abdication of Napoleon. The lesson here is that in the 19th Century it was at least theoretically possible to survive or even win a power struggle against Russia or Britain, but not both at the same time. Anti-monarchy revolutions were possible in the faraway colonies, but but much more difficult in Europe itself – all of the aristocracies from London to Moscow and everything in between would feel threatened enough to put aside their differences and join forces to eliminate the insurrectionists.

By the latter half of the 19th Century the British had grown tired of Americans and wanted our downfall, and such an opportunity presented itself in 1861 with the Civil War. The British aristocracy and their propaganda mouthpieces like the London Times quite openly wanted the southern rebels to win, leaving the USA permanently split between two smaller states in perpetual animosity toward each other and never again be able to project power anywhere beyond their own immediate borders.

Enter Alexander II. He was understandably quite unhappy about his recent defeat in the Crimean War, and also appreciative of American help in it. Not only had the British attacked Russian ships in the Black Sea, they also blockaded Russian America (Alaska). But American merchant crews ignored the blockade and continued bringing goods to Russian colonists. Russians were quite impressed by American willingness to take extraordinary risks to make money. Personal grudges aside, Alexander had just freed the serfs in 1861, so despite the vast political differences between the USA and the Russian Empire, they had equivalent emancipations.

Statue of Lincoln and Alexander in Moscow. It’s symbolic, as they never met in person.

Furthermore, the Russian attitude toward geopolitics has always been different from the British, and this shows even in their conquests. The British consistently prefer to utterly destroy their enemies, breaking up powerful countries into weak ethnostates that can be easily manipulated into fighting each other. This is why they divided up Germany in such a harmful way after WWI and would have liked to do the same to Americans during our civil war. So while the British would like every other country in the world to be a failed state dominated by terrorists killing each other, Russians prefer stable centralized regimes, even if they’re despotic, as long as they keep the peace and provide a reliable authority that can be negotiated with. From Alexander’s perspective, the British had no business balkanizing the USA, and it was important for Americans to remain a unified nation.

So he sent two squadrons of ships to the USA, one to New York and another to San Francisco, and gave President Lincoln full command of them. These two small groups of ships did not participate in combat but their presence was of vital importance to Lincoln. Like all of our early presidents, Lincoln struggled to be respected by European monarchs, who considered the American government a joke. So having the Tsar’s ships in his harbors gave Lincoln a huge credibility boost on the international stage.

While too few in number to have stopped a British attack, Alexander’s ships served a purpose in military terms known as a “trigger force.” If an adversary attacks a trigger force, this is an act of war that triggers a war, hence the name. This doesn’t necessarily mean the Russians would send forces to North America, and it’s unlikely they had the means to do that. But they could threaten the British elsewhere, particularly in West Asia. It would effectively put the British Empire in a two-front war, simultaneously trying to crush the Americans while also having to fend off Russian incursions on the opposite side of the world. Russia and the USA were significantly reformed, more industrialized, and had better transportation networks than in their previous conflicts with the British, and fighting both at once would have been a significant challenge. It would have been tough for Parliament to explain to the British public why tens of thousands of their boys were being butchered all across the world to defend slavery in North America.

In the end, the British stayed neutral, though their nostalgic patriots still breathlessly insist they could have crushed the Northern American states if they wanted to. Maybe fever dreams about sinking Lincoln’s ships a century and a half ago makes British patriots feel less inferior to us, I can’t really say as I’m not a psychologist.

Shortly after the war in 1867, Russia sold Alaska to the USA. By this point the tsar had given up on the idea of expanding into North America, and he preferred to see his former colonies belong to a reliable local partner rather than in the clutches of British imperialists.

Note that while American-Russian relations throughout most of history were friendly, sometimes very friendly, they were never formalized in any kind of permanent alliance or mutual defense pact. Even if the Russians had desired such a thing for some reason, it would be an act of hypocrisy and a violation of the Monroe Doctrine. That’s far outside our sphere of influence and we don’t have the right to meddle in European affairs.

When the Russians had their own civil war, Wilson shouldn’t have intervened, as it wasn’t his business. If Americans didn’t intervene, then it’s likely Canadians wouldn’t have either, and the British might have hesitated if they were the only Anglos in the “coalition.” After World War II there wasn’t any sensible reason for the USA to continue occupying large swathes of the continent. If western Europeans weren’t able to hide behind the USA’s skirt, they would have been forced to engage in diplomacy. That triggered a trend that has never reversed of the USA trying to control the entire world and get involved in every conflict whether or not it made any sense to.

Ian Kummer

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