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by RON PAUL
Over the weekend, Department of Government Efficiency head Elon Musk made quite a stir with just two words posted on his social media platform, X. Responding to a post stating “it’s time to leave NATO and the UN,” Musk replied, “I agree.” The comment immediately made the rounds on social media and also on mainstream and alternative media.
Was this the Elon Musk who owns X speaking, or was it the Elon Musk who has become one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisors? Does it even matter? Having someone so close to the U.S. president who advocates finally extracting the U.S. from these international organizations is a significant and very positive shift for the United States.
With the truth coming out about how USAID has been working against U.S. interests for decades, the disinfectant of public scrutiny is now turning to our membership in – and generous funding of – international organizations like NATO and the United Nations.
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I have long advocated our exit from NATO. At the end of the Cold War, with its very reason for existence gone, NATO decided to look for other ways of stirring up trouble. First NATO involved itself in the first Gulf War, and then it decided its mission should be to bomb Serbia to smithereens – in the name of “human rights.” I agree with the late Sen. Robert Taft, who argued at the time NATO was formed that we should not join the “Atlantic Alliance.”
It has become much clearer these past few months just how far NATO has shifted away from U.S. interests. Even though the United States funds a whopping 70 percent of NATO’s cost, our own NATO “allies” are working against the United States as President Trump attempts to pull us back from the brink of war with Russia.
A simple telephone call between Presidents Trump and Putin was met with hysteria among NATO member countries, and Just as U.S. and Russian high-level delegations were meeting in Saudi Arabia to look for way to walk back from a war footing, our “allies” decided to hold their own summit in opposition to the U.S. move. In Paris our “partners” pledged to continue their failed Ukraine policy and to ridicule the United States for looking to try something different.
To add insult to injury, right at the center of the table in Paris was none other than the Secretary General of NATO himself, former Dutch politician Mark Rutte! The message was very clear: “we are working against you – we push war while you push peace – but you must keep footing the bill.”
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Also over the weekend Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rep Thomas Massie (R-KY) echoed Elon Musk’s sentiment, with Sen. Lee posting a chart showing the wildly disproportionate amount of U.S. taxpayer dollars that go to funding NATO with the statement, “Get us out of NATO.” Rep. Massie added to Lee’s comment, “NATO is a Cold War relic that needs to be relegated to a talking kiosk at the Smithsonian.”
As in the time of Sen. Robert Taft, the sentiment against NATO membership is coming from the conservative end of the U.S. political spectrum. With President Trump’s clear mandate to pursue his “America first” agenda we have the best opportunity in decades to sever our damaging and expensive entangling alliances across the globe. Let’s start with NATO!
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR …
Ron Paul is a former U.S. Congressman from Texas and the leader of the pro-liberty, pro-free market movement in the United States. His weekly column – reprinted with permission – can be found here.
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4 comments
I do not understand Americans like Ron Paul. Are they stupid or corrupt? Both before WWI and WWII America thought we could just stay out of the war. We were an island unto ourselves. That despite our historical and familial ties to Europe, we could just sit back and watch as the Europeans slaughtered each other and say nothing as evil dictators murdered millions of innocent people. It did not work.
Recognizing our failure after WWII we set up a system to prevent this from happening again. And for three quarters of a century, this system has allowed America and Western Europe to become powerful, wealthy and live in relative peace. No war has come to any of our shores.
For most of the post WWII era, the west has had one enemy. Russia. They have persistently sought to divide us and conquer us. When the USSR split up during the Reagan era, we thought finally we have won, we can move on from the Cold War. We were wrong. Where the USSR fell Russia arose and China arose. But through all this our alliances have stood the test of time. They have made us powerful, wealthy and living in relative peace.
Now Trump and people like Ron want to throw all of that away. So I have to ask myself why? How is this good for America? Honestly, I cannot come up with one single good answer. All my answers lead back to corruption. For example why does Trump want to end the war in Ukraine? To save the US money? Clearly not. We spend 800+ billion a year on defense. This is to protect us from our two enemies the Russians and the Chinese. We gave Ukraine a very small fraction of that, and with the resources provided by our European allies they have effectively destroyed the Russian army as a fighting force and the Russian economy is in shambles. If we just continued the pressure for another year or two Russia would likely collapse, eliminating one our enemies and denying the Chinese a valuable supplier of resources for their war machine. That seems good for America, and cheap given what we spend to defend ourselves. So what is the reason Trump wants to end the war. What is the reason Trump told the Pentagon to unilaterally disarm in the cyberwar we have been fighting with Russia. The only country that benefits from ending the Ukraine war on the terms Trump wants and shutting down our cyberwar capabilities is Russia. So why are we doing it? My answer is corruption at the highest level, but I am willing to look at other that make sense.
Good to see that you enjoy reading “The Book Of Our Very Best Fairy Tales” by NATO. They put a lot of time and effort into that book, making themselves the hero and such.
How much better off might we have been had we sat out those WW conflicts? Wasn’t it the First WW conflict that was used as an excuse to forceably take hard-earned money from American citizens? You know, that “temporary” income tax that is still with us over a hundred years later? Had we sat out that conflict, might it have been that we would not have gotten to enjoy a second WW conflict, just over two decades later, caused in part by the severe sanctions imposed on the losing country and the economic destruction brought upon it by the 20th Century version of America’s 1860’s carpet baggers, the Juden?
I could go on but I won’t. I will just ask you not to believe every book of fairy tales that gets put in front of you.
You really don’t read do you? I think you must be writing your own fairy tails in your head. You comment has nothing to do with my comment. While we can debate whether we should have entered WWI, we were forced into WWII because we were attacked first. Remember Pearl Harbor? Nonetheless, the point was we tried to stay out of WWI and WWII, but we got pulled in. The purposes of the system of alliances we set up post WWII, was to prevent that from happening in the future and it has been very successful. No war has come to the shores of a NATO nation. Since its inception the NATO nations have only activated Article 5 once and that was after 9-11 when our allies rallied to our defense, offered aid and offered resources
The only time Article 5 of the NATO treaty has been invoked was in support of the USA after 9/11.