Category Archives: Memory

NATO’s Child

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“How smart is that? And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper…We could use that on our southern border…here’s a guy who’s very savvy.”

— Donald Trump’s comments on Vladimir Putin’s military incursion into Ukraine’s Eastern regions, Feb. 22, 2022

I’ll never forget candidate Donald Trump’s first campaign trail attack on NATO in 2016. According to Vanity Fair, the telegraphed threat to our democratic allies came mere hours after Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination. When asked how he would deal with a Russian attack on the Baltic nations, Trump said U.S. aid would be dependent upon whether those countries “fulfilled their obligations to us.”

The question to Trump referenced Article 5, which represents the core mission of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance as embodied in the concept of Collective Defense. It “requires that an attack against one ally is considered as an attack against all allies,” according to NATO. Article 5 was first invoked after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when NATO member states came to America’s aid.

To someone who had grown up in the shadow of NATO — to an American whose father proudly contributed to NATO’s mission in Europe — Donald Trump’s words already sounded like treason. 

But it got worse. Throughout his chaotic presidency, Trump regularly threatened NATO allies and repeatedly told aides he wanted the United States to withdraw from NATO, according to the New York Times. 

The American president wanted to shatter this 70-year-old mutually protective alliance between the great democracies of Europe and America. 

Does anyone still wonder why?

***

In 1962, my South Omaha-born Polish father, West Point graduate and recently minted Army Lt. George Wees, was stationed in Heidelberg in then-West Germany. His Signal Corps unit was assisting the newly authorized military of the recently admitted NATO member state. I was born at the spartan Army hospital there, just a few months before the October Missile Crisis. 

World War II had ended for our Heidelberg home some 17 years earlier. Evidence of the Cold War now surrounded us, including Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s brand-new Berlin Wall. 

A decade later, in 1973, Dad was ordered to the NATO command in southern Italy, so off we went. We lived near Pozzuoli, a small town on the Bay of Naples, in a country house. Dad worked for what was then called the Allied Forces Southern Europe (AFSOUTH) command, located on a bucolic campus in downtown Naples.

I remember when, in 1974, we learned that NATO member state Greece was stepping away from its role in the AFSOUTH military command. This was a result of an attack by Turkish forces on Cyprus. It felt like a shock: The Greek military was leaving us. 

In those days, even such a small ripple in the fabric of our stability was significant. The Cold War was very real to us, though very hushed, like a terrible secret. We kids knew the dangerous business our parents were engaged in, so we listened closely. Hot spots like Cyprus could become another Korea, another Vietnam. Or something much worse. 

NATO’s strength in numbers felt like our strength. Its diminution felt like our weakness.

***

With the Soviet Union long gone, some now ask, what is America’s interest in NATO? I might respond with the French aphorism: Plus ça change…. Because NATO’s purpose was never to protect Europe from the USSR, as some choose to believe. Its purpose was — and is — to protect all those who value democratic self-determination and the rule of law from those who do not. 

And it’s not just NATO’s job. It’s ours, too. Because as we have been repeatedly reminded lately, some wield power for themselves alone — for their own interests against the interests of peace, against the community of nations and against the rule of law. How well we live up to our ideals is not the question at times such as these. The question is how much we value the preservation of our way of life, the pursuit of our ideals and the legal protections for both traditions afforded by our Constitution. 

A benevolent and peaceful American future is not assured. As we should know by now, the relative peace and economic cooperation that has allowed Europe and America to thrive since the end of World War II is constantly under threat from morally unmoored opportunists like Vladimir Putin — and Donald Trump. 

(The above appeared originally in the online Nebraska Examiner 02/26/2022 under the headline “Ukraine and future of the NATO alliance”)

The Private Life

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I remember when I was a teenager, I loved to read William Safire in the Washington Post. As an out-of-sorts adolescent recently transplanted from Europe to Fairfax County, I was, to put it mildly, a bit isolated. For conversation of sorts, I read the editorials. Safire wrote eloquently on subjects that got right to my heart: self-reliance, self-improvement, the inviolate quality of one’s natural sovereignty. And therefore, one’s natural right to privacy.

Safire would be aghast at the world in 2021. The best joke that describes our transformed society for me is that the government did not need to hide secret mechanisms of Big Brother behind a patriarchal facade and spy on us. We the people invited Big Brother into our lives, all on our own, as the Guest of Honor, aka Alexa. The great intellectual, like many others of his kind, bristled at any intrusion into his life brought by “officialdom.” To witness the masses willingly revealing their most private lives to the amoral, greed-based institution of Capitalism—an even less trustworthy master than fickle government—might have been too much for him to bear. To Safire, the slow and steady chipping away of privacy rights by an expanding government “hive mind” mentality was a grave harbinger, so it seems safe to say that witnessing Americans en masse grabbing a hammer and chisel to join in would possibly overwhelm the man.

For this passionate defense of personal privacy and individuality, he was sometimes lumped in with your garden-variety anti-government (wink) Reaganites. But he was too fiercely independent to be a Republican operative after what Nixon did to him, and too smart to believe that the people who were blowing up the deficit (which more than doubled between 1981 and 1983) were interested in small government. He was conservative—that was his nature—but he was not longer knee-jerk loyal to the party or even its insulated institutions after feeling the deep burn of political betrayal.* I found that stance—that of the observer, never the participant, in the 1980s Washington political flying circus (and by extension the national and global circuses)—to be very refreshing, and enticing. I remember recalling it when I read James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce describes the artist as “the observer,” not participating in what they observe but standing apart, disinterested, impartial, “paring [their] nails,” as Joyce put it. Safire was that way. He skewered them all for their mistakes, their petty weaknesses, their pointless political squabbles. From a resolute distance.

And on the last he had a secret weapon: he was a philologist. His love of words and their correct usage was the subject of a non-political column he wrote for a while, called “On Language”. I read that column even more religiously than his political pieces as I got older and less interested in the predictable noise of politics. Safire helped me realize the importance of words, that they mean what they mean or they are useless, and how some ill-defined words are “wielded” as weapons either righteously or factionally. (They are dull weapons, as opposed to sharp ones, but they do the job of triggering a belligerent response in the pliant mind.) He and his successors at the university taught me to examine closely words like “liberal,” “conservative,” “socialist,” “patriot” and more lately, “Islamofascist” or “Christian” or “terrorist” (or just plain “good,” or just plain “evil”).

On this subject, too, Safire would lament the rise of social media and its “democratization” [sic] of language. Orwell – again – and even Lewis Caroll have schooled us on that (along with countless others who’ve heeded them). So when Humpty Dumpty (or a humpty dumpty president) announces that “When I use a word,’ it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less,’ unless we challenge that notion we have all lost the war without engaging in battle. All the weapons – all the words – then belong to the loudest voice.

– 30 –

*Safire learned he had been the target of “national security” wiretaps authorized by Nixon while working for the New York Times as a columnist, and wrote with what he characterized as “restrained fury” that he had not worked for Nixon through a difficult decade “to have him—or some lizard-lidded paranoid acting without his approval—eavesdropping on my conversations”. (Safire worked on both Nixon campaigns and wrote speeches for both Nixon and Spiro Agnew.)

Fate’s Blueprint: The New Populism

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For us there is only the trying.
The rest is not our business. – T.S. Eliot

They will call it “the new Populism”, comparing Sanders in the early 2000s to Nebraska’s own William Jennings Bryan a century earlier. Bryan was the Democratic presidential nominee in 1896, with his surprise nomination bringing many of his “Populist Party” supporters flooding into the ranks of the Democratic party. Bryan’s nomination was in fact a populist repudiation of incumbent Grover Cleveland and his “Bourbon Democrats” (i.e., the business-allied Democratic establishment). 

Of course, Bryan lost to Republican William McKinley in 1896, but he had become well-known nationally as a fiery public orator, galvanizing his followers with his famous “Cross of Gold” speech, and pretty much inventing the extended cross-country stumping tour (which Teddy Roosevelt copied, Truman also exploited to great effect with his “whistle stop” tour, and which right-wing populist Donald Trump has effectively adopted as his “permanent campaign” approach to the presidency). 

The Democrats put Bryan up against McKinley again in 1900, believing their anti-imperialism stance would galvanize his populist following. And Bryan lost again. 

But by 1904, progressive Republican Theodore Roosevelt had been in office a few years (after McKinley’s 1901 assassination), and with his support for anti-trust activism and widespread reforms he beat the Democrats’ new “Hail Mary” conservative nominee (Alton Parker) handily, thus rehabilitating Bryan’s stature among Democrats. Because by this time, the national popular  opinion had swung toward Bryan’s/Roosevelt’s ideas, such that after the 1904 election both parties were embracing the progressive reforms that had been championed by Bryan and his populist zealots for years. (In fact Bryan was once again the Democratic presidential candidate in 1908.) 

As usual, I think history has a lesson for us here – and it’s echoed in the words of T.S. Eliot in his Four Quartets, in a line I recently heard quoted by a brilliant man and poet at the University of Nebraska commencement. “For us,” Eliot wrote, “there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” With this quote, the speaker was telling the new graduates that unlike in our favorite movie endings, the good will not always be ultimately ascendant or triumphant. But that is not our shame, nor is it even our defeat. As individuals we are not responsible for the broad shapes that form the contours of the tides of history; we are not responsible for the victories of the undeserving. Rather, it is our sole responsibility to TRY on behalf of the greater good—here and now. 

Because sometimes, false prophets and immoral agendas will command the world’s stage despite the efforts of good people to contain them. Power is their only goal, so these people will then do whatever it takes, regardless of law or morality, to consolidate and cement their gains. They will then try to convince us morally inclined nobodies that there’s no use resisting their power, that we are impotent and alone in the dark, that we have lost and they have won. But there is no victory more fleeting than political victory. Immoral times produce their inevitable disastrous outcomes, yes, and then it is left to us morally inclined nobodies to pick up the pieces. But whatever the outcome this time, we will know that we, as individuals of conscience, did what we could to try to make the world a better place for all. That is our only responsibility. 

Our lives and our worth are not defined by the era we live in, they are defined by how we live in our era. Like a batter at the plate or a pitcher on the mound, or a poet with his pen: whether we are successful or not, the job is always the same. To try. 

America

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It’s like when a loved one dies. Maybe you saw it coming, trying to prepare, but then it just rushes up into reality and becomes real and undeniable much more quickly than you were ready for: they are dead, and they are never coming back. Rest in Peace.

You look outside the window of the hospital waiting room after the team of doctors quietly leaves – the sun is shining, birds are singing, in the streets people come and go, traffic lights blink on and off. Why? Why does everything insist on continuing when your world is crushed like this? Everything should stop, and mourn with you. Because things will never be the same.

But it won’t stop. The world is the world, a machine, it runs even when we are broken down. It will run and run. Maybe it will do some recognizable things – day, night, winter, spring. But we’ll be different, changed, having lost some part of us we can’t really define, though we know it was an important part. The reality we occupied is gone, killed by a disease we are powerless to fight alone. And right now we all feel terribly alone.

It’s gone. It’s not coming back.

Rest in Peace.

The Trickster and the Fool

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It’s disheartening to see the U.S. – North Korea kabuki theater performed again and again, always to the advantage of the Kim dynasty and the disadvantage of the West. The dictatorship has one unerring talent: the ability to fool American presidents into playing their zero-sum game. It starts with the rhetoric – bombast hurled at the new U.S. leader in hopes it will be returned (worked like a charm this time around). Then the nuclear brinkmanship (the reason for NK’s program being diplomatic leverage), and the ensuing worldwide panic, followed by the “high level” talks that pull all threatened parties into the mix (China, South Korea, Japan, etc.). The cumulative effect of these actions and their media-grabbing headlines is the only one the Kim dynasty is interested in, namely worldwide recognition of the power, legitimacy and importance of the North Korean regime.

But Kim, like the American president, is playing mostly to a domestic audience. The message? “It would be dangerous to remove me during this (never-ending) crisis.”

Americans should (but probably don’t) remember that this all played out previously, in 1994 under the Clinton administration and later between 2006 – 2007, as the Bush administration announced a “path to normalization” with Pyongyang. For both “agreements” North Korea had agreed to demolish its nuclear development facilities (!) and in the 2007 negotiations provided (doctored) footage to prove it had done so. Clinton and Bush were, of course, hoodwinked as today’s evidence shows. The 1994 Agreed Framework and 2006-2007’s so-called Six-Party Talks were nothing but stall tactics. The result is a nuclear-armed North Korea, now with ballistic missile capabilities. Soon they will have a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile, if they don’t already, capable of striking anywhere in the world.

Today, apparently, the regime released three American prisoners , two of them having been scooped up under the current U.S. administration in order to create the leverage Kim is now strategically ceding. This is of course part of the wider, long-range gambit, which also includes a seeming cool-down between the two Koreas. Now the U.S. president will become overconfident. He will strut into the summit trap Kim has set thinking he has “the advantage.” (It’s The Art of the Deal, you know.)

I predict that at the peak of bilateral negotiations, per the dog-eared script, the Kim regime will find an excuse to introduce delay after delay as they produce false promise after false promise, backed by false evidence, their mission having already been accomplished: widespread media coverage of their power and influence, and a U.S. regime that has completely lost face by walking into their predictable, time-worn diplomatic trap. My question bares repeating: How will he react?

This is why the Obama administration refused to even engage with North Korea – they knew from Bill Clinton and George W. Bush’s experience that there was nothing in it for them. Unless sponsor state China does something about the Kim regime’s recklessness, there is nothing to be done by any other parties short of starting a world war:  China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran versus an isolated United States.

I hope it comes out differently this time, I hope North Korea is serous about denuclearization. But I’ve never seen the sun rise in the West.

Update: When I’m right, I’m right. Also – that was fast.