Nuclear War Dept.: 30 Years Ago I Told Lithuanians Not to Join NATO

When I came to the Orange County Register in 1987 to write editorials, a lot of them were on what turned out to be the end phase of the Cold War. I was the coldest of the Cold Warriors, a hard core anti-communist (still am), always wanting more spent on defense to stand off the gigantic Soviet military. So I didn’t predict things would get better so quickly. But I always expected, when Russia stopped being communist, as Solzhenitsyn said it would, NATO would end, American troops would come home and we would enjoy a “peace dividend.” Naïve me.

I befriended Americans in the Baltic Freedom League, who wanted independence for Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. I attended their banquets, where I enjoyed the heavy, Eastern European dishes, similar to what my immigrant grandmother made. Maybe the one time I had the most influence on this old world was in spring 1990, when Lithuania broke away from Soviet tyranny. I wrote an editorial telling the Soviets to get their tanks out of Lithuania. My Lithuanian friends here translated it into their language and Russian, and held it before the Red Army tanks in Vilnius. The tanks left.

If I played any part in that happy day, it was a small one. But it was a giddy time. Then the greatest event of all happened on Christmas Day 1991, when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics dissolved itself and abolished the Communist Party, which had murdered 60 million of its own citizens over 70 years and spread atheism and socialism and death wherever it could across the globe.

Here's the key point: Communism was ideological, maintained because it insisted it was “on the right side of history.” The Marxist dialectic “inexorably,” to use their words, would bring about “the radiant future.” When those lies were repudiated, communism was over. That meant Russia would go back to being Russia. Although there’s some messianism in Russian history, with Moscow as the Third Rome (after Rome and Constantinople), that’s not too evident today. Putin and the others don’t want to force all 7 billion people to read Tolstoy and listen to Rimsky-Korsakov.

In the mid-1990s, my Lithuanian friends started talking about the Baltic states joining NATO. I said, “No, no, no! America won’t defend Vilnius by getting Chicago nuked.” They didn’t listen, of course. They wanted their little countries to be defended from Russia by the big United States. Russia then also was falling apart, before Putin came in 1999 and began his reforms that restored the country’s economy and military.

I told the Balts they instead should become like Switzerland, with every adult man in the military, with a rifle and ammo at home. And they should end all gun control, like America. I conceded the Baltics, unlike mountainous Switzerland, are flat, and easily invaded. They didn’t like those ideas, either. And I conceded the Baltics had been mistreated for centuries not only by the Soviets, but the Russian Empire. But I said it’s the fate of small countries next to major powers to come to reasonable accommodations with their dominant neighbor. I might have used the old Mexican saying, “So close to America, so far from God.”

I also pointed out President Bush and Jim Baker promised not to expand NATO as part of getting the Soviet Army to move from East Germany all the way back to Russia – east even of newly independent Ukraine. Although some people today say that promise wasn’t made, the proof is at George Washington University’s National Security Archive.

For their re-election in 1996, Bill and Hillary Clinton, always eager to cadge votes by selling out anything to clutch at power, told the Baltics, as well as Poland and other countries recently freed from the Soviet orbit, they could join NATO. They were re-elected; and NATO expanded right up to Russia’s borders. Leading to the current mess over Ukraine.

I’m writing, of course, days before the NATO summit in Vilnius. It probably will decide to give F-16s to Ukraine. They will be shot down. Will it also decide to commit Poland’s army and other countries’ F-16s, with NATO pilots, to the war? Supposedly this would not be NATO per se, but a “coalition of the willing.” The Russians will not be fooled. It better would be called the “coalition of the suicidal.”

When NATO was started after World War II, it only was intended to stop Soviet communism. It worked. Then it ought to have been disbanded, not expanded.

It also never was intended to be an offensive force, taking part in non-NATO conflicts, as that between Russia and non-NATO member Ukraine. Another outrageous violation of NATO’s charter was the bombing of Serbia in 1999, also perpetrated by the perfidious Clintons, to put in charge of Kosovo – Serbia’s ancient center – the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army. That bombing also almost led to nuclear war with Russia, until British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson intervened and prevented Armageddon.

Now we have a barely sentient President Biden with his palsied finger hovering nervously over the Nuclear Button. He’ll be over there in Vilnius with the other NATO honchos. They don’t want to lose another war, like that in Afghanistan two years ago. And Russia sure isn’t going to stop until it completely defeats the Ukrainian Army, disarms the country, and drives out the Ukrainian Nazis even the pro-war New York Times a month ago admitted are influential in the country’s military.

I also might have been wrong 30 years ago when I said America wouldn’t get Chicago nuked over Vilnius. Maybe Biden will.