Introduction: Edward Horgan is an inveterate letter writer and part of the art of letter writing is being succinct and on the ball. We carry here a letter written, and published, in early April concerning NATO:
“It would benefit humanity if Trump were to pull out of NATO.
US President Trump has threatened to pull the US out of NATO. If he does so, this will be one of his very few actions as President that would benefit humanity. However, he is unlikely to follow through on this threat, and his successor would likely reverse any such decision. NATO should have been disbanded shortly after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. NATO was founded in 1949 the same year that the USSR developed its first nuclear weapon, and it claims that it defended western Europe during the Cold War. Nuclear weapons have terrorised all of humanity since the US first used them in its double-tap war crime nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With the increasing proliferation of nuclear weapons, humanity has never been more threatened with extinction.
In the meantime, the US has misused NATO as the equivalent of a global criminal protection racket in its series of resource wars of aggression, beginning with the NATO attack on Serbia in 1999 in contravention of the UN Charter and of NATO’s own Charter. These wars have killed millions of people, especially women and children, wreaked havoc with the environment and left multiple countries in chaos.
Trump is now accusing his erstwhile ‘allies’ of failing to support the illegal US/Israeli attacks on Iran and elsewhere, while at the same time threatening to annex NATO member Canada and Denmark’s Greenland territory. Trump is annoyed because three large NATO members, France, Spain and Italy have imposed severe restrictions on US military use of their airports or overfly their territories. Neutral Switzerland and Austria have done likewise.
Our Irish Government, while claiming to be neutral, is recklessly allowing aircraft associated with the US military to use Shannon airport and fly through Irish airspace, thereby being complicit in genocide and war crimes. It is failing to support the UN and the proper rule of international laws. Basic morality should ensure that preventing the killing of hundreds of thousands of children is prioritised over Irish economic interests.”