“Expand or Die”: Biden’s 1997 Plan to Save NATO And The Consequences
The Soviet Union collapsed, and NATO’s job was done. Instead, the alliance went looking for customers, and Joe Biden read out the prospectus in 1997.
I served in the British Army during the Cold War, in a regiment whose entire purpose rested on the darkest calculation of that age: that the final line against nuclear escalation was the absolute certainty of what would follow it. Mutually assured destruction. MAD. A terrible doctrine, but one designed to prevent an even more terrible reality. Our purpose was never to win a nuclear war. It was to ensure nobody dared start one.
We trained for a war that must never happen. And it didn’t.
The Warsaw Pact dissolved. The Soviet Union ceased to exist. The Third Shock Army, which we had spent our working lives preparing to confront, folded up and went home. And when the Cold War was over, our regiment was disbanded. Its job was done.
There is something in that transition which our political and military institutions seem to have forgotten: when the threat that justifies an institution’s existence disappears, its continued existence ought to be questioned.
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