Is it time to leave, after all?

Time and past time, since the Cold War alliance system and both the Democrats' containment policy and the Republicans' rollback policy were products of absurd capitalist terror of and hatred for communism and, indeed, anything that smelled a bit like socialism.

And maybe, too, a lot of them drank their own Kool Aid, and actually believed of the Reds, as they had claimed they believed of Hitler, that they were out for world conquest.

And that, if we didn't oppose them everywhere in everything, they really could do it.

They really could conquer the whole world, including us.

And that, if they succeeded, the loss of freedom and democracy from the whole planet, the global triumph of totalitarian communism, would be irreversible, a fate so awful that the nuclear destruction of the world would actually be preferable.

Humbug, all of it.

As to the issue of the day, it's not just Trump who's a NATO skeptic.

It's a lot of Americans.

And it was, until Hillary became their candidate and Trump their opponent, a lot of the Americans in the Democratic Party - and I don't just mean the Bernie Sanders supporters - and a lot of people who spoke for them at MSNBC, as well as other major and conspicuous Democratic media.

But most of them have shut up since the election as Trump and the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party have stolen anti-globalism completely from all but the further and more anti-Democrat left.

And it's not just our alliance with Europe the skeptics are and have been long skeptical of.

Look at what Trump has really done in Korea, aided by Kim's cooperation in putting on an amazing propaganda show giving Trump a purely fictitious Cold War II triumph.

He has declared victory, weakened the US military defense of the peninsula, and publicly said he wants to remove US forces both from there and from Europe.

And Europeans see it, too.

For most of its history, the US has sought to avoid entanglement in Europe, and more or less succeeded from independence in 1776 until 1917 and the country’s reluctant entrance into the first world war. 

Even then, most Americans were keen to leave again as soon as possible. 

Congress turned its back on President Woodrow Wilson’s international ideals and refused to ratify the Versailles peace treaty or to allow the US to join the new League of Nations.

Congress was just as resistant to being sucked into the second world war, and the US could well have sat on the sidelines had Japan not attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, and then Germany declared war on the US four days later.

When the second world war was over in 1945, Americans again made plans to pull out, demobilising 90% of their troops. 

But over the next two years it became increasingly clear European states were not going to recover economically without US help and that Stalin’s Soviet Union was looming as a global threat. 

So the US stayed in Europe, rebuilding Germany, and forming Nato.

Now Europe is mostly prosperous, and the Soviet Union has gone. A revanchist Russia has taken its place, but it is a far punier power, with only the fifth biggest economy in Europe.

“Russia is not an existential threat. It’s not felt in London, Paris or Rome as an existential threat. It’s not a unifying threat,” the senior European official said.

With the cold war conditions that persuaded the US to stay engaged in Europe now in the past, some argue that it is inevitable Americans would at some point reconsider their role.

But the American military, diplomatic, and national security establishments are still globalist.

Globalism, after all, is their job.

And there are all those fans of all those books and essays about how awful the world would have been without America's past globalism, how awful it would be now without today's American globalism, and how awful it will be in the future without continuing, persistent, one might even say unrelenting American globalism.

All those people who think that America is, for the good of all mankind, the indispensable nation.

Or say they do to dress up their arrogance of power, their ambition, their delusions of national and personal grandeur, their imitation of global altruism, and their fear of losing such control as America, through its participation in those far-flung alliances as well as other global institutions, actually has of global events and developments.

These are the people who reject immediately and with angry contempt the least suggestion that, for most purposes and most of the time, the rest of the world and what happens in it is not our problem, no skin off our nose, no threat to us, and no business of ours.

These are the people who have irreversibly spun Russiagate into a seemingly endless barrage of pro-NATO, anti-Putin, anti-Russia propaganda and painted every effort of Trump to back off the most extreme of these globalist policies as bought and paid for treason.

Even as Trump rails against Nato, his administration – the Pentagon in particular – has been boosting its commitment to the alliance in resources and troops deployed on its eastern flank. 

This month’s summit will see the creation of two new commands, one on the US east coast to oversee the protection of transatlantic sea lanes, and another in Germany to run logistics to ensure that the alliance can reinforce quickly when threatened.

The new commitments reflect the atlanticist convictions of the US military and diplomatic corps, who may well be seeking to compensate for Trump’s anti-Nato rhetoric.