The NATO Treaty of 1949 is a remarkably short document — shorter than our Constitution — and the meat of it is in Article 5, which basically says: An attack on any member is an attack on all the members, and all the members will come to the assistance of the member being attacked.
Now, on the one hand, people would say that NATO isn’t a government. It’s just a treaty. But if we look at the Declaration of Independence, it says that governments are formed to protect rights, and derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
And isn’t that exactly what’s going on with NATO? Each country is protecting the rights of the people in the other countries to conduct their own business, in their own way, without interference. The fact that Germany will help protect France from attack doesn’t mean Germany gets to tell France which rights it must respect, or what kinds of policies it must adopt, or how those policies are to be paid for.
Germany can make suggestions about those things , but it can’t impose those suggestions without France’s consent.
It’s just a mutual protection society. And that, at its heart, is the kind of government contemplated by the Declaration of Independence. I will help you protect your rights, and you will help me protect mine — but that offer of protection doesn’t mean either of us can interfere with how the other chooses to exercise those rights.
I’ll help you protect your rights to property and privacy, and you’ll return the favor. But what you do in the privacy of your own property isn’t any of my business, and vice versa.
I’ll help you prevent anyone from disarming you, or controlling what you say, or persecuting you for your religious beliefs, and you’ll do the same for me. But what weapons you choose to carry for your protection, or what you choose to say, or how you choose to worship, aren’t any of my business, and vice versa.
What the Declaration says is that an attack on the rights of any American is an attack on the rights of all Americans, and we can form a government to coordinate our mutual assistance in protecting ourselves from such attacks.
But if such a government is created to protect our rights, then we can’t use it as an excuse to violate those rights. So I can’t take your property to give it to someone I think needs it more. I can’t punish you for ingesting substances, or engaging in relationships, or making statements, or owning weapons, that I don’t happen to approve of. I can’t force you to ask me for permission to engage in voluntary transactions with other people. And so on.
That goes beyond mutual protection, into mutual exploitation.
So the question is: Could we peel back what we have now (a mutual exploitation society) to get to what we’re supposed to have (a mutual protection society)? The question seems especially relevant just now, when our federal and state governments are basically husbanding us like farm animals.
Can it be done? What NATO shows it that it can. We’ve been doing it for 70 years. It’s just that we’ve been showing other countries the respect that we refuse to show our own citizens. Maybe this would be a good time to change that.
