This is the Friends of Mr. Debating Society. I am Gaias, John Bachelwood, Sramanicus, Mark of Laos.

We have our cup of wine, whereby the Thames, we can see 2,000 years out, all the troubles that will come to

Roman Britain when the Romans leave somewhere between the beginning of the 4th and 5th century, but really abandoned by the 5th century.

And what will happen afterwards are the invasions of the tribes from the mainland

and other terrible events that will reemerge as Britain.

Great Britain. And we can see all that, but we're looking at the 21st century because Britain is part of NATO.

NATO is a successful alliance formed in 1948. Well, actually the foundation is a little iffy, but it dates to the 1948.

With the crisis caused by the Russian aggression. And NATO's success has turned on the success of the first Cold War.

We're now in a second Cold War, so-called. I don't... history is going to decide what this period is called. I'm just guessing.

And the second Cold War has different circumstances. And NATO is one of the circumstances that's changed, is NATO's no longer being supported by the Republican Party.

Dwight David Eisenhower rode to the rescue of Korea by leaving Columbia University and going to Europe in uniform and rallying NATO.

This is during the period of the Korean invasion when the American troops were being thrown back down the peninsula and all was lost.

Well, Eisenhower put it together in 50 and held it together for the next two years and then was drafted by Sherman Adams and other Republicans to lead the party.

NATO only strengthened under Eisenhower's terms, 53 to 61.

Since then, the presumption has been that NATO is a Republican favorite and that the Democratic Party has enjoyed on again, off again, the anti-war status in America.

Well, no more. Germanicus, it's a puzzle. I don't ask how it happened. I want to make sure that I'm seeing the same Republican Party I've always seen.

This looks like an anti-war party saying, what's in it for us? Saying, what is the national interest? And speaking poorly of someone called a neocon? Am I observing that correctly?

Oh, you are so correct in your magisterial observation. The Republican Party was founded and developed to lead America through the Civil War and after.

In the 1850s, because of its opposition to the war party that was as southerners and their key financial supporter in New York City called the democracy.

They weren't called Democrats, then they were called the democracy. And they were the party of war. They were the ones who manufactured the Mexican war, which was all about the expansion of slavery.

Before that, of course, with Andrew Jackson as the cheerleader, it had been the Texas independence and then Texas being incorporated into the US.

It was all about the slaveocracy, the slave power, the oligarchs, the plantation aristocracy. And the Democrats today don't seem necessarily all that different.

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