This is the Friends Vista Debating Society. I'm John Bachelord with Professor H.J. McHunder, six capital, six points of view. We're on the Brussels, the twin capital of NATO and the European Union. The European Union is caught up in concerns about the recovery from the pandemic, the very high inflation, which appears to be moderating mildly.

But the struggle will continue. NATO, on the other hand, is looking for ammo everywhere. Professor NATO is a question mark. Is it capable of taking the burden of this war on its shoulders? And also after the war, is it capable of maintaining its defenses against whatever remains of the Russian Federation?

Well, of course, NATO is capable of doing all of those things. The question is whether they, at what point they will be convinced that the United States isn't going to take up all those burdens and let them go back to whatever it is that they do.

I think that the end of the war is going to lead to a sort of an agonizing re-appraisal, the coin of phrase, for NATO countries. Because if you think of Brussels, Brussels is not, it may be quite sensibly located, if you're interested in Britain, France, and Germany, and a potential conflict.

But if the center of gravity, or the pivot point, or whatever, of Eurasia is moving as I described, well to the east of Berlin, and even closer to Moscow, then it is to Berlin.

Then NATO is utterly marginalized, that is to say the core states of NATO, the Western states of NATO, the ones that understand that their necks on the block are already really hard of this new hard atom, or this new hard alliance of the Bucharest Nine and the other states there that are simply not going to be able to take up all those things.

So NATO is not going to allow Russia to win. So NATO could unite pool resources, have a unified command, even Macron. Can you imagine to go all arguing this? Macron says it's time to have a European army.

This is only 70 years after the end of World War II, and the President of France has figured out that it would make sense to have one big strong Russian army, not our rather NATO army, and not to have French army, which attempts to make France a superpower, like the Soviet Union, or the United States, which is what Tagalog had never get over the fact that France was no longer what she'd been under Louis Vuitton.

It was either the 14th or whatever. But if NATO does not unite, and become influential, then the danger she faces is that she's going to be sucked into large-scale chaos, because not far to her east, I suspect there is going to be fighting.

I really don't see Russia making a transition from the, as it turns out, disaster's rule of Mr. Putin to whatever is going to come next. It's hard for me to take seriously the idea that it's going to be peaceful. I think it's going to be conflictual. Yet on the other hand, I find that I find it hard to make myself believe what my own logic tells me is the case.

The other thing that NATO has to deal with is that there are new players coming in, because I said Russia has 14 neighbors, and China has got 9 countries that are right border with her, and then she has.

I mean, you're all of a sudden you're unrolling the, you're enlarging the sort of the tennis court of global politics from a relatively cozy. I mean, you could get from London to Moscow by train in about two and a half days.

To something that goes all the way to the Pacific, and it is going to touch till touch on China, Turkey, Iran, India, these are all going to be new players. So there's going to have to be a tremendous amount of vision and careful and very competent statesmanship.

The concern also about Brussels is about Brussels and NATO is the ammo. That is not something you could snap figures fingers and find immediately. The equipment is flowing to Ukraine.

The ammo though is running low. The Russians keep up a much heavier fire rate than the Ukrainians suggesting that what comes after the war is a consideration of what reestablishing the industrial base just quickly. What are your thoughts about?

Well, they're going to have to really we're going to have to reestablish the military industrial complex because what we see now is that we what we have was basically, it was been cut a lot since 1991, but we were preparing to fight the Soviet Union, which is a formidable, formidable power.

It turns out that all the stuff we created for that isn't even enough to keep Ukraine supplied. Now this is the way the countries are that we're faced bigger challenges that see than we ever have before.

Our fleet is below 300 and under this administration is going to shrink by two ships this year.

That's not how you prepare. That's not how you you have to have a strong army and strong military to keep peace. That's the most important thing.

And then if you get in the war, you've got to have enough stuff so that you can push the war back and sort of tie it down before it gets before it gets better.

I agree with you, professor, but we're going to a capital that is in doubt. That is we're going to DC. It is not at all clear that DC is looking at the geopolitical danger of Crimea, nor the geopolitical threat of the people's Republic of China's PLA Navy, which is now larger than the US Navy.

When we come back, we'll be at Washington DC asking point of view with Professor H.J. McHenner International Relations, the Friends of History Debating Society. I'm John Bachelor.

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