I won't attempt to defend NATO interventions in other countries, but disbanding it like the Warsaw Pact was never a real option so long as Russia continued to maintain a significant military capability including nuclear weapons. The Warsaw Pact was never a real thing to begin with. It was a total fiction, not a voluntary alliance of (somewhat) equal sovereign states like NATO. All of the other Warsaw Pact members were under military occupation by the USSR and had zero real decision making authority. Any attempt to go their own way was immediately, violently crushed. So dissolving the Warsaw Pact when the USSR disintegrated meant nothing.
And before someone tries to draw a false equivalence between the USSR's role in the Warsaw Pact and the USA's role in NATO, those were hardly the same. NATO members were free to leave at any time without fear of a US invasion. France actually did withdraw from the NATO command structure for a while and nothing happened to them.
Yes, Yugo and Albania broke from the Soviet sphere early in the 1950s.
Look Im not saying Albania was a swell place to be in 1950. It sucked. Commies are terrible terrible people. But the relations in the Eastern block were far more nuanced than the caricature we're spoon fed.
> Any attempt to go their own way was immediately, violently crushed. So dissolving the Warsaw Pact when the USSR disintegrated meant nothing.
that’s not completely accurate. e.g. Romania even publicly condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia. They didn’t support Russian foreign policy that much in the 70’s and 80’s either with no direct consequences.
While obviously it was Moscow keeping the communists in charge, the local dictators supported the suppression of the reforms in Cezhoslovakia largely out of self-interest.
When the Berlin Wall came down, there were not a few people still around with vivid memories of what 'Unified Germany' had got up to in the 20th century, so there was that. Just sayin.
Well, that's why disbanding NATO and giving military control of Europe to a German-centric organization was viewed with, well, uncertainty about what they might get up to. Given the persistence of the Nazi mentality in that region, one might also point out. It's not like the Japanese were the only ones with their holy shrines in the mountains to fallen heroes, was it?
And before someone tries to draw a false equivalence between the USSR's role in the Warsaw Pact and the USA's role in NATO, those were hardly the same. NATO members were free to leave at any time without fear of a US invasion. France actually did withdraw from the NATO command structure for a while and nothing happened to them.