De Gaulle’s Final Showdown with NATO: The Last Battle

On this day 60 years ago, French President Charles de Gaulle began the process of his country’s withdrawal from NATO, which he called “the last important battle”, by withdrawing the naval forces from the NATO fleet.

Charles de Gaulle, a prominent political and military figure who led the resistance to the Nazi occupation and the first president of the French Fifth Republic after the defeat of Nazi Germany, began to resist hard American hegemony over NATO from the late 1950s. having prevented the placement of nuclear weapons by the Americans in the military bases of the alliance in France, he also rejected the project of creating a joint nuclear force and began work on his country’s nuclear program “Strike Force”.

The situation on the European scene in the early 1960s was similar to what exists now, when the US controls NATO, puts the Europeans in de facto rule every time, wages wars and invasions, dominates financial resources, so French President Charles de Gaulle decided to rebel against this reality and try to change it.

Later, under his leadership, Paris withdrew its navy from NATO command, and this operation began in the Mediterranean Sea, and in the summer of 1963 in the Atlantic Ocean.

By this time, France had greatly reduced its forces in NATO, leaving only two divisions instead of 14, and at the same time, de Gaulle sharply criticized the US actions in Vietnam, so that in May 1965 he called the country’s representatives to the Southeast Treaty Organization in Asia , whom the United States mobilized in the region under the pretext of opposing the communist current.

Moreover, de Gaulle, in the context of his desire to return his country to the ranks of the great powers, guaranteeing its independence from any influence, touched a sensitive American nerve when he made a statement in 1965 refusing to use the dollar in international transactions and proposing to replace it with a single gold standard. , and this against the backdrop of a sufficient amount of gold accumulating in Europe at that time, and France converted most of its dollar reserves into gold.

The French government dealt its painful blow to the United States in 1966 by issuing a memorandum of withdrawal from the Allied Joint Military Command.

In addition to all this, de Gaulle considered the then confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact a mistake and proposed the creation of a “united Europe from the Atlantic Ocean to the Urals.”

France’s decision to withdraw from the military part of NATO was a heavy blow to the United States, which had long been stuck in the Vietnamese quagmire, and all the governing bodies of the alliance had to be hastily transferred from France to Brussels, although France did not demand the removal of NATO’s political headquarters from its territory.

By April 1, 1967, the United States was forced to evacuate 29 bases with 33 thousand soldiers from France, and Paris retained its political participation in NATO.

US President Lyndon Johnson sharply criticized de Gaulle at the time and in a message expressed bewilderment to him about his position that the presence of allied troops on his country’s territory was detrimental to French sovereignty, emphasizing the importance of NATO in “achieving a more effective deterrence and peacekeeping in North Atlantic region”.

Charles de Gaulle did not care about the objections and irritations of Washington, and his country remained outside the military framework of NATO for a long time, even after his departure from the political scene in 1969 and his death in November 1970.

Despite all this, US hegemony over the political and military structures in the West strengthened over time, and instead of surrendering across the North Atlantic after the collapse of the socialist system, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Warsaw Pact, the alliance expanded rapidly to the east, while how American interventions and provocations continued, under the auspices of the Alliance around the world, and the world is again on the verge of a dangerous confrontation with two great powers, Russia and China.

While the United States continued to tighten its grip on NATO and its frenzied desire for and control of world hegemony according to its own interests and whims, “Galian” resistance in Europe weakened and then disappeared completely with the return of France to the military institutions of NATO. With the subjection of Paris, General Charles de Gaulle lost what he called “the last important war”.

Source: RT