The difference between NATO and the United Nations is pluralism. The UN Charter is explicitly predicated on the sovereign equality of states. It is an ideal, to be sure, perhaps more honoured in the breach than the observance, but NATO’s ideal is the opposite.

Where there is a human rights regime, especially if it is an international one as in Europe, the legal system is no longer rooted in social reality. It is no longer constitutive or protective of that reality; it becomes, on the contrary, an instrument for reforming or deforming it.

The U.S.A. was determined to unite Europe militarily, politically, and economically for its own purposes, and the Cold War provided much of the pretext.