If you want to reach the kids, you've got to go where the kids are. Where are they right now? With their devices, of course. And what are they doing on those devices? Listening to podcasts, of course.
This, presumably, was the reason behind the release of a corker: NATO Through Time, in which a grandfatherly former NATO official and three young and extremely well-informed co-hosts plunge into the past. What's next, Yalta: The Musical? It would probably be a more successful venture, because Yalta was once; NATO is forever. From age to age, a new generation of supporters must be rallied, and that is becoming the 13th labor of Hercules.
If the thudding disappointment of Unfrosted taught us anything, it's that young people hate Boomer nostalgia. And NATO is the rotary phone of geopolitical alliances. I grew up a long time ago, when the world was every bit as complicated and dangerous as it is today.
But, if only as a reassuring fiction, the American president was often referred to as "the leader of the free world." America was the most powerful country in history, and it was sworn to protect—and was protected by, should the terrible day come—an alliance of other free nations. NATO was principally a firebreak against the Soviet Union and remains one against Russia.
But Barack Obama felt that a foreign policy in which Russia was our chief enemy was a little old-fashioned. Too From Russia With Love. Too Rocky IV and Rambo III.
In a presidential debate in 2012, he mocked Mitt Rom.
