NATO Dinosaur Plods On
By Finian Cunningham
December 06, 2019 "Information
Clearing House"
- The splits and rancor
at the NATO summit this week could not
be concealed, even by strained calls for
“unity”. The US-led military alliance is
a dinosaur well past its extinction
date.
Boris
Johnson, the British prime minister,
did his best to rally a sense of unity
as the two-day summit hosted by Britain
came to a close. The event was supposed
to be a celebration, marking
the 70th anniversary of NATO’s founding.
Far from being a “happy birthday” party,
the NATO gathering descended into
embarrassing farce with bickering and
jibes. Video footage appeared to show
the French, British and Canadian leaders
making fun of American President Donald
Trump over his rambling press
conferences. Trump then hit back,
accusing Canada’s Justin Trudeau of
being “two-faced”.
There were
other spats, between France and Turkey
over Ankara’s military incursion into
northern Syria against Kurdish
militants, whom France and the US regard
as allies. Turkey
was also chided for buying the S-400 air
defense system
from Russia.
However, the biggest clash came
between Trump and France’s Emmanuel
Macron, who was taken to task by the
American leader for his recent media
remarks about NATO being “brain
dead”. Trump said those comments
were “very,
very nasty”
and “disrespectful”. Macron bridled
at their joint press conference,
saying he stood by his earlier
critical comments.
It
was toe-curling stuff, especially the
lecture on politeness coming from Trump
who himself has several times in the
past disparaged NATO as “obsolete”.
Jens Stoltenberg, the Norwegian
secretary-general, tried to smooth
over the ruffled relations by
claiming: “NATO is the most
successful alliance in history
because we’ve changed at the world
has changed.” He went on to describe
the 29-nation military bloc as
“agile, active… adapting.”
That was after he pointed out that the
combined NATO military spend was set for
massive increases. An extra $400 billion
will be forked out by the alliance by
2024, said Stoltenberg, on top of the
current $1 trillion.
Already NATO’s total budget is 20 times
that of Russia and five times that of
China.
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This is not about being “agile” or
“adapting”. It’s about what NATO has
always done: actively expand its
military forces on a global scale in a
way that deliberately destabilizes
security and thus creates “challenges”
that “need” to be responded to.
At
this year’s summit, the NATO leaders
have “for the first time” discussed
China as a collective security
challenge. They also discussed making
“space an operational domain” for
military technology.
And, of course, Russia featured as the
time-honored “bogeyman”, with
Stoltenberg talking about increasing
battalions on Russia’s borders to
“protect Poland and the Baltic region”.
There were also a few token statements
about “fighting terrorism” thrown into
the mission mix during the two-day
summit near London.
But the “anti-terror” platitudes
can’t hide the fundamental purpose
of NATO which is expansionism and
the creation of international
tensions, conflicts and enemies, or
more politely “adversaries”.
When NATO was founded in 1949 until 1991
it comprised 12 members. The
organization was supposed to “defend”
Europe from attack by the Soviet Union.
That was always a much-overblown claim
even back in the Cold War decades. Since
the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact
dissolved, NATO has more than doubled
its size with 17 new member states, most
of them proximate to Russia’s borders.
The recruitment goes on, with talk of
Georgia and the Ukraine joining in the
future. Yet NATO inverts Russia’s
legitimate concerns over an increasing
security threat, by absurdly claiming
that Russia is threatening Europe.
It
wasn’t Russia that attacked the former
Yugoslavia and the Balkans in the late
1990s, nor conducted regime-change wars
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.
It wasn’t Russia that oversaw a coup
d’état in Ukraine in 2014. In all the
mayhem over the past three decades since
the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO has
relentlessly ramped up foreign wars,
destabilizing the entire globe.
Adding China and the militarization of
space as new remits to its mission, this
is NATO seeking to expand its real
“insecurity agenda”, in contrast to its
official claims of maintaining global
security.
The truth is NATO is a front
organization for the military-industrial
complex that drives the
corporate-capitalist economies in North
America and Europe, but primarily in the
US. Without NATO’s annual $1 trillion
spend – soon to escalate further – the
militarized economies of the US and its
allies would flounder from the lack of
massive public subsidy year after year.
If
NATO were disbanded and the war
economies of the US and its allies were
to cease, then more civilized economies
would lead to greater social equality
and democracy, which would not be
tolerated in Western plutocracies.
The NATO dinosaur plods on… for now. But
the disaster of poverty and
unsustainable international tensions
that it leaves in its wake suggest that
the beast is soon heading for
long-overdue extinction. Either that, or
the planet could very well be made
extinct from its reprehensible
rampaging.
Finian Cunningham
has written extensively on international
affairs, with articles published in
several languages. He is a Master’s
graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and
worked as a scientific editor for the
Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge,
England, before pursuing a career in
newspaper journalism. He is also a
musician and songwriter. For nearly 20
years, he worked as an editor and writer
in major news media organisations,
including The Mirror, Irish Times and
Independent.
This article was originally
published by "Sputnik"
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