Six on NATO: It’s Time to Disrupt NATO But not for the reasons Trump gives.; The End of NATO?; Saving NATO from Trump; NATO S
philip panaritis
"But the foreign-policy community reacted to Kennan and Lippmann’s proposals with a vehemence that stunned them both. Revealingly, however, that opposition didn’t center on anxiety over the Soviet menace, real or illusory, but rather on the now-familiar concerns regarding the imperative of American “leadership” and the need for America’s “continuing engagement.” Kennan was forced to conclude that American statesmen “would not have considered the withdrawal of a single American battalion from Western Germany even if the Russians had been willing to evacuate all of Eastern Germany and Poland by way of compensation,” and he came to realize that US preponderance in Europe served aspirations unrelated to stanching a Soviet threat. By enmeshing the Western European states’ (and Japan’s) foreign and military policies in alliances that it dominated, the United States permanently stifled the emergence of new, truly independent great powers—a development that it defined, and still defines, as ipso facto inimical to its interests and to the US-“led” (read: controlled) global order. Obscured by all the lofty rhetoric about transatlantic “partnership” was and is a simple fact: US policy in Europe has aimed not to counter others’ bids for hegemony but to perpetuate America’s own supremacy.
Thus it’s not surprising that the US foreign-policy establishment hardly saw the end of the Cold War as an occasion to dissolve the US-dominated NATO. Nevertheless, since the alliance had always been sold to the American public as the necessary counter to the ostensible Soviet threat, the foreign-policy mandarins frantically searched for a new rationale to justify NATO’s continued existence. The solution, to use the slogan that was embraced for this purpose, was to forestall NATO from going “out of business” by having it go “out of area”—the alliance would take the states of Central and Eastern Europe and, soon enough, the states of the former Soviet Union under its military, political, and nuclear umbrella."
Sanja and the nine others were killed on the 68th day of the Nato bombardment of Serbia, which was prosecuted – so it was claimed at the time, to protect the Muslim Albanians of Serbia’s province of Kosovo – and the alliance was by this stage growing desperate for a victory over Slobodan Milosevic. As many as 3,000 Muslims were executed and thrown into mass graves but most of the inhabitants of Kosovo had been driven from their homes by Serb militias after the bombing began, and Nato’s targets were becoming steadily more promiscuous, however often they made excuses for a total of more than 500 civilian deaths.
But the bombing of Varvarin – carried out by German Nato aircraft, according to a group of German lawyers and by the Serbs themselves – was particularly frightful. Nor were the reasons for the attack on the feast of the Pentecost – a Sunday – credible. Nato claimed that the narrow iron bridge “could have been used by tanks” but in fact it was scarcely wide enough for a car to pass. Nato headquarters chose to give no reason why its aircraft, having bombed the Varvarin bridge at around 1pm when the village was crowded, especially around the Greek Orthodox church close to the bridge, should have returned to bomb the rescuers, Sanja Milenkovic among them. Many of the wounded fell into the Velika Morava river, dark brown and fast-flowing to this day."
"Before the jamboree, NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg (one of those selected for a Trumpian harangue), recounted in a speech on 21 June that “NATO has totally transformed our presence in Afghanistan from a big combat operation with more than 100,000 to now 16,000 troops conducting training, assisting and advising.” But then he had a bit of a rethink when he was asked a question about whether NATO had learnt any lessons that might make it think about “intervening in the future.” To give him his due, Stoltenberg replied that he thought “one of the lessons we have learned from Iraq, from Afghanistan, from Libya, is that military intervention is not always solving all problems.”
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He is absolutely right about that, because the US-NATO military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have been catastrophic.
It is intriguing that NATO’s secretary general can at last admit that military muscle doesn’t solve every problem, but he did not expand on the subject of Libya, which unhappy country was destroyed by US-NATO military intervention in 2011, and it is interesting to reflect on that particular NATO debacle, because it led directly to expansion of the Islamic State terrorist group, a prolonged civil war, a vast number of deaths, and hideous suffering by desperate refugees trying to flee from Libya across the Mediterranean."
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To be sure, over the past few decades, NATO’s primary focus was on peacekeeping operations in distant places, rather than on its core function of territorial defense. For most European member states, the peace dividend from the alliance’s operations justified cuts in domestic military spending.
But this attitude changed in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and launched secretive military incursions into Eastern Ukraine. Since then, NATO member states’ defense budgets have increased by around 4% per year on average, making the 2024 target eminently achievable.https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-nato-russian-aggression-by-carl-bildt-2018-07##
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