Most people professing an interest in international relations know that NATO was created in 1949 to ‘keep the Soviet Union down, the Americans in, and the Germans down’. Moscow was forced to react by setting up the Warsaw Pact, after NATO had rebuffed Moscow’s efforts to join it. NATO was meant to expire in April 1999. So what went wrong, and why has NATO become an enormous organisation with worldwide aspirations, attacking various countries without United Nations authorisation?
Only history can explain: 1989 was a crucial year. The Berlin Wall collapsed, and the world thought that the Cold War had ended. Germany would reunite, and NATO would die ten years later in an outbreak of peace and international brotherhood. But old habits die hard. First there was the Anglo-Saxon geopolitical obsession with keeping Russia away from Germany and Western Europe; second was the aim of keeping Europe under NATO’s thumb; but third, and perhaps most important, the obsession with making ever more profits for the shareholders of the military-industrial-congressional complex of America. This whole question of corporate greed connects to the West’s (i.e. the EU’s and NATO’s) expansion, a combination of thoughtless ambition and gluttony.
From 1989 onwards, Moscow naïvely chose to believe western promises that NATO would not expand eastwards, and even began to co-operate with NATO in 1991, within the framework of the North Atlantic Co-operation Council, and then the Partnership for Peace Programme in 1994. But money-grubbing shareholders, fanatical neo-cons and so-called ‘liberals’ put paid to peace, by manically expanding NATO, instead of terminating it, and bombing Belgrade for 78 days without the permission of the United Nations. In the words of one expert, ‘this was a classic example of image taking precedence over substance, which is not uncommon in today’s political world. It is often associated with a rhetorical style that is more concerned with effect than with accuracy.’ NATO found the bombing a good way to promote its 50th anniversary, when it was already beyond its shelf life. Russia understandably became increasingly worried as the West destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Syria was the final straw, and Moscow had little choice but to react militarily. As for the EU, it expanded too rapidly in 2004, leading to a certain measure of administrative confusion, pleasing America and Britain, since the expansion weakened the Franco-German axis to the benefit of anti-Russian Poland and the Baltic statelets: indeed, only one year after France and Germany had publicly opposed the invasion of Iraq, the expansion put paid to their sudden streak of independence vis-à-vis America, and they are now back in Washington’s anti-Russian camp. As for Britain, ‘NATO is and will be the only organisation for collective defence in Europe.
NATO seems to thrive on war, and therefore needs enemies. It has become as much a business profit-making body as an exporter of geo-killing and western ‘freedom’. The EU is now literally part of America, a veritable geopolitical absurdity, given America’s physical distance from Europe. The chief geopolitical culprit is actually Britain, which has chosen to be America’s Trojan Horse in Europe, by sticking hair on its chest and piggy-backing American foreign (i.e. military) policy, and thus participating in the interests of the American military-industrial-congressional complex.
But Europe is not enough for NATO, which will be setting up a NATO liaison office in Tokyo, using it as a hub for co-operation with Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea. Needless to say, this has infuriated China, since it will upset the regional balance and egg on some of its neighbours to poke the Chinese dragon and be more aggressive. NATO certainly seems to have transmogrified from a defensive into an offensive organisation, spreading like an invasive cancer wherever it can.
In the words of one expert, NATO consumes rather than creates security. In a world where the communists have lost their god, and the capitalists their devil, capitalism is running wild, as the current crisis shows. Of course, we have been there before. Two quotes by Albert Einstein, from 1934 and 1949 respectively, show how then can be now: ‘The armament industry is indeed one of the greatest dangers that beset Mankind; it is the hidden evil power behind the rampant nationalism which is rampant everywhere.’ ‘The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evil.’
With the current Moscow-, Beijing- and Delhi-instigated restructuring of the world economy, a ray of hope has appeared: when Russia achieves its objectives in the Ukraine, and puts a stop to the madness of the money-grubbers, we may at last see a more balanced and safer world.
