Since 1992 I have not been a fan of NATO….in the beginning it was to solve the possible expansion of the former USSR…..after the break-up I did not see a threat(at that time) to Europe so I thought Clinton should have dissolved the group and let Europe come up with their own defense plan if ever needed.
I still am not a fan of NATO because I think they are expanding its reach far beyond Europe.
In recent years NATO has created more problems than it solves….
It has become fashionable among the mainstream western commentariat to claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had nothing to do with NATO expansion, but as recently explained by Philippe Lemoine for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, that’s a completely false narrative that requires snipping past comments made by Putin out of the context in which they were made. Many western experts warned for years in advance that NATO expansion would lead to a conflict like the one we’re seeing today, and they were of course correct.
The recent push to expand NATO in Ukraine along with nations like Finland and Sweden as justified by “Russian aggression” is a good example of what professor Richard Sakwa has called the “fateful geographical paradox: that NATO exists to manage the risks created by its existence.” As the late scholar on US-Russia relations Stephen Cohen explained years before the Ukraine crisis erupted in 2014, Moscow sees NATO as an “American sphere of influence,” and the expansion of NATO and NATO influence as expansion of that sphere. It reacts to this with hostility just as the US would react to China or Russia building up aggressive military alliances on its borders, and arguably with vastly more restraint than the US would.
Other future examples of Sakwa’s fateful geographical paradox are likely to include the push to reconfigure NATO into an alliance dedicated to “restraining” China, which of course means halting China’s rise on the world stage and working to constrict, balkanize and usurp it. A recent Financial Times article titled “Washington steps up pressure on European allies to harden China stance” gives new detail to this agenda:
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/nato-exists-to-solve-the-problems
I still think that NATO should be replaced with a European lead group….after all it is their necks on the line if Russia is truly the threat that so many think it is these days.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”