In the aftermath of the cold
war one can ask how N.A.T.O. is relevant to European security. After all
N.A.T.O. was formed in response to the post-World War Two chaos of Europe that was divided between the Soviet bloc and the west. When the dust
settled after Soviets rolled back the Nazis from the East and other allied
powers from the west Europe was divided from the core right at Berlin North Atlantic alliance ‘across the pond’. America Western Europe against, primarily, the Soviet Union though any existential threat to N.A.T.O. members
would be met by all.
Is N.A.T.O. still relevant in the post-cold war political and economic environment? Its foundation is one of conventional historical nationalism and international conventions rather than that of transcendental economies flowing beyond national borders with instant global communications, stock trades etc.
Since the Cold War, N.A.T.O. interventions have been out of phase with its reason for being. Intervening in the Yugoslav civil war was not an action in response to an attack on a N.A.T.O. member, neither was Kuwait a member of N.A.T.O., nor did Iraq attack a member of N.A.T.O. before several N.A.T.O. members joined the coalition of the willing to invade and occupy Iraq. It is difficult to say that the Afghanistan attacked a N.A.T.O. member. Instead Khalid Sheik Mohammed-a terrorist organizer from Baluchistan, designed a plan to crash planes into building across the U.S.A., the international terrorist organizer and financier Osama Bin Laden scaled back the plan and focused it upon New York and Washington D.C. and the Taliban provided refuge to the terrorists. The decision to send N.A.T.O. to occupy Afghanistan was the knee-jerk response-a policy that has been costly with uncertain long range results.
In the year 1994 while N.A.T.O. was bombing the heck out of Serbia Russian President Boris Yeltsin acting under Bill Clinton’s influence signed away the Ukraine. With uncertainty even as to who or what a hypothetical new Russian Federation would be or become in the post-Soviet new Russian order and without an effective military at his command Yeltsin gave up on the indefensible Ukraine. N.A.T.O. was not in disarray. The U.S. military forces in Europe and worldwide were primed and ready to attack a Soviet enemy that had dissolved. The power of a Yeltsin government to hold on to Ukraine was not existent. Like V.I. Lenin giving away Ukraine to a victorious Germany that had defeated the Tsar’s army as a land-for-peace deal, Yeltsin gave away Ukraine. Moral arguments of the west to hold on to all of the Ukraine are not well-founded. Instead they lie in force de majeure.
Western nations have historically sought to capture the Ukraine from Russia taking it like an overly burdensome fruit waiting on a branch for plucking. Swedes, Teutonic Knights, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm and Adolph Hitler were prior aggressive warriors invading Russia. The Kaiser, like President Bill Clinton, possessed military power advantages over Russia and Boris Yeltsin like Vladimir Lenin before him signed away the Ukraine to buy a period of relief. This time Washington provided certain economic benefits yet those would not prevent a natural long-term effort for Russia to recover its missing limb. Russia is probably not planning an invasion of Paris or battle of Britain.
N.A.T.O. construction of long-range political instability that promotes curtailment of Russian-N.A.T.O. counter-terror and economic security is bad policy, yet that is the way bureaucracies surge ahead inertially as the most doctrinaire rise to the top pounding on the pulpit of paranoia. Democracy morphing to corporatism are run from the top-down like structuring programming language. The people of Ukraine probably want peace, security, prosperity and freedom and don’t care much who is running the government in an era when governments are run by and for elites- elites that don’t mind breaking a few hundred thousand eggs to make Wall Street omelets rise in value.
So today Russia is struggling to recover some of its Ukrainian possession or at least secure independence for Russians living in the region. N.A.T.O. Chief Rasmussen made grandiose, nationalistic form statements about international obligations of Russian (to give up the Ukraine). The natural Russian sphere of influence and security in Ukraine is targeted by anachronistic N.A.T.O. leadership. Without Russia as an enemy N.A.T.O. has little obvious reason to exist except perhaps to keep its own members in line.
One of the primary roles of N.A.T.O. is to defend not just against external threats but against internal threats too. Europeans traditionally fought themselves or even attacked the U.S.A. (burning the U.S. capitol in 1812). It was good to know that with N.A.T.O. formed the werewolf problem of recrudescent Germen Nazis or Italian fascists would not too easily recur, It was good to know that France and Germany could forge a new identity together fighting communism at least before French President Charles DeGaulle withdrew France from N.A.T.O. membership. It may be that N.A.T.O. wasn’t too helpful to France in the French-Algerian war and he resented that. If European N.A.T.O members hadn’t supported America’s Afghanistan invasion its leadership would have worried about American support if Russia should attack-something it wasn’t likely to do.
So far as I know Russia has never attacked the West. Adolph Hitler signed a deal with Stalin enabling Stalin to attack Finland-yet that was a special case with Stalin perhaps a little incentivized to appease the dictator in return for some real estate. With Hitler receiving assurances that Stalin would not attack from the east if the Nazis attacked the west, the Nazi game was on. European N.A.T.O. memberships preclude much potential for intra-European military scrumming.
Europeans, it should be recalled, are quite subject to social determinism. There is less social room for movement as well as less vacant land space for movement or expansion in Europe than the U.S.A.. Lebensraum was a rational for Nazis. Conflicts often arise because people are unable to leave their highly determined social roles-even at a national level. The First World War was set into motion with automatic alliances and mobilizations.
Americans had less physical social determinism thanEuropeans because of the unpopulated land where only 3 or 4 millions pre-Columbian orgin natives lived (in the area that is today the U.S.A.). The recent Obamacare health policy is a movement of modern social determinism snaring every citizen for corporatism and making it difficult to live a poor nomadic national existence with health care. That freedom of land, movement and social existence in American heritage makes it difficult for Americans to recognize how much social determinism still shapes political affairs in Europe especially in how political actors fill their roles. EC changes and the ending of the Iron Curtain permitted more freedom of movement for ordinary people yet powers of control will inevitably re-cinch determinist nooses.
Americans have supplied military muscle to keep Europe free from either German hostile takeover or communist dictatorship. Supplying the intellectual muscle is a little more challenging for Americans. In the present political environment Americans should think hard about how to let Russia have hegemony east of the Dnepr in Ukraine and return to normalize economic relations and close social cooperation with Russia-a nation in land-population ratio more like America than Europe. There are pressing economic and environmental concerns that need to be addressed directly as demographics of the Earth continue to outpace the capacity of institutions to recognize and successful respond to the challenges. The Ukrainian billionaire President wants NATO to fight his battles for him with the warning to Western Europe that the Eastern Ukraine could be the start of a domino effect where all of the EC fall one at a time to Vladimir Putin. I can hardly wait till Vienna becomes the winter Kremin and London the major producer of vodka.
The United States and Europe as N.A.T.O. members face few conventional threats. South Americans don’t seem likely to invade Europe soon though Taco Bell may be expanding its menu. Australia and Africa don’t seem ready to kick over Norway or Sweden. China is a potential future military threat yet that’s kind of tentative right now . Besides, China is a fertile nation for economic investment-it is inconvenient to posture about a Chinese military threat for N.A.T.O. leaders. So Russia is the old reliable threat for N.A.T.O. leaders. Like preceding large post-Korean war era interventions the object nation N.A.T.O. is concerned over is not a member of N.A.T.O., nor should it be. Russian, European and American economic security are threatened and adversely impacted by N.A.T.O. actions concerning Ukraine and Syria.
One of the troubles with expanding a political alliance too broadly is that the potential for internal breakup increases with size as do the problems implicit in its breakdown. When an alliance is a mile wide and an inch deep it may freeze and wind can transport stones around rolling over the surface (that makes as much sense as some present NATO policy). N.A.T.O. parameters for mutual defense against external threats have become less effective as the nature of the threats have changed. China defends against Muslim terror and is not a member of N.A.T.O.
With the rise of ISIS in the post-invasion chaos of Iraq there are far more terrorists with excellent training funded ironically by American and N.A.T.O. efforts than in 2001. N.A.T.O. members promoted development of the Syrian Civil war with rhetorical and material support perhaps to give themselves something to so. With the appearance and proliferation of new technology in that region counseling patience and slow political evolution organically would have been a better way. At least three million people would not have been made homeless with something like 194,000 dead.
Did promotion of the Syrian civil war enhance N.A.T.O. member security? Britain recently declared its second highest terror alert level –severe- because of the danger posed by Caliphate members with British passports who might return home to blast civilians to bits. The Middle East is saturated with loose plastic explosives and ISIS has more than a half billion dollars in cash after robbing a bank in Mosul. ISIS might afford to exfiltrate packages of semtex to England. The U.S. Government is concerned about American citizens-some from Minneapolis Minnesota that are fighting for the Caliphate in Iraq or Syria who might return to attack Boston, New York, San Francisco, D.C. or London-hubs of radical godless atheist, homosexual politics.
Muslim terrorism is the greatest clear and present threat to N.A.T.O. nations. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has warned the west about the Caliphate's potential for attack. Prior N.A.T.O. responses have thrown accelerants upon formation of Muslim terrorists. Though Russia has been very helpful in combating Muslim terrorism since the end of the cold war, N.A.T.O. is quick to put economic sanctions on Russia, stimulate a civil war in Syria and Ukraine-where no conflict would have arisen if the natural balance was not changed with interventionist policies, and N.A.T.O. member security has been degraded.
Global Islam has no conventional borders. The Islamic State aka the Caliphate synthetically appearing in areas of Syria and Iraq is an example of the transcendental nature of the Muslim political identity. In the U.S.A. it is called the nation of Islam; the fundamental concept of Islam is a world without borders ruled by Sharia law wherein all bow to Mecca. N.A.T.O. has no rational strategy for addressing its primary political-para-military challenge as it has allowed liberal Muslim immigration policies for decades.
N.A.T.O. member immigration policies were set in the post-Nazi era to act against racism and to exploit cheap labor from immigrants. The redistribution of people of various races for racial reasons seems implicitly racist, yet the prevailing sentiments about racial redistribution of an historical period do follow economic interests. It is worth remembering that the United States with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world besides that of the Soviet Union exercised a lot of political influence…there were many yes men nations in Europe both former allies and former enemies. That much power can dull a nation’s need for critical political thought-it simply has so much power that a reductionism to us or them may be all that is necessary.
Being us is the infallible advantage it might be thought. In that security of power arise the inflexibility and ossification that many mature powers have experienced over the course of history as Toynbee noted in A Study of History. The philosopher Allan Watts wrote a book named The Wisdom of Insecurity. Whatever gives political leaders cause to circumstantially reevaluate their political situation may be good. Simple confident assumptions about power structures and threats that are more real in inertial appearance rather than actual, and hidden dangers built structurally in one’s own actions can make N.AT.O. ineffective at defending European and American security.
Since the Cold War, N.A.T.O. interventions have been out of phase with its reason for being. Intervening in the Yugoslav civil war was not an action in response to an attack on a N.A.T.O. member, neither was Kuwait a member of N.A.T.O., nor did Iraq attack a member of N.A.T.O. before several N.A.T.O. members joined the coalition of the willing to invade and occupy Iraq. It is difficult to say that the Afghanistan attacked a N.A.T.O. member. Instead Khalid Sheik Mohammed-a terrorist organizer from Baluchistan, designed a plan to crash planes into building across the U.S.A., the international terrorist organizer and financier Osama Bin Laden scaled back the plan and focused it upon New York and Washington D.C. and the Taliban provided refuge to the terrorists. The decision to send N.A.T.O. to occupy Afghanistan was the knee-jerk response-a policy that has been costly with uncertain long range results.
In the year 1994 while N.A.T.O. was bombing the heck out of Serbia Russian President Boris Yeltsin acting under Bill Clinton’s influence signed away the Ukraine. With uncertainty even as to who or what a hypothetical new Russian Federation would be or become in the post-Soviet new Russian order and without an effective military at his command Yeltsin gave up on the indefensible Ukraine. N.A.T.O. was not in disarray. The U.S. military forces in Europe and worldwide were primed and ready to attack a Soviet enemy that had dissolved. The power of a Yeltsin government to hold on to Ukraine was not existent. Like V.I. Lenin giving away Ukraine to a victorious Germany that had defeated the Tsar’s army as a land-for-peace deal, Yeltsin gave away Ukraine. Moral arguments of the west to hold on to all of the Ukraine are not well-founded. Instead they lie in force de majeure.
Western nations have historically sought to capture the Ukraine from Russia taking it like an overly burdensome fruit waiting on a branch for plucking. Swedes, Teutonic Knights, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm and Adolph Hitler were prior aggressive warriors invading Russia. The Kaiser, like President Bill Clinton, possessed military power advantages over Russia and Boris Yeltsin like Vladimir Lenin before him signed away the Ukraine to buy a period of relief. This time Washington provided certain economic benefits yet those would not prevent a natural long-term effort for Russia to recover its missing limb. Russia is probably not planning an invasion of Paris or battle of Britain.
N.A.T.O. construction of long-range political instability that promotes curtailment of Russian-N.A.T.O. counter-terror and economic security is bad policy, yet that is the way bureaucracies surge ahead inertially as the most doctrinaire rise to the top pounding on the pulpit of paranoia. Democracy morphing to corporatism are run from the top-down like structuring programming language. The people of Ukraine probably want peace, security, prosperity and freedom and don’t care much who is running the government in an era when governments are run by and for elites- elites that don’t mind breaking a few hundred thousand eggs to make Wall Street omelets rise in value.
So today Russia is struggling to recover some of its Ukrainian possession or at least secure independence for Russians living in the region. N.A.T.O. Chief Rasmussen made grandiose, nationalistic form statements about international obligations of Russian (to give up the Ukraine). The natural Russian sphere of influence and security in Ukraine is targeted by anachronistic N.A.T.O. leadership. Without Russia as an enemy N.A.T.O. has little obvious reason to exist except perhaps to keep its own members in line.
One of the primary roles of N.A.T.O. is to defend not just against external threats but against internal threats too. Europeans traditionally fought themselves or even attacked the U.S.A. (burning the U.S. capitol in 1812). It was good to know that with N.A.T.O. formed the werewolf problem of recrudescent Germen Nazis or Italian fascists would not too easily recur, It was good to know that France and Germany could forge a new identity together fighting communism at least before French President Charles DeGaulle withdrew France from N.A.T.O. membership. It may be that N.A.T.O. wasn’t too helpful to France in the French-Algerian war and he resented that. If European N.A.T.O members hadn’t supported America’s Afghanistan invasion its leadership would have worried about American support if Russia should attack-something it wasn’t likely to do.
So far as I know Russia has never attacked the West. Adolph Hitler signed a deal with Stalin enabling Stalin to attack Finland-yet that was a special case with Stalin perhaps a little incentivized to appease the dictator in return for some real estate. With Hitler receiving assurances that Stalin would not attack from the east if the Nazis attacked the west, the Nazi game was on. European N.A.T.O. memberships preclude much potential for intra-European military scrumming.
Europeans, it should be recalled, are quite subject to social determinism. There is less social room for movement as well as less vacant land space for movement or expansion in Europe than the U.S.A.. Lebensraum was a rational for Nazis. Conflicts often arise because people are unable to leave their highly determined social roles-even at a national level. The First World War was set into motion with automatic alliances and mobilizations.
Americans had less physical social determinism thanEuropeans because of the unpopulated land where only 3 or 4 millions pre-Columbian orgin natives lived (in the area that is today the U.S.A.). The recent Obamacare health policy is a movement of modern social determinism snaring every citizen for corporatism and making it difficult to live a poor nomadic national existence with health care. That freedom of land, movement and social existence in American heritage makes it difficult for Americans to recognize how much social determinism still shapes political affairs in Europe especially in how political actors fill their roles. EC changes and the ending of the Iron Curtain permitted more freedom of movement for ordinary people yet powers of control will inevitably re-cinch determinist nooses.
Americans have supplied military muscle to keep Europe free from either German hostile takeover or communist dictatorship. Supplying the intellectual muscle is a little more challenging for Americans. In the present political environment Americans should think hard about how to let Russia have hegemony east of the Dnepr in Ukraine and return to normalize economic relations and close social cooperation with Russia-a nation in land-population ratio more like America than Europe. There are pressing economic and environmental concerns that need to be addressed directly as demographics of the Earth continue to outpace the capacity of institutions to recognize and successful respond to the challenges. The Ukrainian billionaire President wants NATO to fight his battles for him with the warning to Western Europe that the Eastern Ukraine could be the start of a domino effect where all of the EC fall one at a time to Vladimir Putin. I can hardly wait till Vienna becomes the winter Kremin and London the major producer of vodka.
The United States and Europe as N.A.T.O. members face few conventional threats. South Americans don’t seem likely to invade Europe soon though Taco Bell may be expanding its menu. Australia and Africa don’t seem ready to kick over Norway or Sweden. China is a potential future military threat yet that’s kind of tentative right now . Besides, China is a fertile nation for economic investment-it is inconvenient to posture about a Chinese military threat for N.A.T.O. leaders. So Russia is the old reliable threat for N.A.T.O. leaders. Like preceding large post-Korean war era interventions the object nation N.A.T.O. is concerned over is not a member of N.A.T.O., nor should it be. Russian, European and American economic security are threatened and adversely impacted by N.A.T.O. actions concerning Ukraine and Syria.
One of the troubles with expanding a political alliance too broadly is that the potential for internal breakup increases with size as do the problems implicit in its breakdown. When an alliance is a mile wide and an inch deep it may freeze and wind can transport stones around rolling over the surface (that makes as much sense as some present NATO policy). N.A.T.O. parameters for mutual defense against external threats have become less effective as the nature of the threats have changed. China defends against Muslim terror and is not a member of N.A.T.O.
With the rise of ISIS in the post-invasion chaos of Iraq there are far more terrorists with excellent training funded ironically by American and N.A.T.O. efforts than in 2001. N.A.T.O. members promoted development of the Syrian Civil war with rhetorical and material support perhaps to give themselves something to so. With the appearance and proliferation of new technology in that region counseling patience and slow political evolution organically would have been a better way. At least three million people would not have been made homeless with something like 194,000 dead.
Did promotion of the Syrian civil war enhance N.A.T.O. member security? Britain recently declared its second highest terror alert level –severe- because of the danger posed by Caliphate members with British passports who might return home to blast civilians to bits. The Middle East is saturated with loose plastic explosives and ISIS has more than a half billion dollars in cash after robbing a bank in Mosul. ISIS might afford to exfiltrate packages of semtex to England. The U.S. Government is concerned about American citizens-some from Minneapolis Minnesota that are fighting for the Caliphate in Iraq or Syria who might return to attack Boston, New York, San Francisco, D.C. or London-hubs of radical godless atheist, homosexual politics.
Muslim terrorism is the greatest clear and present threat to N.A.T.O. nations. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has warned the west about the Caliphate's potential for attack. Prior N.A.T.O. responses have thrown accelerants upon formation of Muslim terrorists. Though Russia has been very helpful in combating Muslim terrorism since the end of the cold war, N.A.T.O. is quick to put economic sanctions on Russia, stimulate a civil war in Syria and Ukraine-where no conflict would have arisen if the natural balance was not changed with interventionist policies, and N.A.T.O. member security has been degraded.
Global Islam has no conventional borders. The Islamic State aka the Caliphate synthetically appearing in areas of Syria and Iraq is an example of the transcendental nature of the Muslim political identity. In the U.S.A. it is called the nation of Islam; the fundamental concept of Islam is a world without borders ruled by Sharia law wherein all bow to Mecca. N.A.T.O. has no rational strategy for addressing its primary political-para-military challenge as it has allowed liberal Muslim immigration policies for decades.
N.A.T.O. member immigration policies were set in the post-Nazi era to act against racism and to exploit cheap labor from immigrants. The redistribution of people of various races for racial reasons seems implicitly racist, yet the prevailing sentiments about racial redistribution of an historical period do follow economic interests. It is worth remembering that the United States with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world besides that of the Soviet Union exercised a lot of political influence…there were many yes men nations in Europe both former allies and former enemies. That much power can dull a nation’s need for critical political thought-it simply has so much power that a reductionism to us or them may be all that is necessary.
Being us is the infallible advantage it might be thought. In that security of power arise the inflexibility and ossification that many mature powers have experienced over the course of history as Toynbee noted in A Study of History. The philosopher Allan Watts wrote a book named The Wisdom of Insecurity. Whatever gives political leaders cause to circumstantially reevaluate their political situation may be good. Simple confident assumptions about power structures and threats that are more real in inertial appearance rather than actual, and hidden dangers built structurally in one’s own actions can make N.AT.O. ineffective at defending European and American security.
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