NATO’s irrelevance self-evident

Developing Just Leadership

Crescent International

Rabi' al-Thani 08, 1441 2019-12-05

Daily News Analysis

by Crescent International

The recent public spat between head of the fanatic-secular French regime, President Emmanuel Macron and the moron-in-chief heading the regime in Washington DC, Donald Trump, about NATO’s current and future prospects is a positive development for global peace.

The military-political alliance of war-mongering Western neo-colonial regimes, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), has outlived its usefulness.

It should have been disbanded with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Recent public disagreements between key NATO members that surfaced due to Trump’s crude antics would hopefully generate lively debate about the military alliance’s irrelevance.

At 70, it is time to perform its last rites and consign it to the dustbin of history where it belongs.

The post-WWII military alliance was created in 1949 to confront the Soviet Union and prevent its expansion into Western Europe.

NATO has now expanded much beyond the shores of the North Atlantic and has spread its tentacles even into landlocked Afghanistan and Niger.

From strictly a military point of view, in the age of hybrid and guerrilla warfare, NATO’s conventional military approach rooted in nation on nation warfare is outdated.

This is probably the reason why Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov responding to NATO’s communique of December 4, highlighted that Moscow would not get involved in an arms race with NATO.

The Soviet Union committed this mistake in the 1980s thereby weakening itself economically.

Russia clearly understands the radically altered military landscape of 2019, where a lightly armed but highly motivated Taliban movement has forced Washington to negotiate its retreat.

Nevertheless, it is not the military aspect that renders NATO irrelevant for the contemporary situation, but its political failure.

Created supposedly to hold Europe together against an external threat, NATO’s arrogance is probably one of the primary reasons for EU’s current crisis.

Despite EU’s many shortcomings, the Western part of Europe is the most successful socio-political project. It has prevented war among these states since the Second World War.

True, wars have been exported elsewhere: Africa, Latin America, and the Muslim East but Europe has remained conflict-free since 1945.

Nonetheless, NATO’s use of EU as a political cover to expand eastward toward the Russian borders, under its “partnership for peace program” triggered harsh Russian responses in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine in 2014.

One of the key reasons for EU’s current political crisis is that the bloc stopped being an economic union and was pushed by the US to turn into a political and security project closely linked to NATO.

The EU’s acceptance of East European states as members, while most of them are still not ready to be part of the bloc economically and politically, created an array of economic and political problems.

Influx of cheap labor from Europe into Britain was one of the key contributors to the Brexit disaster.

Apart from clear divisions among NATO member Western regimes, Turkey is also beginning to gradually distance itself from the Western designed security system.

While it is too early to predict Ankara’s date of departure from NATO, Turkey’s disdain for the alliance is a small step towards regional Muslim security architecture.

As Turkish society is becoming more Islamicaly conscious and its government more oriented toward advancing its own interests, at some point Turkey will leave NATO.

It will then seek an alternative and that would most likely be a regional alliance that will include Iran and Pakistan.

Among Muslim countries, these three are the only ones that pack military punch. In the past, they had formed an economic bloc under the Regional Cooperation for Development (RCD).

It petered out due to internal changes in the three countries. Recent developments point toward the possibility of a revival of cooperation between them.

This should be welcomed and encouraged.

END