The Posh Boys on the Editorial Board of the prestigious Financial Times waste no time in their lengthy praise/advocacy for NATO. A selection of quotations from this essay and some commentary follow:
Collective defence of the Atlantic community’s democracies sat alongside the Marshall financial aid plan.
The Marshall Plan was part of the rehabilitation of Europe after War II, what is left out of this is that the Marshall Plan was also about the institutionalization of American power in Europe, allied to the fact that the political fate of Easter Europe had been decided by Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt at Yalta. Eisenhower pulled the troops out of Eastern Europe , some say to quickly to foil Stalin’s Imperialism.
Europe needs US support to check Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
…to counter Mr Putin’s revanchist ambitions…
Putin acts here as the incarnation of Stalin. Putin hysteria is the very lifeblood of The New Cold War: Crimea and Ukraine its exemplars . While the promises made by the American political actors, to Gorbachev to limit the expansion of NATO are subject to a self-serving political amnesia. Not to forget that The Atlantic Council, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty still function as propaganda outlets for NATO. Make note of the fact that the utterly notorious Elliott Abrams is a Senior Fellow.
Permanent military facilities in Europe provide vital bases for US-led strikes against Islamist terrorists.
…cyber warfare, the proliferation of new technologies and China’s rising military power present new challenges.
Its almost as if the reader is experiencing a kind of deja vu, of the xenophobic paranoia writ large of Huntington’s ‘Clash’. The editors will defend Europe i.e. the EU as the evolving bastion of a State Capitalism, whose reason d’etre is to provide a political framework for a Market Singularity, that places the efficient function and profitability of ‘The Market’ above every other imperative!
Now is not the time for western democracies to walk away from the world’s most successful military alliance.
Given the above, what can the reader make of NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg comments regarding ‘Brazil, other Latin American countries’ joining NATO?
Headline: NATO chief says Brazil, other Latin American countries could become ‘partners’
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – NATO can look at the possibility of other Latin American states joining Colombia in becoming alliance partners, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Wednesday, while appearing to rule out U.S. President Donald Trump’s suggestion that Brazil could one day become a full member of the North Atlantic security body.
“Until 2017, NATO didn’t have any partners in Latin America and then in 2017 we got our first partner, which was Colombia, and to be a close partner of NATO is something that is good for NATO and the partner country,” the NATO leader told Reuters in an interview ahead of a NATO ministerial meeting in Washington.
“So of course, it is a possibility to look into the possibility of having also other countries in Latin America become partners which then provides a platform, a framework for close political and practical cooperation,” he said.
At a joint White House news conference last month, Trump said he had told visiting far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro he would designate Brazil a “major non-NATO ally” and possibly go further by supporting a campaign to make Brazil “maybe a NATO ally,” something that would imply full membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Political Observer
https://www.ft.com/content/40aaa992-5520-11e9-91f9-b6515a54c5b1
Added April 07, 2019
Headline:NATO ‘broke away’ from intl law, lost its legitimacy – ex-OSCE Parliamentary Assembly VP to RT
NATO broke away from international law and risks “collapse” or a conflict that will “destroy Europe,” if it does not change its modus operandi, Willy Wimmer, the former vice president of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, told RT.
As the US-led military alliance marked its 70th anniversary on Thursday, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg stated that the bloc remains essential for global security. “We stand together, fight together, and, sometimes, die together,” he said in a speech in Washington.
Stoltenberg, however, is not striking a chord with the people NATO claims to be protecting, Wimmer believes. The veteran German politician explained to RT that “it is not the message that Germans, the Europeans and even the Americans want to hear.”
…
https://www.rt.com/news/455776-nato-legitimacy-international-law/
Thank you to Paul Craig Roberts for posting this!
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