When General Ismay, Churchill’s top advisor, was made the first Secretary General of Nato, he stated that the purpose of the Treaty was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”; very hawkish words from a man appointed to head what was supposed to be a defence alliance.
However, a defence alliance it remained for over 40 years until, ironically enough, the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain came down, the Warsaw Pact was dismantled, former Soviet satellites joined the EU, and the Soviet Union split into a number of independent nations and the Federation of Russian States based upon a constitutional democracy. Nato allies subsequently intervened militarily in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.
Today we are informed by its own website that “from being an exclusively defensive alliance for nearly 50 years, Nato began to assume an increasingly pro active role within the international community”. This innocuous term “pro active role” has included invasions, boots on the ground, aerial bombings, Tomahawks, killer drones and expansion Eastwards through taking in 12 new members. It has also expanded operations and influence by cooperating with a further 22 nations in the setting up of the Partnership for Peace (PfP)
The PfP includes the Russian Federation. So once this inclusive PfP was set up, as a peace initiative, as its name implies, what exactly should this pro active role of Nato be today? Could it ever include military interventions that are not strictly defensive in terms of clearly defined international law?
Indeed, does Nato even have a raison d’etre anymore, considering that the PfP has an impressive 40 member States? Has the Nato setup not been superseded by the PfP programme based on the all-important principle of security through inclusiveness?
Nato countries account for over 80 per cent of all military expenditure on earth, while Israel, India, Australia and Japan make up over five per cent. Russia, with a budget of just 1.6 per cent of the global total, spends less than the UK or France.
So whom are we kidding when alleging a Russian military threat? What need is there anymore for such a defensive alliance treaty? This is an age of relentless austerity measures cropping up like Hydra’s heads, and people taking to the streets of Brussels, London, Paris and beyond, in heated protest. Should we not be introducing drastic austerity measures to cut military budgets to reduce the taxpayer’s burden in the West, rather than rattling our sabres in the face of the rest, while ignoring civil unrest at home?
No one should ever be allowed to divide Europe again, and Russia, who could be such a strategic partner, is part of Europe
Orwell’s 1984 envisages perpetual war which turns out to be a phoney one. Does that sound familiar? This idea must certainly have gone down well with the arms manufacturers who built up what US President Eisenhower coined the “military industrial complex”. It is as though the military based economy that exploded in WWII never really died. It only gathered momentum, with a declared Cold War, which finally came to an end just long enough to extend Nato’s borders, before being resuscitated to the abject delight of Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War, they who build the big guns...”
So when British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond expresses fears in the House of Commons of some Russian threat, and the former Nato Deputy Commander, General Richard Shirreff, publishes a book called 2017 War with Russia, and makes a statement, as preposterous as it is bold, that Russia will invade the Baltic states by next May, how are the sovereign people, protesting on the streets of Europe and staring into the dark and scary abyss of financial collapse, to give such hawkish words any credence, and believe that this threat is real and not just a scaremongering, diversionary tactic with a hidden agenda?
Might this agenda perchance have anything remotely to do with trying to justify a staggering 31 billion pound replacement of the UK nuclear Trident missile defence system? This mind-blowing figure averages at 1,200 pounds per British taxpayer, and actually exceeds the entire Russian military budget when calculated at 2014 Ruble exchange rates.
In this age of Partnership for Peace, why are the major players in the West being alarmist and asking squeezed taxpayers to be squeezed even further to finance a new mutually assured destruction tool that should have been confined to the rubbish bin of the history of human folly?
Why was Gorbachev’s 1986 Reykjavik proposal to Reagan to eliminate all nuclear weapons in 10 years rejected? Why did Obama, who was given a Nobel peace prize for declaring his mission of nuclear non proliferation, just request another $8.8 billion dollars to fund more nuclear weapons? And why is Nato mobilising even more troops on Russia’s borders, in obvious provocation?
Has the West gone utterly mad? Anyone of sound mind simply follows the money to get to the root of the real problems. That path leads inexorably to Dylan’s masters of war.
No one should ever be allowed to divide Europe again, and Russia, who could be such a strategic partner, is part of Europe. This is not about being pro EU or pro Russia, but pro peace!
We have come so close to realising De Gasperi’s, Adenauer’s and Schuman’s European dream, which I share. Let us not allow it to slip through our hands in a moment of blind insanity and crass gullibility. If we do, the devastating consequences of war will once again be felt on our side of the Atlantic.