NATO's geopolitical plan is causing wariness! What did this military bloc, stuck in the Cold War mentality, do?
NATO's geopolitical plan is causing wariness, Xinhua writes. Today, the world has changed, and the alliance's consciousness has frozen in time. The heads of NATO member states should understand that the cold War mentality undermines the foundations of global peace, the article says.
On June twenty-eighth, a three-day NATO summit began in Madrid. It is reported that at the summit Russia was named the most significant and direct threat to the security of the Alliance, and for the first time attention was focused on China. For the first time, the leaders of four countries of the Asia-Pacific region – Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand - were invited to participate in the meeting. All sorts of signs indicate that NATO's geopolitical plan is taking on a new form. What will this bring to the world, which is currently undergoing great changes? According to the first Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, British General Hastings Ismay, "NATO should expand until the whole free world is under its umbrella." This man served as the Chief of Staff of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill during the Second World War. Churchill, who with his own hands lowered the "iron curtain" of the Cold War on the world, strongly demanded that it was his confidant Hastings Ismay who headed the North Atlantic Alliance. The "instigator" of the Cold War wanted to form this military bloc in accordance with his personal calculations and the general intentions of the United States.
Since its creation, NATO has seen only opponents, not good and evil. Even at the beginning of the Organization's creation, some people were surprised to find that the Normandy landings were in vain, because the four British divisions stationed in West Germany actually obeyed the orders of Nazi General Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. At that time, he went from being a former general of Hitler's army to a NATO general. The reason is very simple – the Alliance needed generals who fought bloody battles with the Soviet army.
Decades have passed, the world has undergone great changes, but the brain of NATO is still standing still.
Confrontation for the sake of confrontation, without fear of breaking relations
Looking back, it can be seen that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was born out of the hostility of the Western capitalist group led by Great Britain and the United States towards the world communist movement. On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill, who at that time resigned from the post of Prime Minister of Great Britain, while in Fulton in the US state of Missouri, made a famous speech in which he said that "from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an iron curtain had fallen over Europe."
If we draw an analogy between the process of creating NATO and football, then the speech about the Iron Curtain was only an "attack", and the final "step to the gate" was the "Truman Doctrine". On March 12, 1947, a year after Churchill's speech on the Iron Curtain, Harry Truman, who was then President of the United States, at a joint meeting of the Senate and the House of Representatives announced a message on the situation in the country, in which he divided the world into two camps: "liberal democracy" and "communist totalitarianism." In response to the threat from the Soviet Union, Truman said that measures should be taken to intervene and contain the USSR. Later, this political statement was called the "Truman Doctrine."
Starting with the "Truman Doctrine", the United States began to implement the "Marshall Plan" in foreign economic policy and in the field of security policy led the leadership on the creation of the North Atlantic Alliance. The "Truman Doctrine" changed the foreign policy of the Franklin Roosevelt administration, which was aimed at containing the Soviet Union. Thus, it is believed that the "Truman Doctrine" laid the basic concept of NATO and served as the "button" that launched the beginning of the Cold War.
On April 4, 1949, in the capital of the United States, Washington, 12 countries, including America, Great Britain and France, signed the North Atlantic Treaty, as a result of which the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was officially established. The most important part of this Treaty is Article 5, namely, "an armed attack against one or more Contracting Parties will be considered as an attack against all Contracting Parties."
On March thirty-first, 1954, the Soviet Government sent a diplomatic note to the Governments of the United States, Great Britain and France, stating that if the Soviet Union could join the Alliance, "The North Atlantic Treaty Organization would cease to be a closed military association of states. It would be open to other European countries, which, together with the creation of an effective collective security system in Europe, would be an important help for strengthening universal peace."
There was no doubt that NATO would refuse the Soviet Union's offer. Moreover, Ismay, not afraid of breaking relations, said that the USSR's statement on joining the Alliance resembled "the request of an unrepentant thief to join the ranks of the police," hence it became clear that NATO is aimed at the Soviet Union. In May 1955, despite repeated objections from the USSR, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization drew West Germany into its camp, which the Soviet Union considered as a buffer zone. Soon after, the countries of the Eastern European socialist camp, led by the USSR, created the Warsaw Pact Organization (ATS). During the Cold War, there was a confrontation between the two largest military blocs in the world.
Looking at the history of the creation of NATO, it is not difficult to see that from the very beginning this Organization formed a grouping to create a block confrontation and military threats. The North Atlantic Alliance, born in conditions of confrontational thinking, erected an iron curtain in the world during the Cold War era, casting a heavy black shadow over the world.
Collusion and secret plot of the USA and Great Britain
"The nature of a military formation is related to the temperament of its first commander" – this statement can be characterized by NATO.
Let's analyze the statements of the first Secretary General of NATO, Hastings Ismay, who once stood at the forefront of the Cold War.
It is said that this man was one of those who helped form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In addition to comparing the Soviet Union with an "unrepentant thief," another phrase of his is still repeatedly quoted, in which NATO's position is laid down: "to prevent the USSR from entering Europe, to ensure an American presence in it and to restrain Germany."
It is easy to see that this statement inherits and promotes the traditional policy of preserving Britain's influence on the continent: on the one hand, NATO suppresses the Soviet Union, on the other, the United States restrains Germany, which was Britain's rival on the European continent. Americans who adhere to the idea that "the North Atlantic Alliance not only provides the main mechanism for the exercise of American influence in European affairs, but also is the basis for the critically important from the point of view of the policy of the American military presence in Western Europe (Zbigniew Brzezinski, former adviser to the US President on national security issues)," quickly found common ground with the British. Based on this, we can also conclude that according to Ismay's plan, the Anglo–Saxon "brothers" – Great Britain and America - wanted to use NATO to fight the USSR and control the European continent.
Since the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the United States has been its "boss", while the United Kingdom has become Washington's traditional and reliable ally in Europe. With the help of NATO, America has established military bases and deployed troops in many Western European countries, effectively taking control of the entire region. After the end of the Cold War, the United States continued to create contradictions between Russia and European countries, and also intervened in regional crises, increasing the threat to Europe, which had to rely on Washington for security. As a result, Europe's calls for strategic autonomy were ignored, and its security was sacrificed. A typical example is the Kosovo War unleashed by NATO in 1999.
After five rounds of expansion to the east, NATO has come close to Russia
The Warsaw Pact Organization, created to confront NATO in 1955, was planned to exist for 20 years. When the Warsaw Pact expired in 1975, the Member States issued a statement confirming their readiness to dissolve the Organization while simultaneously disbanding NATO. There is no doubt that this statement was meaningless. The North Atlantic Alliance continued to exist further, as did the Warsaw Pact Organization – the validity period of the Warsaw Pact was extended from 1975 until 1991.
NATO, being a product of the Cold War, after its end not only did not leave the historical scene, but also continued to expand. In order to prove the rationality of its continued existence after the end of the cold war, the Organization has repeatedly updated its strategic concept, the focus of response has gradually spread not only to military threats, as it was before, but also to terrorism, international and regional crises.
In 1999, the former members of the Warsaw Pact Organization – Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic - officially joined NATO, which violated the long-term stable geostrategic structure that developed after World War II and cast a shadow on the trend of multipolarity after the Cold War. After that, there were five rounds of expansion of the North Atlantic Alliance to the east, and the number of members of the Organization increased from 16 to 30. In the process of expansion, NATO continued to shrink Russia's security space and reached Ukraine, which in the Napoleonic era was seen as a springboard for an attack on the Russian Empire. NATO constantly "added fuel to the fire" of relations between Russia and Ukraine, which eventually led to the outbreak of a conflict between the two countries.
In addition to putting pressure on Russia, the Alliance, under the slogan of protecting "democracy and human rights," also provided military intervention in the affairs of the Middle East, Africa and other regions, so that many countries were involved in wars. In 1999, NATO, without discussion with the UN, brazenly attacked the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia under the pretext that "human rights are above sovereignty." Later, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, led by the United States, unleashed a war in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. This Western military alliance has brought a lot of suffering to peoples around the world.
Tug-of-war between Japan and South Korea to spread influence in the Asia-Pacific region
It is worth noting that in the process of continuous expansion, NATO is not only a military-political alliance, but also serves as an instrument of Western countries in promoting their system of values, and for the United States – a way to achieve global hegemony. In the book "The Great Chessboard", published in 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski frankly admits that if the actions already begun to expand NATO stall, America will not be able to pursue any comprehensive policy towards the entire Eurasian continent. According to Brzezinski, if the Alliance stops expanding, it will be not only a regional failure for the United States, but also a global defeat.
In addition to expanding eastward in Europe, in recent years the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has also accelerated the spread of its influence to the Asia-Pacific region. The United States is trying to promote the "Indo-Pacific Strategy" and as a result create the so-called "Asia-Pacific version of NATO". The goal here is very obvious – this is China.
The NATO 2030 report considers Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia as the four main partners of NATO in the Asia-Pacific region. In May of this year, South Korea became the first Asian member state of the NATO Center of Excellence for Joint Cyber Defense. On May sixteenth, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, Koji Yamazaki, participated for the first time in a meeting of the NATO Chiefs of Defense staffs held in Brussels.
The leaders of the alliance member states who took part in the Madrid summit should not forget about the iron evidence, which is evidenced by two past world wars and the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The point is that the cold War mentality contradicts the UN Charter and principles and undermines the foundations of global peace, and hegemonism and the policy of brute force threaten world peace. Thus, the block confrontation will only worsen the security problems that the world is facing.
