The purpose of NATO has always been to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down, according to its own first Secretary General.
If any one leg of this tripod fails – the whole thing comes tumbling down. At least as the imperialist, anti-national, anti-Orthodox, and Russophobic project it was always construed to be, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Which is why its highly interesting that Trump has come out with some interesting proposals on NATO via social media.
N.A.T.O. is obsolete and must be changed to additionally focus on terrorism as well as some of the things it is currently focused on!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 24, 2016
We pay a disproportionate share of the cost of N.A.T.O. Why? It is time to renegotiate, and the time is now!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 24, 2016
All this of course follows on from his extended interview on March 21 with that loyal propaganda organ of globalism, The Washington Post:
JACKSON DIEHL, DEPUTY EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR: Back to foreign policy a little bit, can you talk a little bit about what you see as the future of NATO? Should it expand in any way?
TRUMP: Look, I see NATO as a good thing to have – I look at the Ukraine situation and I say, so Ukraine is a country that affects us far less than it affects other countries in NATO, and yet we are doing all of the lifting, they’re not doing anything. And I say, why is it that Germany is not dealing with NATO on Ukraine? Why is it that other countries that are in the vicinity of the Ukraine not dealing with — why are we always the one that’s leading, potentially the third world war, okay, with Russia? Why are we always the ones that are doing it? And I think the concept of NATO is good, but I do think the United States has to have some help. We are not helped. I’ll give you a better example than that. I mean, we pay billions– hundreds of billions of dollars to supporting other countries that are in theory wealthier than we are.
Aside: One wonders if this was what triggered them into their recent deranged claim that the Brussels attacks were a rebuke to Trump’s foreign policy, as if he was already President and not Obama. No matter that Trump is the only candidate calling for NATO to become an explicitly terrorist-fighting outfit. Its almost as if WaPo and similar goons believe that Russia/Putin/Assad are personally responsible for what happened in Brussels. Oh wait… they actually, literally, do. One can’t help but be reminded of Putin’s observation on the unparalleled power of the Western MSM to “portray white as black and black as white.”
Anyhow, what makes Trump’s most recent comments all the more interesting is that they coms on the exact 17th year anniversary of the beginning of NATO bombing against Serbia for what was essentially a metastasized Molenbeek declaring independence and proceeding to burn down monasteries, kill ethnic Serbs, and harvest their organs. (The latter was derided by the Western MSM as a Serbian nationalist conspiracy theory until it was proven true, by which point – most conveniently – nobody remembered or cared outside Serbia).
Incidentally, this was a war that Hillary Clinton and her “humanitarian interventionist” brand of neocon had enthusiastically supported:
James Rubin, Albright’s State Department spokesman, remembers strained phone calls between Albright and U.K. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook during the planning for the bombing of Yugoslavia. Cook told Albright the U.K. government was having problems “with its lawyers” because attacking Yugoslavia without authorization by the U.N. Security Council would violate the UN Charter. Albright told him the U.K. should “get new lawyers.”
Like Secretary Albright, Hillary Clinton strongly supported NATO’s illegal aggression against Yugoslavia. In fact, she later told Talk magazine that she called her husband from Africa to plead with him to order the use of force. “I urged him to bomb,” she said, “You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?”
After the U.S.-U.K. bombing and invasion, the NATO protectorate of Kosovo quickly descended into chaos and organized crime. Hashim Thaci, the gangster who the U.S. installed as its first prime minister, now faces indictment for the very war crimes that U.S. bombing enabled and supported in 1999, including credible allegations that he organized the extrajudicial execution of Serbs to harvest and sell their internal organs.
Furthermore, what makes it interesting in the extreme is that it also coincides with the sentencing of Radovan Karadzic at The Hague. What is really strange is that he got 40 years – not, presumably, the sort of sentence a court could reasonably be expected to hand out to someone who had been definitively proven to have committed crimes as serious as “ethnic cleansing” and even “genocide.” (Or maybe not. After all, the West never pursued or even condemned the Croatians who committed the largest ethnic cleansings of them all: The expulsion of 200,000 Serbs from Krajina. Bosnians too were hardly ever found guilty. It was the subhuman Serbs who were always guilty because they happened to like Russia but didn’t have Russia’s nuclear weapons.) Though this is certainly a huge stretch, it’s not impossible that Trump has also chosen this moment to thumb his nose at that kangaroo court.
Anyhow all in all these are some very interesting coincidences here indeed.
Could we really be seeing the prospect of NATO being taken off our backs under President Trump? For political reasons, Trump can hardly speak out against either keeping the Russians out or the Germans down, but he can attack NATO on the basis that it is a drain on American resources, and as such calls for a rollback of its commitments.
However it is justified, the entire world will be thankful to him for it. (Minus the neocons and a few East European nationalists who allow Putin to leave rent free in their empty heads).
If the Europeans haven’t figured out how to deal with Russia in 300 years (I’ll start modern Russian history with Peter the Great) they never will. It’s no longer the big bad USSR; it’s just Russia, and not all that strong. Time for the U.S. to tell the Europeans they can attend to their own defense from Russia, if any is really necessary. As the attacks on Tuesday showed, the real threat to Europe is from the south. Russia could be an ally in that struggle!
I’d love nothing better, but I am convinced that this is all wishful thinking. Even the current régime in Washington is demanding that Europe pay its ‘fair share’ for NATO by upping their defense budgets to 2% of GDP. And what if they did just that? Wouldn’t that satisfactorily address Trump’s complaint that we’re carrying Europe? It probably would, but it definitely wouldn’t result in a US pull-out from Europe, and it would probably only worsen NATO-Russian relations some more, forcing Moscow to up defense spending as a response–just what Washington wants.
Every once in a blue-moon, Trump does say some startlingly refreshing things on foreign policy. But to the extent that his statements aren’t extremely vague or naïve to begin with, he usually just ends up contradicting himself a short time later. Take Israel, for example. If I had a nickel for every anti-Zionist who was giddy with joy when Trump first declared that he would deal with Israel and Palestine even-handedly! And the fact that the Zio-cons all denounced him was even more titillating. But then came the sell-out at AIPAC: http://thesaker.is/trump-chooses-his-master/
I know, I know. All the Trumpeteers here are going to scramble to his defense by arguing that he was just ‘telling them what they wanted to hear’ and that, once he’s elected, we’ll see the ‘real’ Trump again. But hey, people! What if he’s just telling you what you want to hear? After all, if he gets elected, he would have a powerful incentive to quickly mend fences with them so he could govern. So which Trump are you going to believe? Mr. Even-handed? Or Mr. AIPAC? This is no rhetorical question. I have no idea myself. But I do have a sinking feeling that betraying us would be a lot easier for Trump than trying to take down the whole system single-handedly.
As far as Serbia is concerned, that was easily one of the most sickening and disgraceful moments in NATO’s history. Every word that Karlin says on that subject is true. The Yugoslav wars were orchestrated by Washington and Berlin to dismember the country as fast as possible so they could set up shop in the Balkans–e.g., Camp Bondsteel. When the Serbs tried to oppose this, they were unfairly labelled ‘ethnic cleansers’ by the MSM and their country was illegally and shamefully attacked. And the Hague is a complete and total farce–a real NATO kangaroo court.
I hope Bill Clinton and his loathsome wife rot in hell.
There’s no downside to voting for Trump. In the worst case he’ll turn out to be an establishment sell-out as you say, but we’ll get that with Hillary anyway. In the best case he’ll try to honor some of his promises, which would be awesome.
Anglo policy has always been about keeping any one power from dominating Europe. Monarchical France in the 18th century. Revolutionary and Napoleonic France (1789-1815). Germany (late 19th century-1945). The USSR (1945-1991)…..
NATO gives the US some degree of control over those in it so there’s the temptation to keep it going lest some of them stray too far. Like something old in the closet there’s the idea that it may come in handy one of these days so one doesn’t throw it out just yet. Besides, it’s a business, arms contracts to be had for upgrades, standardizations, a career track for many and so on. It can’t be turned against terrorism because that’s mainly a police matter involving spying and SWAT type raids unless one includes the supposed bombing runs against ISIS and the occasional drone attack against alleged terrorist training camps. Besides, Turkey is a member of NATO and as has been thoroughly exposed by now has been a major backer of jihadi fanatics in Syria, providing them with transit, medical care, funds through stolen Syrian oil dealings and other forms of support. Could Turkey have been doing all this without the other NATO ‘partners’ knowing about it? It seems unlikely so NATO is itself complicit in the Syrian conflict and in supporting the various Islamic extremists gathered in Syria. The European incidents seem to be unexpected spinoffs of what’s been taking place. Were someone like Trump to actually try to revise or downgrade NATO they’d run into a very sticky situation, coming from all quarters; there’s a lot of vested interests here.
NATO made perfect sense immediately after WWII, with Europe in ruins, Stalin running the USSR, and the Nazis recently vanquished in Germany, but its time has passed, it should have been liquidated soon after the collapse of the USSR. Instead, it became an organization looking for a mission, and, as always, it found one, and not necessarily a good one.
It’s not 1948 anymore. Today, Europe is the second-largest economy on Earth, Putin is significantly less Communist than the current US President, and the German threat to Europe comes from the insane passivity of a Merkel, not the aggression of a Hitler. Time to wrap this organization up, it’s become the threat to the peace it was originally meant to protect.
@Anatoly Karlin
Any good articles explaining what actually happened in the Yugoslav wars?
Sam, Misha Glenny’s books are quite good, as well as Robert Fisk. Both follow the Western-line to some extent, but they are professional oldschool journalists who do their best to be fair and critical (Fisk in particular said a while ago “I think the ‘free syrian army’ spends most it’s time drinking coffee in Istanbul’).
I don’t think it’s possible to find any English-language account of the 1990’s Balkan-wars sympathetic to Serbia. Noam Chomsky probably came closest considering how often he’s still slandered with ‘apologetics for Serbian genocide’.
Karlin’s comparison of Bosnia as a metastasized Molenbeeck is spot-on. That’s probably the end-game for Mahometans across Europe. Invent an ‘indigenous European’ folklore and grievance-culture, an ethnic-demonym, take-over a given area, provoke secessionism and wait for US to bomb on your behalf.
Maybe Karadzic could be offered parole, on condition he organizes a solution for that Molenbeek problem (on a serious note, while I do find Serbian nationalism somewhat deranged, I’ve come over the years to the conclusion that the Kosovo war was indeed unjustifiable aggression by NATO).
I’m somewhat ambivalent about the idea of NATO being dissolved…Europe does need some kind of security structure, and I do believe there’s a need for deterrence against Russia. It would be better though if Europeans themselves provided for their defense (spend less money on Islamic welfare-scroungers, more on the military…). Since NATO is one of the means by which the US exerts its dominance in Europe, it would be good for it to disappear.
I would argue NATO makes Europe less safe. It is by its very nature an extremely hostile anti-Russian institution. Such policies no longer make sense. Europe’s true enemy is Islam.
[Karlin’s comparison of Bosnia as a metastasized Molenbeeck]
That was Kosovo. Bosnian Muslims are descended from converts not immigrants.
There is tremendous waste involved in our NATO presence. It has become a profitable racket over the years. For example, most of the money and jobs go to maintaining massive headquarters and luxurious bases with dozens of American Generals living in mansions. Less than half of taxpayer money goes to actual combat power.
Here is a detailed list of outdated Cold War bases the USA maintains overseas. They have little value yet costs billions of dollars each year, with most of that money enriching and employing foreigners.
http://www.g2mil.com/OBCL.htm
Kosovars are Albanians. So where are the Albanians from? Aren’t they also European? They look white to me. I think their ancestors were converts, just like the Bosniaks.
It’s not “defending your way of life” when you are doing it in other countries halfway around the world, you damned evil witch!
We Bombed the Wrong Side in Kosovo (2004)
While the Bush Administration dances around their lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction used to justify the conquest of Iraq, let us recall the Clinton administration lied to justify their conquest of Kosovo in 1999. No mass graves were found, except in places where a few dozen Islamic terrorists, and civilians caught in the crossfire, were killed in firefights with Serbian police. There was no “ethnic cleansing” by the Serbian army, which includes thousands of Muslim soldiers. Reports that civilians were forced to vacate cities by evil Serbian police proved false; they fled because they were terrified as NATO aircraft unleashed hundreds of bombs over a three week period, killing 2000 civilians. This destroyed the Serbian economy and terrorized their government into submission, which resulted in a compromise in which Serbia retained sovereignty over its Kosovo province and agreed to allow NATO peacekeepers to occupy Kosovo on a temporary basis.
THE NATIONAL POST (Canada) | 2004-04-06 |
We bombed the wrong side?
Major General Lewis MacKenzie – Armed Forces of Canada (retired)
His article is here: http://www.g2mil.com/Jun2004.htm
Yes indeed, but they immigrated to Kosovo from the south within the last two centuries.