The Soviet Union is long gone, along with those menacing troops and the strategic threat they posed. The rationale for NATO has evaporated.
And yet it remains. Not only that, but it long since has abandoned its defensive posture and embraced an offensive temperament, moving inexorably eastward in a manifest effort to encircle Russia and remove its influence from territories that had been within its sphere of interest for centuries. Instead of an alliance to prevent war, NATO has become an institution generating tensions and hostilities where none need exist.
William S. Smith of the Catholic University of America noted recent meetings pulled together by NATO’s military committee chairman, a Czech army general named Petr Pavel. His sessions with his counterparts from Ukraine and Georgia, crowed Pavel, were “dedicated to Projecting Stability.” Given that those two nations are crucial to Russia’s sense of national security (and have been for centuries), wrote Smith, stability seems the least likely outcome of those meetings.
Those clinging to NATO simply can’t see that the world has changed and now requires new thinking, new geopolitical sensibilities, new alliances. To avoid obsolescence NATO must adjust to these new realities. If it can’t it should be killed off.
The American Conservative
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