By JO on December 2, 2019
December 2, 2019
Political
NATO’s London Summit on
December 3 and 4, 2019 displays the deep political crisis of
the 70-year-old alliance: Only a dinner and a short meeting, no statement to be
issued, quarrels among the leading military members, accusations, substantial
differences on Syria and many other issues, the deepest-ever Transatlantic
conflict and the usual issues of burden-sharing.
Legal
But the political dimension
of NATO’s crisis is only one. There is also a legal crisis.
You’ll recognize it if you care to read the NATO Treaty text – something academic and media people don’t
generally seem to have done. They would then have noticed that the Alliance of
2019 consistently operates outside – indeed in violation of – its own goals,
purposes and values. For instance, the UN Charter which should be NATO’s
guideline has been violated on a permanent basis for decades – such as in its
out-of-area bombings of Yugoslavia with no UN mandate.
The contempt shown for
international law in general and the UN Charter in particular is an integral
part of NATO’s existential crisis.
Moral
And, third, there is a moral dimension
to NATO’s crisis. Of course, no one talks about it.
It’s the simple fact that no
war that individual NATO members states or NATO as NATO have engaged in can be
termed anything but predictable fiascos when judged by the alliance’s own
stated goals and criteria – just think of Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan,
Iraq, Libya, Syria… all crystal clear moral catastrophes causing unspeakable
suffering, death and destruction to millions upon millions while achieving none
of the stated goals that were set to explain and legitimize these wars such as
creating democracy, respecting human rights, liberating women or stopping
alleged genocides.
By now, the world should
have been told enough lies about NATO’s benevolent motives, policies and
actions for taxpaying citizens to mobilize resistance to it.
These three crises can all
be related to the response of the Western world to the demise of the Soviet
Union and the Warsaw Pact 30 years ago – i.e. to the choice to expand NATO and
exploiting the weakness of Russia.
Intellectual
The last and perhaps
most-hidden-of-all crisis is NATO’s intellectual crisis.
It’s now an alliance that
operates in a kind of echo chamber with little, or no, sense of the realities
of the world. It’s there for its own sake. When you listen to its
Secretary-General – not only Stoltenberg but Fogh Rasmussen and earlier ones –
you sense a level of creativity and intellectualism that reminds you of leaders
who also happened to be Secretaries-General such as, say, Leonid
Breznev.
Irrespective of some little
objective analysis of the situation, NATO sings only one tune: There
are new threats all the time, we must arm more, we need new and better weapons
and we must, therefore, increase military expenditures.
And how is it legitimized?
By uttering mantras.
No matter what NATO and its members choose to do, it is simply stated without a
trace of argument or documentation that more money will increase four things:
Defence, security, stability and peace. And be good for basic Western values
such as freedom, democracy and peace.
How come – the small boy
watching the Emperor would ask – that no matter what NATO has done the last 70
years, it is still maintaining that it needs more to create that defence,
security, stability and peace?
What’s wrong with a system
that keeps applying the same medicine decade after decade and gets further and
further from achieving the stipulated goal?
Military expenditures in
general – no balance and no reality check
NATO’s main enemy is
supposed to be Russia. It doesn’t matter that Russia’s military expenditures
are about 6-7 % of NATO’s total expenditures (29 countries). It doesn’t matter
that NATO’s technical quality is superior. It doesn’t matter that Russia’s military expenditures are
falling year-by-year –
decreased to US $ 64 billion in 2018 from US $ 66 billion in 2017. It doesn’t
matter that Russia’s military expenditures averaged only US $
45 billion from 1992 until 2018.
And it doesn’t matter that
the old Warsaw Pact budget were some 65-75% of NATO’s during the first Cold War
and we were told back then that some kind of balance was good
for stability and peace. Today we are told that the more superiority NATO has,
the better it is for world peace.
In short, reality doesn’t
matter anymore to NATO.
The 2 per cent goal
And this is where the 2 per
cent of BNP comes into play and reveals just how deep NATO’s crisis is. But
have you seen anybody questioning this 2 per cent goal as the philosophical
nonsense – or forgery – it is?
It resembles the Theatre of
the Absurd to tie military expenditures to the economic performance of a
country. Imagine a person sets off 10 % of her/his income to buy food. Sudden
he or she wins in a lottery or is catapulted into a job that yields a 5 times
higher income. Should that person then also begin to eat 5 times more?
The 2 per cent goal is an
absurdity, an indicator of defence illiteracy. People who take it
serious – in politics, media and academia – obviously have never read a basic
book about theories and concepts in the field of defence and security. Or about
how one makes a professional analysis of what threatens a country.
If military expenditures are
meant to secure a country’s future, do the threats that this country faces also
vary according to its own GNP? Of course not! It is a bizarre assumption.
Decent knowledge-based
defence policies should be decided on the basis of a comprehensive
analysis of threats and contain dimensions such as:
What threatens our nation,
our society now and along various time horizons? Which threats that we can
imagine are so big that we can do nothing to meet them? Which are such that it
is meaningful to set off this or that sum to feel reasonably safe? What threats
seem so small or unlikely that we can ignore them?
What threats are most likely
to go from latent to manifest? How do we prioritize among scarce resources when
we have other needs and goals than feeling secure such as developing our
economy, education, health, culture, etc.?
And, most importantly, two
more consideration: What threats can be met with predominantly military means
and which require basically civilian means? And how do we act today to prevent
the perceived threats from becoming a reality that we have to face – how do we,
within our means, prevent violence and reduce risks as much as possible.
All these questions should
be possible to answer with the new mantra: Just always give the military 2 per
cent of the GNP and everything will be fine?
The MIMAC
MIMAC is the
Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex – the vested interests of small
elites in symbiosis with governments which run on and benefit from bizarre
standards like the 2 per cent goal.
One purpose of that goal is
to make serious, empirical and relevant threat analysis irrelevant. It’s a
perpetuum mobile – a way of securing that MIMAC always gets what it needs, no
matter what the consequences are for thosee who pay it all, the citizens and
their tax money.
Imagine that Russia
disappeared from the earth tomorrow. And NATO would quickly find some other
“enemy” by which to legitimate that it anyhow needs also 2 per cent of your BNP
in the future. At least!
NATO Titanic
Secretary-General Jens
Stoltenberg
It’s Secretary-General Jens
Stoltenberg two days ago announced this mind-boggling news, swallowed by media
as the most natural thing of the world in need of no questions – read it on NATO’s homepage:
“Ahead of the meeting of
NATO Leaders in London to mark the Alliance’s 70th anniversary, Secretary
General Jens Stoltenberg on Friday (29 November 2019) gave details of large
increases in Allied defence spending. Mr. Stoltenberg announced that in 2019
defence spending across European Allies and Canada increased in real terms by
4.6 %, making this the fifth consecutive year of growth. He also revealed that
by the end of 2020, those Allies will have invested $130 billion more since
2016. Based on the latest estimates, the accumulated increase in defence
spending by the end of 2024 will be $400 billion. Mr. Stoltenberg said: “This
is unprecedented progress and it is making NATO stronger.’ “
Read it carefully: NATO’s
military expenditure increase 2016-2020 is US $ 130 billion –
that is twice as much as Russia’s total annual budget!
There is only two words for
it: Madness and irrationality. Madness in and of itself and madness
when seen in the perspective of all the other problems humanity must urgently
find funds to solve.
The total regular UN budget for the year 2016-17 was US $ 5.6 billion. That is, NATO
countries spend 185 times more on the military than all the world does on the
UN.
Do you find that sane and in
accordance with the problems humanity need to solve? This author does not. I
stand by the word madness. There exists no rational academic,
empirical analysis and no theory that can explain NATO’s military expenditures
as rational or in service of the common good of humankind.
•
The world’s strongest,
nuclear alliance is a castle built on intellectual sinking sand. It’s a
political, moral, legal and intellectual Titanic.
The only armament NATO needs
is legal, moral and intellectual. And unless it now moves in this direction, it deserves to be
dissolved.
The inverse proportion
between its destructive power and its moral-intellectual power is – beyond any
doubt – the largest single threat to humanity’s future.
This challenge is at least
as serious and as urgent as is climate change.
Perhaps it is time to stop
keeping NATO alive by taxpayers’ money and start a tax boycott in all NATO
countries until it is dissolved or at least comes down to – say – one-tenth of
its present wasteful military level? Not to speak of its bootprint destruction
of the environment…
/https://www.niagarafallsreview.ca/content/dam/thestar/news/canada/2021/09/25/huawei-executive-meng-wanzhou-receives-warm-welcome-upon-return-to-china/_1_meng_wanzhou_2.jpg)
