'NATO, an aggressive organization in search of a mission'
Donald Trump has said that NATO is obsolete because it
is not really defending its members’ territory against Islamic terrorism, which
is the only real threat Europe suffers, Jim Jatras, former US diplomat and
geopolitical analyst, told RT.
Washington says it is worried about Moscow's
deployment of Iskander short-range ballistic missile in Russia's western
exclave of Kaliningrad in response to new US cruise missiles being placed just
across the border.
Tension with Moscow is not the only thing bothering
the military alliance.
With a new US president soon to enter the White House,
Western media is raising concerns over his plans for NATO. The European elites
are growing increasingly worried about what any changes Trump may bring to the
NATO alliance.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg Stoltenberg
urged NATO members to follow the British example and contribute two percent of
GDP to the military alliance.
Besides the UK, Poland, Estonia, Greece, and the
United States are the only members of the 28-country alliance meeting the two
percent threshold. The US contributes the highest proportion of its GDP to the
military block, some 3.61 percent, according to NATO’s 2015 Annual Report.
RT: What do you make of Western media raising fears over
Donald Trump’s plans for NATO?
Jim Jatras: When the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact were
out of business in 1991, NATO should have gone out of business as well. That
didn’t happen. Unfortunately, NATO doesn’t have any particular function as a
defensive organization - as we saw in Bosnia and Kosovo - it has behaved as an
aggressive organization. It is an organization in search of a mission. Right
now, we have Donald Trump who said that it is obsolete because it is not really
defending its members’ territory against Islamic terrorism which is the only
real threat Europe suffers. So frankly, what good is it?
NATO is a product of the Cold War. It does not fit
into our time anymore. My party and other parties; we can imagine a treaty
which is for defense but not against Russia but more or less against another
kind of threats, for example, terrorism…We should rearrange NATO and give NATO
another structure and philosophy. In NATO there are still a lot of people in
power who are attached to this old philosophy.- Joachim
Paul, from Alternative for Germany Party (AfD)
RT: Why are the European elites concerned about changes
Trump may bring to the NATO alliance?
JJ: It seems that there is still a very strong
consensus for NATO in the American political establishment. Part of this is
simply inertia that it is something that has been around forever. And let’s
keep in mind: NATO is essentially a tool of Washington to maintain control over
Europe in security affairs. Remember back in the 1990s, the EU indicated it
wanted to develop its own defense capability, and that provoked near panic in
Washington. The Washington establishment moved very quickly to quash any such
independence from the Europeans and to insist that security affairs must be
governed by NATO and only NATO as the premier security organization in Europe. The
Europeans could help out if they wanted to, but they were not in control of the
process.
RT: If we imagine that NATO breaks up one day, what could
be the consequences?
JJ: If NATO actually breaks up, then we would see
the assertion of more national interests based policy of its various
member-states who will be promoting their own sovereign state interests and not
basically subservient to a bunch of bureaucrats in Brussels and even more so in
Washington. I think it is also very interesting to see what is happening to
NATO’s twin – “Euro-Atlantic organization” – the EU, which is under threat of a
break up with the British withdrawal, with the hopeful election of Marine Le Pen
in France next year. I think we have many Europeans saying that ‘We want our
country back.’
RT: The US claims that NATO is a “defensive alliance” that
is not threatening Moscow. Is that true? Is it defending Europe?
JJ: Defend themselves from whom? One of the
criticisms that Donald Trump has made of European countries and NATO is that
they don’t spend the two percent threshold on defense which he considers
rightly to be free-loading on the US. Why don’t they spend that much? These are
wealthy countries. They can spend that money if they want to. Even Greece,
which is not in a very good position, is actually one of the countries that
does spend more than the threshold because they do perceive the threat, but
from Turkey, a fellow NATO member. The reason these countries don’t spend the
money is because they don’t feel threatened. For all the hype of a so-called
Russian threat, with the absence of maybe Poland and the Baltic States, nobody
in Europe feels threatened by Russia or any other external threat. The only
real threat they face is the threat of terrorism. And NATO doesn’t seem to know
what to do about that.
The statements, vie
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