NATO at 75: Madness of King Lear

What the declaration does say as commentator and retired US Army Major General Matt Ryan pointed out on his Twitter account is all too clear. The takeaways are simple:

First, the fictional entity that is labeled “Ukraine” must be propped up and kept in the fight in a needless war against Russia even though 600,000 at least of its young men have been slaughtered in only two years, and there is no moral or strategic cause for continuing the war at all.

Second, China is described as the decisive enabler of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Third, North Korea and Iran are also called out for supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine.

But fourth, not to worry, NATO’s 32 ramshackle member states are called out to support a new “strategy” to develop artificial intelligence (AI) as the next Harry Potter Magic Wand or Gandalf’s Master Ring out of Tolkien, to magically banish all these “Evil Empires” and make the world safe for NATO to continue bombing recalcitrant governments, populations and nations around the world at will.

Like Shakespeare’s King Lear, NATO and its collective leadership have gone mad. They cannot come to terms with a world that has passed them by and does not need them anymore. The clear fact is that except in their demented imaginations they do not rule – and never did – this 21st century world they never made.

This 21st century world was given shape on a day of double destiny as I warned at the time: June 15, 2001.

On that day, George W. Bush, until the ineffable unsurpassable Joe Biden, easily the most small-minded person, dim, and disastrous of US presidents, proclaimed as an US foreign policy and national security priority that for the first time NATO be expanded to include former Soviet republics – the three tiny Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia with a combined population of less than seven million people.

Bush Junior made this pledge to ringing applause and mindless editorial and pundit approval across the United States during a speech given in Warsaw. As always with little Bush, the sensual, simple satisfaction of short-term applause and cheap adulation blotted out any concern for the prosperity, security and ultimate survival of his own country.

The response of Russian President Vladimir Putin was not long in coming. That same day, almost 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) to the east, he and President Jiang Zemin of China, along with the leaders of four of the five former Soviet republics in Central Asia, set up the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, even then the most powerful potential military alliance in the history of the planet.

Today, the SCO has gone from strength to strength, where both India and Pakistan, historic enemies and also nuclear powers with first rate militaries capable of projecting power around the world, are full members.

Iran is a member too. Saudi Arabia and Turkey lead the impressive list of major nations seeking close formal ties as well. In the military and strategic nuclear forces it commands and in its vast population reserves comprising almost one-third of the human race, the SCO dwarfs NATO.

It also contains in China the greatest concentration of industrial power and capability on the planet, dwarfing the struggling and shrinking US industrial base.

By contrast with the still rising, young and powerful SCO, NATO does not combine the strategic power of several world class military and industrial powers. It only has one – the United States. And all its other member states serve only to encumber the United States and offer a hundred different ways and potential obscure, minor conflicts that could entangle America in a thermonuclear world war for no good or sane purpose at all.

Far from guaranteeing the safety and security of the United States, NATO dooms it. The United States is doomed to go to thermonuclear war in defense of more than two dozen tiny irresponsible postage-stamp sized countries that bring it no prosperity or security and that often make a mockery of so-called democratic values.

And that is how great empires die: Russia defending Serbia and England defending “Gallant Little Belgium,” which had just murdered 10 million people in the Congo in a Nazi-scale genocide from the 1880s into the 20th century, in 1914; Poland refusing to let Britain and France join forces with the Soviet Union to stop Hitler in 1939. This is the reality of NATO. 30 tiny tails – dangerously irresponsible little mini-states – wag the big American dog into needless confrontation with Russia.

NATOs 75th anniversary should have been used as a meeting of sober reflection and reassessment. It should have been a gathering of frank admission and apology for the alliance’s role in the catastrophe of Ukraine and an assessment of why its projection of power failed so totally in Afghanistan only three years ago.

Instead, the anniversary was just used as the excuse for another narcissistic, childish exercise for infantile prancing around on the global stage – throwing not merely insults but existential threats at the major powers with which the member states of the Alliance must share this overcrowded world of 8 billion people.

Indeed, NATO’s birthday bash should have been an exercise not of childish rejoicing but of dread.

For 110 years earlier, NATO Britain solemnly guaranteed the long-term survival of Belgium by the Treaty of London in 1839. 75 years later, this treaty was used as the “unavoidable” reason Britain had to enter World War I.

Supposedly the motivation for entry into the war was a threat to the survival of Britain itself. If Germany captured the ports of Belgium, so the argument went, it could invade Britain at any time.

That argument had held good in the days of sailing ships, which were already becoming obsolete in 1839. By 1914, the argument was patently ridiculous. The political head of the British Navy at the time, one Winston Churchill, actually withdrew the British Grand Fleet to a more secure anchorage at Scapa Flow in the Orkney islands where it could block any German High Seas Fleet incursion into the Atlantic Ocean.

So well judged was this deployment and so successful was it in strangling Germany’s foreign trade and global imports that it was repeated with equal strategic success throughout World War II.

But Churchill was also one of a cabal of only four leaders – the others were Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, Foreign Secretary Edward Gray and War Minister Lord Haldane – who took the crucial decisions to bring Britain into the Great War against Germany where it would lose more than a million lives immediately killed and two million more crippled, lives shortened or devastatingly traumatized for life.

For Churchill was blind to the simple fact that a 75- year-old treaty had become antiquated junk. The development of new technologies and new patterns of economics and power had rendered it dead as a dodo.

But Churchill always lived in his own romantic haze of an imaginary past.

Today, the same romantic haze of a past that never was befuddles the leaders of the West and entices them to their doom – and ours.

Therefore, this week in Washington we have been treated to the spectacle of NATO as William Shakespeare’s King Lear – an old, stupid, senile king, stripped even of his pretense and fantasies of power and glory, reduced to ranting and raving at a world that has passed him by – and calling down the wrath of heaven in annihilating destruction.

But unlike Shakespeare’s fantasy king, NATO remains all too real – and its leaders’ senile fantasies of omnipotence threaten the survival of the entire world.