When will it end? When will the people of Europe finally, at long last, wake up to the fact nobody wants their tourist attractions or their debt? The latest remaks made by NATO boss Jens Stoltenberg just has to have some people wondering. Come on, the EU cannot protect Europe from Russia and terrorists?
Okay, I have to set the record straight. NATO cannot protect anybody from terrorists. This should have been abundantly clear with Paris residents who got blasted to bits in November of 2015. And where was NATO in July of 2003, October of 2004, December of 2007, in March of 2010 and 2012, May 2013, December 2014, January, February, April, June, and August of 2015? Did NATO respond to five 2016 terror attacks in France in 2016? How about the nine terror attacks in 2017, the three in 2018, or the three in 2019? Who was guarding on the NATO wall when nine horrific attacks occurred in 2020? How come NATO special ops units intercede to prevent the beheading of a middle-school teacher north of Paris last year? If anti-terror is a NATO mission, the organization failed miserably.
If Jens Stoltenberg were not a puppet of the western military-industrial complex, I’d not hesitate to refer to him as a dufus. His plan, the whole anti-terror plan of the west, is to feed the fires of discontent that cause international terror. NATO is about job security for arms manufacturers and generals, and a marketplace for politicians to receive bids for their influence, and nothing more. Terror! Come on. It’s as if NATO geniuses think the rest of us are stupid as bricks. Most terror attacks in Europe have nothing to do with Al Qaeda or ISIS, most incidents are ethno-nationalist and separatist terrorism; left-wing and anarchist terrorism, according to The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol). But, okay, let’s assume for the sake of fairness that NATO serves somewhere, to stem the flow of head-chopping jihadists attacking Europeans at sidewalk cafes. Hell, NATO does not even seem able to identify these enemies, let alone stop them.
“Russia is a part of European culture. Therefore, it is with difficulty that I imagine NATO as an enemy.” – Vladimir Putin –
What does Russia want with Europe? Did nobody figure out the fall of the wall was about economics? Do NATO strategists still believe some democratic ideology won the day in the Cold War? Or, are colleges still teaching students to think about what eastern Europe represented for the Russian people, economically, I mean? The former Soviet republics were red ink, a gigantic boat anchor, hundreds of millions of mouths to feed, with lingering inefficiencies and corruption from the last days of World War II. Europe, unlike most other blocs of nations, is almost totally dependent on imports to survive. The bottom line being, there’s nothing on the continent but a gigantic service industry, consumers, and scant natural resources remaining. Vladimir Putin would be insane to invade Europe if the people of the bloc lined up at the borders and begged him.
Don’t take my word, read the WWF report from 2019. The gist of the report is, if everyone on Earth lived like the average European, we would need 2.8 Earths just to survive at all. And if this report does not clue you, then the fact that several EU countries may run out of critical resources very soon should. My question is, why would Russia invade Europe when the UK, France, and Germany do not have sufficient energy reserves to cover more than five years? From a practical standpoint, all Russia needs is for Europeans to pay them for natural gas and other natural resources. Let Brussels and the German bankers figure out how to feed everybody, and Russian people can just be good Greek beachgoers in Summer, or perhaps they can visit the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower, or take in a ride a gondola in Venice. Oh, and before I forget, Russia has over 50 years of oil left, over 100 years of natural gas, and over 500 years of coal, based on their current levels of internal consumption.
All of Europe may have 5 to 10 years, and that’s it. I don’t want to get into GDP and other socio-economic areas, but the reader should know that the European Union is running at an 80 percent debt to GDP rate, while Russia is going at about a 19 percent ratio. So, Putin’s armored divisions would be taking over a huge problem, not a rich set of vassal states. As a further reference, the United States is currently running at 134 percent debt to GDP.
“I think NATO needs to redefine itself. There has been no substantial thought about what NATO is for since the Berlin Wall came down.” – Nigel Farage –
Now that we have things in the right context, you can see that NATO’s game has nothing to do with protecting Europeans. I think it’s easy to see that NATO needs to reassess what it is all about. There is nothing to protect the people of Europe from, at least nothing that NATO is prepared to face. Furthermore, I am not the only analyst proclaiming NATO a useless tool of a dying hegemony. This Foreign Policy report is one of the only legitimate pieces of literature to come out of the magazine in decades. In the report, author Stephen M. Walt gives us the real score on what NATO is and is not. Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University gets Russia all wrong as far as the country is a declining power, but he hits the NATO nail on the head when he says Europe has nothing to fear from Russia.
So, where does this leave Jens Stoltenberg’s assertions that Europe must have NATO to be secure? Well, the NATO boss is delusional when he claims it was the U.S.-led Global Coalition that defeated ISIS. The U.S. took the leading role in creating ISIS, it was Russia that broke the back of the terrorist organization in Syria, while coalition warplanes were flying air cover for black market ISIS oil out of the eastern fields. Putin blew the trucks to pieces and posted the footage on Youtube, while Central Command posted reports of ISIS foxholes being blown up with a billion dollars worth of Raytheon ordinance.
Meanwhile, Europe was devastated by millions of refugees scared from their homes by America’s Arab Spring initiatives. Gaddafi fell, and Africa swam for Greece, Italy, and Spain. Come on Stoltenberg, we’re not idiots. NATO is destructive to Europe, not the reverse. It’s time to reassess your mission.
Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
