ENLARGEMENT MASKS NATO'S FAILURE

It should be obvious by now that NATO cannot survive the Ukrainian episode in its current form. It is likely to be reorganised as a maritime alliance of Eurasian peripheric or littoral states and coordinated from Washington instead of Brussels.

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The countdown has begun to the long-delayed dissolution of NATO, which should have taken place 20 years ago .

If it had folded at the right time in history, NATO would have remained in our collective memory as the only politico-military alliance that managed to maintain peace in Europe for 50 years.

Since 2000, however, when it fell into the hands of neoconservatives, NATO has turned into an offensive alliance, imitating the Delian league model of 2,500 years ago. The organization's relentless propaganda and its military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, have failed to impress Russia, which decided to end its expansion inbordering regions which were formerly part of the Soviet state, such as Georgia or Ukraine. China is not afraid of NATO either, although the leaders of the organization have recently announced that it will from now on involve itself in possible conflicts in the Indo-Pacific area.

Essentially an alliance whose core consists of US-led maritime and peripheral powers relative to  Eurasia, NATO has decided to hide its failure in Ukraine by expanding into Finland and Sweden. It should be noted that both these countries and member states such as Greece - whose existence the Americans have suddenly started to acknowledge in the last 2 years - are in turn situated in peripheral and coastal areas of Europe, on the Baltic Sea and the Ionian & Aegean seas respectively. (Toynbee considers them representatives of wilted civilizations).

After the dismantling of NATO in its current form, which after what happened in Ukraine is no longer hypothetical but more and more of a certainty, the Anglosphere will try to conclude substitution alliances - as Boris Johnson has already done recently - with other peripheral and/or coastal states of Eurasia, according to the "birds of a feather" principle.

Such an alliance policy direction was suggested by the geopolitician Spykman in 1938 and is called the "Rimland theory". One can only wish them well.