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.

Secret History of the EU Project

 June 10, 2016

Pew research data released a few days ago indicates a growing dissatisfaction with the EU even in countries like France and the Netherlands, founding members of the Union.

It would be easy, of course, to blame the spread of euroscepticism on Brexit, on the 2008 financial debacle or last year’s migration crisis. In fact, as I will attempt to demonstrate further, it is the design flaws inherent in the European project that now undermine its survival.

This project – involving “an ever-closer union” of European nations – originated on the other side of the Atlantic and had started as a covert operation of the then newly-formed CIA. These essential details were hidden from the public for decades. Even I, as an historian, was made aware of them thanks to the interventions on French TV of Mrs. Marie-France Garaud, the eminence grise of presidents De Gaulle, Pompidou and Chirac.

Recently declassified CIA-OSS archives also prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that men whom we have considered for years to be the EU’s founding fathers (Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman and so on) were in fact paid to impose the CIA’s European project on an unsuspecting public opinion.

The CIA’s project was chiefly inspired by former OSS boss “Wild Bill” Donovan and by John Foster Dulles, former CIA director. Together with a small group of other lawyers, they elaborated the mad project of an “United States of Europe”. It was supposed to be realized in stages, by stealth and without European nations being fully informed about the ultimate shape or objectives of the EU institutions created in the mid-fifties.

Its original design flaws reflected the founders’ lack of grasp of European history, geography and geopolitics. Donovan and Dulles, steeped in European clandestine operations during WWII instead, had also developed an unhealthy admiration for existing Nazi blueprints to unite the continent’s countries and/or of Nazi high-ranking officials like Walther Funk. Their ideas by and large were incorporated into the CIA project, with the consequences only now made apparent by the financial and sovereign debt crises of the past decade.

However, had the initiators of the CIA project taken into consideration their own, American geopolitical scholarship concerning the organization of Europe after the war, Germany would have never been included into NATO but had been kept neutral instead, possibly undivided and under military occupation. Nicholas Spykman, the founder of American geopolitics, writing in 1941 considered that:

 

“Any proposal for the unification of Europe would tend to put them in a subordinate position to Germany (regardless of the legal provisions of the arrangement), since Germany, unless broken up into fragments, will still be the biggest nation on the continent. It is hardly conceivable that countries now fighting for their freedom would turn around and voluntarily submit to any such arrangement. It is equally improbable that the United States, after having made such tremendous sacrifices to help free these countries from the German yoke, would consent to the restoration of German domination.” (Nicholas Spykman,“The Geography of the Peace”, 1944)

 

 

 

Today when we look back at the crucial 1947-1957 decade, we can start to understand why the EU Commission and institutions are manned by an opaque bureaucracy unresponsive to public scrutiny, which is hell-bent on advancing the agenda of global corporations at the expense of the European citizen. Being a covert project inspired and financed by the CIA, the EU is indeed unable to fulfil the aspirations for progress of the European nations, although for a few decades it has seemed to function in that sense.

Towards the end, however, the central tenets of the project – the creation of the United States of Europe, Brussels’ centrally-planned economic and fiscal management, the common currency – became the foremost priorities of the subservient EU bureaucracy and of some EU political leaders alike. But this was also the point where European nations could not continue to support the project and started having serious doubts about the whole construction.

In hindsight, after two devastating world wars, the creation of NATO and the Marshall Plan would have been sufficient to keep the peace on the continent and return it to prosperity. The CIA on the other hand, which during the same period also financed the creation of the Bilderberg club, wanted to make sure that American multinationals and later global corporations can fully profit from European reconstruction and the accompanying economic development. Hence the adoption of an European union project and the creation of European institutions which were from the outset under the influence or management of people vetted and approved by the CIA/Bilderberg bosses.

The un-European nature of the entire EU project is its major flaw, although there are others, as well. No such project originating in the New World – even if elaborated with the best of intentions (which of course is not the case) – could ever be expected to work for long on the old continent. And vice-versa.

The EU’s apparent fleeting success had more to do with European reconstruction efforts and with the ubiquitous desire for peace after the two devastating wars. During the past two decades, unfortunately, CIA-sponsored politicians and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic have overplayed their hand and the entire edifice is crumbling as a result. While it is hard to gauge right now what alternative structures and arrangements will ultimately replace the EU, what’s for certain is that European nations should never again go to war with each other or allow outside powers and institutions to make vital decisions on their behalf concerning their collective future.

NATO and the Baltics' Geopolitical Predicament

May 6, 2016

During the 90’s, the uncontested dean of American diplomacy, the late George Kennan, fulminated against NATO’s expansion eastwards, which he considered both unnecessary and potentially dangerous for the security of the United States. The Clinton and Bush administrations did not heed sound professional advice and now the Baltics’ inclusion into NATO is creating major headaches for the alliance’s military planners.

The planned deployment of a few NATO battalions in the Baltics has already irked the Russian military, who decided to deploy three divisions in order to counter the perceived danger on their northwestern border. Most Western military analysts have recently highlighted the fact that NATO is in no position to really protect Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in case the Russians do decide to attack, which they obviously do not intend to at this point in time.

Objectively speaking, small coastal states – like the Baltics – cannot be defended indefinitely against a much more powerful neighbour in search of access to the sea. Here is what the founder of American geopolitics, Nicholas Spykman, had to say in 1938 about it :

“The fate of the newly-created coastal states (…), the three Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia is still to be determined, but to the geographer they appear as distinct anachronisms in the evolution of geographic state types, and it is hard for any student of history to study a map of Europe without a strong conviction that Russia will some day force her way to the Baltic and swallow them a second time” (“Geography and Foreign Policy II”, pp.219-220)

The size and geographical location of the Baltics, therefore, will render their defense against Russia useless in the long run. This does not mean that Vladimir Putin – or even his successor in the Kremlin – has any current invasion plans concerning these three republics. NATO military planners, however, are duty-bound to take these geopolitical realities into consideration and avoid the risk of exposing the alliance to military conflict with Russia.

Granted, over the past few decades Western politicians have chosen to ignore solid geopolitical advice and to act in the name of certain ideals that are at odds with geography and sound foreign policy principles. This ignorance of geopolitics has been the source of many a policy error in Europe and the Middle East, to mention but two geographical regions currently in turmoil.

The upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa and the shaky internal situation in Turkey, on the other hand, mean that the United States – and the West generally – needs Russia’s cooperation more than it ever did in the past. Accordingly, by making an unnecessary troop deployment decision in the Baltics, NATO risks being embroiled in facing alone the Islamist threat in the Middle East and possibly even the unraveling of the political order in Turkey. As matters currently stand, the president of Turkey has already proven his willingness to stoke up an open military conflict with Russia, which of course his country cannot hope to win.

Both the small Baltic republics and Turkey, therefore, have the potential to drag the other NATO members into direct confrontation with the Russian army, a development that no NATO commander seriously contemplates though. Still, the ugly European experience during WWI illustrates the fact that small countries, like the Baltic republics, or desperate political leaders like Erdogan are quite able to ignite a generalized military conflict, paid for with the lives of their much larger and peaceful neighbours that can be induced to sleepwalk their way into such a conflict.

Consequently, the political leaders of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania should be well advised by NATO’s major military powers to tone down their anti-Russian rhetoric and try to find ways to cohabitate peacefully with their neighbour. ( Incidentally, this is the same type of advice I have given in 2008 to the Estonian Ambassador to France during a seminar on these matters that took place at Sciences po in Toulouse).

As for Turkey, the NATO high command should make it clear to the country’s military that shooting down Russian aircraft for minor violations of the country’s airspace will not constitute the casus belli that could automatically trigger the full involvement of NATO into conflict, as stipulated by Article 5 of the alliance’s treaty. To be sure, this provision in the treaty is activated only when one of NATO’s member states is subject to fully fledged armed intervention by a hostile power.