President Obama is traveling to Warsaw, Poland, to attend the July 8-9 summit of NATO, the post-World War II, Cold War-era dinosaur organization that unfortunately failed to go out of existence once the Cold War was over.
NATO was brought into existence in 1949, two years after the United States was converted into a national-security state to wage the Cold War against its World War II partner and ally, the Soviet Union. It’s mission was ostensibly to protect Western Europe from an invasion by the Soviet Union, which had lost some 20-30 million people in WW II, had been entirely destroyed, and was mired in severe economic distress, especially given its socialist economic system.
But as well all know, the Cold War is over. It’s ended more than 25 years ago. Why didn’t NATO end as well?
What is NATO’s mission today? Ostensibly, it’s a variation on a theme. This time, the organization, which, needless to say, is controlled by the U.S. national-security establishment, says that it’s protecting both Western Europe and Eastern Europe from what it and the U.S. mainstream press are calling an aggressive attitude by Russia.
NATO’s real mission: to initiate crises in order to justify the existence of the U.S. national-security establishment, another post-World War II, Cold War dinosaur that failed to go out of existence when the Cold War ended.
With crises, Americans are made afraid. If Americans are afraid, they’ll scurry to the national-security establishment and say, “Please don’t go out of existence so that you can keep us safe (from the enemies you are producing).”
The crisis in Ukraine provides a textbook example of this racket. At the end of the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact went out of existence, naturally so. But NATO didn’t. Instead, it proceeded to absorb the former members of the Warsaw Pact, thereby enabling U.S. troops and missile installation to be placed ever closer to Russia’s borders.
When the NATO blob finally reached Ukraine, which borders Russia’s, NATO threatened to absorb that country as well. That would have meant a U.S. takeover of Russia’s longtime military base in Crimea as well as U.S. troops and missiles being stationed and installed on Russia’s border.
There was never any reasonable possibility that Russia was going to permit that to happen, and U.S. officials knew it. After all, imagine the reaction of U.S. officials if Russia had reconstituted the Warsaw Pact and had absorbed Cuba, Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Chile and then begun basing Russian troops and installing Russian missiles along the Mexico-U.S. border.
NATO knew full well the Russian reaction would be the same as the U.S. reaction if Russia had done the same thing over here that the U.S. is doing over there.
But the old Cold War style maneuvering worked perfectly. The Russians were new perceived as the new threat to the post Cold War order. And the U.S. mainstream press bought into the scam eagerly and willingly.
Look at what the U.S. national security state did after it lost its official Cold War enemy in 1989. Almost immediately it began intervening in the Middle East, which, coincidentally, produced a new official enemy — terrorism, which was set to last longer than communism.
So, they now have the best of all possible worlds: A renewed crisis with their old Cold War enemy and a new official enemy, terrorism (which has morphed into islam), that is supposedly going to last a few lifetimes.
Meanwhile, the national-security state is now obligating American men and women to go to war in the defense of Montenegro, the newest member of the 28-member NATO alliance.
Did anyone see Congress deliberating that decision? On the contrary. Like most everyone else, Congress just passively defers to the power of the national-security state branch of the federal government.
Too bad we can’t have a Brexit type of referendum here in the United States. It would enable the American people to exit NATO and, at the same time, restore America’s founding principle of a limited government by dismantling it’s other Cold War apparatus, the national-security state.
Also see my book The CIA, Terrorism, and the Cold War: The Evil of the National Security State.