POSTED RESPONSE ON A COLUMN BY LEWIS MACKENZIE IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
"NATO's purpose, now long vanished into history, had been to exist as a counter to the WARSAW pact and the threat of Soviet hegemony.
But now the Soviet Union and the WARSAW are gone - and so should NATO have disappeared"
Absolutely.
But NATO has another important purpose, and it is this other purpose that keeps it going.
The U.S. uses NATO as a kind of theatrical costume for events like Afghanistan. Instead of the world's seeing America acting as lone bomb-dropping lawgiver to the world, it sees the somewhat more benign face of NATO, benign only because the organization carries the suggestion of plausibility with a number of nations agreeing on some objective.
The reality is, of course, America’s NATO allies do not genuinely regard Afghanistan as a serious threat: their relatively small commitments and refusal to expand them effectively are screaming this truth at us.
NATO is also used by American policy to keep Europe from becoming a genuine competitor on the world stage, a role Europe’s economy, the largest in the world, fully justifies.
American policy uses all kinds of subterfuges towards this goal, as for example keeping alive the many decades out-of-date conception of “a special relationship” with Britain, a game, appealing to the feelings of a declined imperial power, which keeps Britain from fully integrating into the Europe which is clearly its destiny.
As for MacKenzie’s silly way of talking about the Taleban, let’s remember they are a major part of the population, not some foreign invader like the United States. And they never attacked anyone in the past. American policies have made them an enemy. Just as American policies are driving Pakistan towards disaster.
Remember what America achieved in Cambodia during its holocaust in Vietnam.
