WHY HAS NATO CHOSEN RUSSIA AS ITS ENEMY INSTEAD OF ISIS?
According
to statements made at last weekend’s summit in Warsaw, NATO regards Russia as a
bigger threat than ISIS.
Of course,
that’s ludicrous but when you scratch beneath the surface, the use of these
falsehoods makes perverted sense.
Gleb is a
Russian student in Dublin. Recently, at the request of a mutual friend, I’ve
been helping him with his university thesis which focuses on the reasons
Ireland is one of the few Western European countries that has resisted NATO
membership. A distinction that most Irish people are extremely proud of.
As an Irishman
myself, I’ve always been baffled by why so many members of the British and
continental European elite see NATO as a good thing. After all, where’s the
glory in being dictated to by an external power whose interests are often at
marked variance with your own?
Like right this
moment, when it’s plainly obvious the biggest threat to Western Europe is
Islamic fundamentalism and the fallout from a destabilized Middle East. But the
US remains somewhat impervious to these issues, which it largely helped to
ferment, and instead continues to be, bizarrely, focused on Russia.
Now, I owe Gleb
this mention for noticing something I missed after last week’s NATO summit in
Warsaw. On Saturday afternoon, the club issued two important statements. The
first was titled ‘The Warsaw declaration on Transatlantic Security’ and it
outlined the core agreements reached in the Polish capital. Curiously, and this
is really interesting, it mentions Russia four times but references ISIL only
once.
The
Real Deal
Yet, that was
only the entree. Two hours later came the main course, the ‘Warsaw Summit
Communiqué’ which contained 139 points, many of them rather lengthy.
In total, the
agreed summary runs to an incredible length of around 16,000 words, or more
than half the length of Ronald Dahl’s ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,’
which I can assure you was a far more enjoyable read. In this document, ISIL is
specified on twelve occasions but, by contrast, there are 58 instances of
Russia being directly called out.
Thus, Gleb’s
email was titled, “why has NATO chosen Russia as its enemy instead of
ISIS/ISIL?”
And this is the
gist of my reply.
The main reason
is because there is very little profit in combating the, self-styled, Islamic
State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL). And NATO is primarily a money racket which
provides a lot of influential people with a very comfortable lifestyle, flying
around the globe on private jets and generating well-paid jobs, both directly
and via the think-tank circuit.
Let’s be clear here.
You don’t require submarines or nuclear weapons to engage ISIL, but you would
in a putative conflict with Russia. The fact that such a collision would
probably, due to the atomic arsenals involved, mean the end of human
civilization, is irrelevant to NATO because it doesn’t actually want a war with
Russia.
Instead it
desires to use Moscow as a convenient bogeyman in order to maintain US defense
spending, which grew 9 percent annually from 2000-2009 during the “war on
terror.”
That massive
increase in expenditure was justified by the need to remove, initially, Osama
Bin Laden and, later, Saddam Hussein from the international stage. After both
were eliminated, in reverse order, you’d have expected the splurge to be
cancelled and for the largesse to be reduced to pre-9/11 levels.
Money, Money, Money
The problem was that too much depends on
it. Defense now constitutes 54 percent of all federal discretionary spending in
the US or around 17 percent of all Washington outgoings. This butters a lot of
people’s bread and keeps a wide variety of industries alive.
At the same time, Russia will splash out
roughly 19 percent of its state budget this year on defense. This is equally as
wasteful and ridiculous as the American endowment. However, a major difference
is that Russia is not trying to prescribe to the rest of Europe about whom or
what it should regard as a threat.
The simple fact is that six of the top
eight defense contractors in the world are American. Together, they directly
employ close to 750,000 people and that’s in addition to millions of other
service and supply roles that depend on their patronage.
Any reduction in munitions outlay would
jeopardize a lot of those jobs, creating unemployment black spots in many US
towns and cities. And those would be primarily in ‘blue collar’ areas which
have already been hollowed out by decades of outsourcing, many of which happen
to be situated in electoral swing states. Politician who’d advocate this would
be self-immolating their career.
So let us be brutally frank here, bearing
in mind that NATO is primarily a European organization. Right now, the biggest
danger to European security originates in the Middle East. In the past year,
over one million migrants have arrived in Germany alone. This has helped to
create political and social instability across the continent. Very few of
these, if any, were created by anything Russia did.
However, a great many of those newcomers
came from countries which the US has helped to destroy, like Iraq and Libya. It’s
also worth noting that ISIS has claimed direct responsibility for recent
attacks in both Paris and Brussels. In other words, ISIS is killing people
inside NATO territory, something Russia is not doing.
Despite this, NATO continues to be fixated
on Russia. That’s because in order to maintain its gigantic military budget
(which incidentally is larger than the entire nominal GDP of Poland),
Washington needs a “big ticket” opponent and Russia currently fits the bill.
Fighting ISIS doesn’t require expensive
hardware. Instead, it needs boots on the ground, which are politically costly
but financially cheap. By contrast, squaring off against Moscow is like a
comfort blanket. Familiar to the masses, very unlikely to lead to an actual
war, but extremely lucrative.
Related Posts:
http://www.jewsnews.co.il/2016/07/17/why-has-nato-chosen-russia-as-its-enemy-instead-of-isis.html
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