Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: NATO Should Stop Expanding, Says UK Think-Tank

NATO Should Stop Expanding, Says UK Think-Tank
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/nato-should-stop-expanding-says-uk-think-tank-935180.html


Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Why are we pretending we would fight for Georgia?
Messrs Miliband and Cameron want Georgia to join Nato.
Such thinking is muddled, dangerous and defies the lessons of history
Sunday, 17 August 2008
Hard on the heels of Nicolas Sarkozy and Condoleezza Rice, and keen to share
their limelight, David Cameron arrived in Tbilisi yesterday. His visit is a
reward to the Leader of the Opposition for having expressed even more
bellicose views on the Georgian crisis than the Americans, which should
sound loud alarm bells for those of us who may quite soon be living under a
Tory government.
In the official view of Washington, the expansion of Nato up to the borders
of Russia was a benevolent spreading of democracy. "It is the right of the
Georgian people and Georgian government to determine their own security
orientation," says Kurt Volker, principal deputy assistant secretary of
state, and Matthew Bryza, the American special envoy, adds that Russia would
not have attacked Georgia if she had already belonged to Nato.
While Gordon Brown and David Miliband merely mouthed empty platitudes about
the crisis (although Miliband has been sympathetic to Georgia's Nato
aspirations in the past), Cameron went startlingly further when he said that
its membership of Nato should be accelerated. His words so excited the
Georgians that they asked him to meet their ambassador in London on
Wednesday, and then fly out for his Caucasian photo-op.
No doubt this crisis has illustrated Russian ruthlessness and brutality, but
then, as the Chechens might say, we knew that already. It has also exposed
the severe limits of US power. Although George Bush, Dick Cheney and
sabre-rattling pundits have screeched defiance at Russia, they are bereft of
any practical response. Removing the Winter Olympics from Sochi doesn't
sound like the ultimate deterrent.
But above all, the crisis has highlighted the incoherence of Western policy
since the Cold War ended – and belatedly raised the question of just what
purpose Nato now serves. This is something an intelligent opposition should
be discussing.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was created in 1949 as a "one for all
and all for one" mutual defence alliance between west European countries, of
which Great Britain was then militarily much the most important, and the
United States, guarding Europe against Soviet aggression. By the terms of
the treaty, "an armed attack on any member in Europe or North America shall
be considered an attack against them all and ... if such an armed attack
occurs, each of them ... will assist the party or parties so attacked by
taking forthwith... such action as it deems necessary, including the use of
armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic
area."
That object met with total success. Forty years later, the Berlin Wall fell,
Soviet Russia began to implode, and its empire soon fell apart. This left
Nato without an obvious role, and it might logically have been wound up.
Instead, it evolved, almost without anyone's noticing, into an arm of US
policy – and an outlet for Tony Blair's zealous "humanitarian
interventionism".
In the spring of 1999, he mawkishly extolled Nato's bombing of Serbia: "No
one in the West who has seen what is happening in Kosovo can doubt that
Nato's military action is justified... [You need only ask] anyone who has
seen the tear-stained faces of the hundreds of thousands of refugees
streaming across the border, heard their heart-rending tales of cruelty."
But even if Blair had been correct to say that misrule in distant countries
justified armed intervention – an alarmingly open-ended principle which has
since helped take us into the Iraq disaster – what had it to do with Nato?
How did those tear-stained faces become "an armed attack on any member"? And
by what geographical conjuring trick did Afghanistan, more recently, become
part of "the North Atlantic area" to require a Nato operation there?
Before then the acutely dangerous policy of enlarging Nato had already
begun, partly for the most frivolous of reasons. Bill Clinton ingratiatingly
promised a Polish-American audience in Chicago that Poland would join, yet
another example of the baleful influence of "hyphenated" American domestic
politics on foreign policy.
And so, in this heedless way, Nato was expanded to include not only the
former Warsaw Pact countries Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria, but the Baltic
states that were part of the Soviet Union only 20 years ago. One didn't have
to be a Russian nationalist to see this as deliberate provocation of an
angry and wounded country. With all its brutality, Russia has legitimate
security concerns and national interests. When Georgian membership of Nato
is flaunted, one wonders what the US reaction would have been if Leonid
Brezhnev had invited Mexico to join the Warsaw Pact. Russian policy may
sometimes have a paranoid tinge but, as the saying goes, paranoiacs have
enemies, too.
No one stopped to point out that, if the fundamental Nato principle applied,
an irredentist border dispute between Latvia and Russia should have become
an armed conflict fought by Nato, which was plainly absurd. Bryza's claim
that Russia would have been deterred if Georgia had already belonged to Nato
is mercifully theoretical but highly questionable. And does Cameron really
want what's left of our depleted army sent to the Caucasus to fight Russia?
It remained for a former Tory foreign secretary to dash a little cold water
of sanity on these overheated effusions. On Friday Sir Malcolm Rifkind
chided the folly of making threats about the use of force when these are
obviously not going to be carried out. And the day before he had said, "I
think people in both the United States and in the United Kingdom and
elsewhere in western Europe will have to ask very clearly how important is
Georgia to them.
"There was a lot of talk about how Georgia should join Nato and if only
Georgia was a member of Nato this wouldn't have happened, and so forth. I
think that is frankly totally unconvincing." The truth is surely as Sir
Malcolm says: "The United States, Britain, France and Germany are not going
to go to war with Russia over South Ossetia, however sympathetic to the
people of Georgia we are.
"We are sympathetic to Tibet, we are sympathetic to Zimbabwe, but we don't
contemplate military solutions to these problems. So Nato membership is not
the answer." Is it too late for our politicians to learn again that kind of
plain speaking and common sense?
Non tutti i britt sono nazisti come Amaltric
Mi domando se un bricciolo di buon senso e interesse per le proprie
popolazioni sia rimasto in Europa.
Articoli come questo fanno sperare.
Kossovo, entrata della Turchia in Europa, appoggio alla Georgia
nazionalista, fanno tremare.
Saluti
--------------------------------
Inviato via 
http://arianna.libero.it/usenet/