Who really wants to join NATO? Yes, it might calm some of the nervier steeds but this week’s display of political analysis [not], warmongering, boys toys actually on the golf course – or was it some half-baked arms sales pitch to captive markets? – did NATO no favours whatsoever.
NATO was born in the cold war and, as they say, the early years are the formative ones. ‘Give me the child till the age of seven
and I will show you the man.’ – and all that.
NATO is incapable of seeing Russia as anything other than a threat to the survival of homo sapiens – and anything less sapiens than the homogenous war gamers gathered at Newport’s arriviste Celtic Manor would be hard to find.
Let’s deal with the boys toys first. Has anyone ever seen anything so ludicrous, so eminently unserious as the tanks of different types pitched up on the edge of a shaven cosmetic lawn or fairway below the hotel? And, beside them, an unidentified warplane with different types of missiles laid out alongside it. This put quite another cast on the diplomatically worded: ‘Something for the weekend, Sir?’
Look at it another way – not instead but as well: this was not a May Day parade in Red Square or one of the North Korean hardware gigs. It looked like the latest from Hamleys – and shone a spotlight on the mind sets of the superannuated – but powerful – teenagers indoors.
We self-satisfied ‘westerners’ have been seduced into accepting without question that ‘Russia’ can legimitately be spoken of as a single entity – although it is a Federation.
Look at a map and try mentally to encompass ‘Russia’. The wonder is that anyone can hold this together at all. The failure and break up of the Russian Federation would be a human, economic, political and cultural nightmare as far from the world’s interests as imaginable.
Here are we in the United Kingdom, a brush stroke of an island you have to strain to locate against a map of Europe, much less than against a globe. Yet, as is coming to a conclusion now, as four tiddler territories with even tiddlier populations, we appear to find it impossible to work out how to stay together for our combined benefit.
But we find it so so easy to talk of ‘Russia’. In our miniscule, tidy, chippy little parochialism, we cannot even imagine ‘Russia’, never mind grasp the challenges it faces.
We have supported the light-fingered European Union’s dangerous and self-interested seducing of the European states from the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to join it. This has been done deliberately to isolate ‘Russia’.
The European Union is a viable model for nothing. It is wholly undemocratic – its ‘parliament’ can only parlay and, when it gets really cheeky, which is rare, say ‘Hang on a minute chaps…’.
It’s attempt at a currency union, the eurozone, with no inconvenient internal discipline in the core management of monetary and fiscal policies, substantially aggravated the extent of the impact of the collapses of international financial institutions in 2008.
It has a cluster of basket-case economies feeding like barracudas on the back of its common hulk – basket-case economies that have had their organs of recovery neutered by the ease of being assured dependents.
It makes its most senior appointments on the basis, not even on issues of merit but on bargaining between members states on who can nominate the incumbent of which post this time around. And, as one of his last actions as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Gordon Brown gave us – gave Europe – the utterly incomparable, altitudinously over promoted party hack, Cathy Ashton, as Europe’s first Foreign Affairs secretary.
Like our own union, the European Union is a worthwhile and important union; and like ours, is overdue for radical reform.
But this limping confection, stapled together from opportunist states, power-hungry unelected and unaccountable Commissioners and overpaid and unaccountable bureaucrats, has seen fit to muck around with the stability of Europe as a whole by making an insecure ‘Russia’ as nervous as possible.
Seducing to EU membership the states in geographical Europe and on the borders of ‘Russia’ is intended to drive it back, to put a buffer zone between the EU and the Bear, to undermine ‘Russia’s’ sense of security.
How fundamentally stupid is that?
Where you exclude and demonise you create enhanced monsters for yourself – because the less contact you have, the easier it is to forget the rounded complexity of humanity and reduce the excluded to the stereotypical line drawings of polemic.
You create a fortress mentality in the excluded because you deliberately drive them back into confined territories of geography, of operation, of interaction and of the mind.
And those held within the bounds of an externally imposed fortress will be driven defend themselves as they see fit.
Yes, Russia’s intervention in Crimea was of questionable propriety – but there was a massive referendum to validate it.
Yes, Russia’s actions in eastern Ukraine are belligerent in being unwelcome to the Ukrainian administration – but this is a Russian exclave, a situation any nation would find morally as well as politically delicate.
This is not to excuse ‘Russia’s’ actions, it is to try to indicate the importance of trying to see things from the perspective of the other.
It is arguable that the trigger of the current global instability, driven by the rise of Muslim religious ‘nationalism’, for want of a better word, was the United Kingdom’s eager participation in the illegal war in Iraq, which was always a regime change mission, led by the USA but ‘validated’ by our presence.
The wrongness of that war; the destruction we caused – and intended to cause; the uncounted deaths – statistics can be so embarrassing; and the consequent delamination of that country were potent fuels for recruitment to Islamic terrorist organisations – and they had been given genuine cause.
We and not ‘Russia’ did this.
We joined the USA in the offensive in Afghanistan. How has that made anything better?
Under Blair, we were also raising our voice from whisper to speech in potential repeat support for American aggression, this time in Iran. ‘Events’ not good judgment saved us from that one.
We supported and armed the anti-government faction in Libya. How has that worked out?
We supported the rising in Egypt – and how would we describe that as a leading to a more stable country, or continent?
In total, we have done as much if not more harm as ‘Russia’ in our extra-territorial interventions; and we have done them more recently, with more of the supposed benefit of hindsight no one ever seems to consult.
But there, at Celtic Manor were the leaders of the NATO member states, focused on doing nothing other that regenerating the cold war – with all of the immeasurable beneficial impact this has on arms sales – and with a delicatessen buffet outside to tempt the appetites of the armchair warriors indoors.
‘Russia’ will be a threat only if we make it one and ‘enemise’ it, as we are doing. This is so primitive, so unevolved, so dangerously stupid, it summons little more than despair
The Cold War was American led. NATO is American-led. The sanctions against ‘Russia’ are American-driven.
There is a great deal to commend America and Americans but within its own immense diversity, it is parochial. It has no need to go elsewhere. It has everything it needs somewhere within its own outer borders.
This means that for America in general, the rest of the world is ‘other’ and strange. And within this world-view, for America ‘Russia’ looms large in its mythology. It is even more unable than we are of coming to comprehend the ‘state’ of Russia, in any terms.
First we need to understand ‘Russia’. We need to talk, to include, to collaborate, to work from the same side of the common good, not to force it and ourselves into oppositional and rearmed parahostilities. That can only lead in one direction – where we could airheadedly trigger the war that literally would end all wars and much else besides.
In relation to the referendum on independence, the issue of NATO membership is neutral by dint of its assets being cancelled out by its liabilities.
Some would see the advantage of the protection it offers being cancelled out by the likelihood of its making the continued presence of Trident at Faslane a condition of membership.
We see what protection it offers cancelled out by the fact that it is itself an agent of global instability, as we have sought to demonstrate above.