NATO appears to me like a gate build in a place where there is no fence at all. With USSR dissolved, and cold war 1 ended, the nail was gone. So it was natural to expect the hammer to go as well. But the hammer remained! With the hammer in hand, of course, everything begun to look like a nail. This mistake would lead to cold war 2!
In a nutshell, NATO is a unity of nations having a common fear. These nations actually donnot love each other at all! They need an outside enemy to remain united. Without an enemy, the unity is in jeopardy. So the end of cold war 1 and USSR was actually a bittersweet experience. Just how can Europe stay together without an enemy? Will they not rivert to the WW1 and WW2 mentality?
Or perhaps that is just a U.S. exaggeration! NATO might be just an excuse to maintaine U.S.'s hagemony. Actually U.S. donnot respect Europe at all! To U.S. Europe is an immoral and irresponsible region that absolutely requires U.S. itself plus an enemy for it to stay together! There seems to be some truth in this, thanks to Trump's extraordinary leadership. He revealed that Europe's unity is just a profound illusions! It is like the way the spokes of a bicycle appears united but only because they are all connected to the same axle. It the case of US-Europe connection, it is for pure convenience. Each nation needs goodies from the fat brother across the Atlantic, beginning from the so called 'Marshall's Plan'. So in this way, US black mails them into its own so called 'sphere of influence'. But US cannot do this forever, especially as China rises economically!
This NATO's persistence despite the fact that the reason for its creation is long gone is the main reason we now have the mess in Ukraine. The problem is that NATO had to justify its indefinite existence by creating ever new fears, once USSR was gone. So, for instance, they bombed Serbia. So they moved from such a massive 'nail' as USSR into a microscopic Serbia. So even though it is defined as though 'defensive', it is actually an aggressive mounster, or so must it turn to be, if it desperately needs an enemy to justify its existence!
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But worse, it convinces its citizens that an hostile Ukraine, just sitting next to Russia in a 'Russia is the enemy' nuclear alliance, with Intercontinental Balistic missiles, hypersonic weapons is not a threat to Russia!!
Maybe this worked when the Warsaw Pact existed, with Moscow in charge of an eastern block, but that is no longer the case, however they seek to keep it going...
Personally I see a massive divide between the Continentals and Anglospherics....The EU, for example, does not have the interests of the UK, at heart...So why do we defend them...?? Especially the Germans and French...There is no united western Europe...The French hate us too much for that...
Former Soviet republics, now in NATO, seem more loyal to the UK than the rest of the EU...Maybe NATO needs to be redefined in a more up to date mission...?? Or disbanded....
Already, the signs are there that British interests are not really in Europe, but rather in the Indo-Pacific region...We recently consolidated this fact by creating a new defense alliance, or military pact, named; AUKUS......
I want to see a united Anglosphere......English speaking peoples coming together for commercial reasons, cultural and military defense...The Anglospheric Union.
That political project is named C.A.N.Z.U.K. Maybe you should search online for the details..?? That is the future, not continental Europe...
Consider expansion of NATO eastward, for instance. Since it is the neighbourhood of Germany, Italy etc, you would naturally expect that these countries to be the ones deciding most on whether to expand NATO. But you find that it was all done in Washington boardroom, led by such as Clinton! U.S. has no 'security' interests in these regions! It only has hegemonic interests. The case of Ukrain is another example. Putin had to attempt a negotiation with Biden, rather than with Germany etc. Why? Biden has no interest with peace in this region at all! He is petty save in Washington! All what he is interested with is unifying NATO to create a sense of 'America is back'. If a war in Ukraine will do that, then so be it! So as a peace negotiator, Biden and other US presidents should have been a non stater!
The complications came when they decided to secure Chernobyl....Which is an operation using paratroopers, working with Ukrainian nuclear station personnel..
It is necessary for ground troops to make a success of it...And, if they did not have to commit to this, they could have launched an airstrike, then moved out...
So yes, they are getting bogged down....THIS IS NOT BLITZ KREIG....If it were, they would have taken the whole of Ukraine and captured President Volodymyr Zelenskyy...
Now Putin is up against a guerrilla war, and that often keeps any military campaign bogged down...This has been made possible by British anti-tank weapons, plus surface to air missiles (SAMs) and now, even the cowardly EU are sending weapons in, to fight Russia....
MY ADVICE TO PUTIN IS TO STICK TO SELECTED AND SPECIFIC TARGETS ONLY....Then rapidly withdraw forces..
The longer he stays, the more egg on his face and the more the world hate Russia..
What will it happen if Germany built its own military without expecting a support from U.S.? The answer is that it would become powerful on its own and therefore no longer vulnerable to blackmailings from US! It would begin to walk its own path and form its own allies etc without any need to involve U.S.. This will undermine U.S. power!
But this U.S. trick is slowly coming to an end! Following the embarrassing performance in middle east, countries are beginning to arm themselves! They no longer trust US's protection. Even Japan has defied its own war-forbidding constitution and it is beginning its pre-WW2 aggressiveness!!
The world is changing, watch out!
Also many US alies will use Ukraine incidence as an excuse for more militarism. Ironically, this will slowly erode NATO itself. The aim of NATO was to rubber stamp U.S.'s military superiority monopoly by ridding capable nations from arming themselves. This was US's strategy to control both Europe and Asia! By promising to protect Japan, for instance, Japan would always be military inferior to U.S., hence U.S. would be assured that Japan would never rise again to challenge it like it did in WW2. But it seems that the time is up for such conmanship, and Putin is accelerating the change in world security order!