Washington Plans Global NATO To Replace UN

Flags of the 26 NATO member countries - http://www.nato.int/pictures/nato-hq/b040326a.jpg

• This is the rise of the revived Roman empire as stated in the Bible. Is the United Nations about to be obsolete? Will this new setup propel the world to another world war? Russia Today reports:
   
  Barack Obama’s administration sees NATO as the nucleus for a global organization of democracies that will eventually replace the United Nations, believes an influential Russian newspaper.
   
  Washington wants NATO to be expanded by inviting counties like Australia, Japan, Brazil and South Africa and become a global organization tackling not only security issues but also epidemics and human rights, reports Kommersant daily on Friday. The next US Ambassador to NATO Ivo H. Daalder is a great supporter of this idea.
   
  Daalder, expert of the Brookings Institution and a foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama during the election campaign, is a strong proponent of the so-called Concert of Democracies.
   
  Exclusive club for democratic nations
  The idea, coined by the think-tank Princeton Project on National Security, is that the United Nations is outdated, because it was created to prevent a war between great nations, but now this threat is negligible. On the other hand, the UN is inefficient in dealing with local conflicts between small nations or between a great power and a small nation. Examples of those include conflicts in Darfur, Kosovo or, a more recent example, in South Ossetia. Authors of the concept, including Daalder, see the solution in an organization of democratic nations with resources both diplomatic and military to answer these challenges.
   
  According to them, democracies are eager to co-operate for the sake of defending human rights and providing securities, while authoritarian nations are not. If you drop out authoritarian regimes – including the great powers of Russia and China – then decision making will be quicker and action is far more likely to be taken. This Concert of Democracies will serve as a magnet for other nations and coerce them into becoming democracies in order to have a say on global affairs.
   
  The argument continues, saying that actions by this limited club including military ones will be legitimate, even if they violate national sovereignty of non-democratic nations, and will not need the sanction of the UN. Daalder believes that NATO is a prototype of the proposed concert, being an alliance of democracies with a long success record, and can be extended to the new global organization.
   
  The upcoming anniversary summit of the alliance in April may be the time when Daalder presents Washington’s reform plan to other NATO members, the newspaper Kommersant continues. The event will be a sort of ‘family reunion’ with no would-be members like Ukraine and Georgia invited. The event will be dedicated to a discussion of the future of the organization.
   
  Kommersant cites a source in the White House as saying that Vice President Joe Biden is among the supporters of the Concert of Democracies. During the security conference in Munich he mentioned that Washington wants its European partners to play a larger role, but this means they’ll have to take a larger share of the burden of maintaining international security. Inviting new non-European members to NATO will allow Europeans not to increase their expenditures.
   
• NATO sees itself increasingly as a global military force. Diana Johnstone reports in NATO’s Global Mission Creep :
   
  NATO, the main overseas arm of the U.S. military-industrial complex, just keeps expanding.  Its original raison d’être, the supposedly menacing Soviet bloc, has been dead for twenty years.  But like the military-industrial complex itself, NATO is kept alive and growing by entrenched economic interests, institutional inertia and an official mindset resembling paranoia, with think tanks looking around desperately for “threats”. 
    ……
  The other, less obvious but more objective cause is the recent expansion of the European Union.  The rapid absorption of all the former Eastern European satellites, plus the former Soviet Republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, has drastically changed the balance of power within the EU itself.  The core founding nations, France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries, are no long able to steer the Union toward a unified foreign and security policy. After France and Germany refused to go along with the invasion of Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld dismissed them as “old Europe” and gloated over the willingness of  “new Europe” to follow the United States lead.  Britain to the west, and the “new” European satellites to the East are both more attached to the United States politically and emotionally than they are to the European Union that took them in and provided them with considerable economic development aid and a veto over major policy issues.
    ……
  The worst political effect is much broader.  The impression is now created that “the West”, Europe and North America, are barricading themselves by a military alliance against the rest of the world.  In retrospect, the French dissent accomplished a service to the whole West by giving the impression, or the illusion, that independent thought and action were still possible, and that someone in Europe might listen to what other parts of the world thought and said.  Now, this “closing of ranks”, hailed by the NATO champions as “improving our security”, will sound the alarms in the rest of the world.  The empire seems to be closing its ranks in order to rule the world.  The United States and its allies do not openly claim to rule the world, only to regulate it.
   
  The West controls the world’s financial institutions, the IMF and the World Bank.  It controls the judiciary, the International Criminal Court, which in six years of existence has put on trial only one obscure Congolese warlord and brought charges against 12 other persons, all of them Africans – while meanwhile the United States causes the deaths of hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of people in Iraq and Afghanistan and supports Israel’s ongoing aggression against the Palestinian people.  To the rest of the world, NATO is just the armed branch of this enterprise of domination.  And this at a time when the Western-dominated system of financial capitalism is bringing the world economy to collapse.
            
  This gesture of “showing Western unity” for “our security” can only make the rest of the world feel insecure.  Meanwhile, NATO moves every day to surround Russia with military bases and hostile alliances, notably in Georgia.  Despite the smiles over dinner with her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, Hillary Clinton repeats the stunning mantra that “spheres of influence are not acceptable” – meaning, of course, that the historic Russian sphere of interest is unacceptable, while the United States is vigorously incorporating it into its own sphere of influence, called NATO. 
   
  Already China and Russia are increasing their defense cooperation.  The economic interests and institutional inertia of NATO are pushing the world toward a pre-war lineup far more dangerous than the Cold War.
   
  The lesson NATO refuses to learn is that its pursuit of enemies creates enemies.  The war against terrorism fosters terrorism.  Surrounding Russian with missiles proclaimed “defensive” – when any strategist knows that a shield accompanied by a sword is also an offensive weapon – will create a Russian enemy. 
   
  The Search for Threats
  To prove to itself that it is really “defensive”, NATO keeps looking for threats.  Well, the world is a troubled place, thanks in large part to the sort of economic globalization imposed by the United States over the past decades.  This might be the time to be undertaking diplomatic and political efforts to work out internationally agreed ways of dealing with such problems as global economic crisis, climate change, energy use, hackers (“cyberwar”).  NATO think tanks are pouncing on these problems as new “threats” to be dealt with by NATO.  This leads to a militarization of policy-making where it should be demilitarized.
            
  For example, what can it mean to meet the supposed threat of climate change with military means?  The answer seems obvious: military force may be used in some way against the populations forced from their homes by drought or flooding. Perhaps, as in Darfur, drought will lead to clashes between ethnic or social groups.  Then NATO can decide which is the “good” side and bomb the others.  That sort of thing.
   
  The world indeed appears to be heading into a time of troubles.  NATO appears getting read to deal with these troubles by using armed force against unruly populations.  

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