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Peace at any cost is a prelude to war!
"Europe Needs Its Own Pat Buchanans"
Will NATO Survive?
>From "BYRONICA" Monthly Newsletter of The Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan
Studies
Vol II, No. 10, October 1999
We have long maintained that one of the motives for the interventionist
strategy of the United States in the Balkans was to create an autonomous zone
of American military presence and political influence on the European
mainland that would be independent of the ups-and-downs of Washington's
present and future relations with its West European partners. By imposing its
own post-Yugoslav architecture the Clinton administration is hoping to ensure
that its Balkan bridgehead will outlive an eventual demise of NATO as we know
it.
While an anti-traditionalist, "globalist" brand of neoimperialism provides
the ideological basis for the obsessively anti-Serbian bias of U.S. policy,
the desire to establish an effectively irreversible Pax Americana in
south-east Europe is the "rational" underpinning of the strategy (which also
has its "Turkish," "Russian" and "Middle Eastern" components).
This is an unsubtle divide et impera, based on creating an unstable outcome
that will demand its creator as the guarantor of the status quo. By creating
a string of small, highly dependent and inherently weak statelets and
quasi-states - Dayton-Bosnia, "Kosova" and FYROM today, with an "independent"
Montenegro, and "autonomous" Sanjak and a "cantonized" Vojvodina soon to
follow - the U.S. is ensuring that Tuzla, Pristina, Skopje... will remain its
"assets" even if it has to close its bases in Kaiserslautern, Frankfurt-Main
or Pirmasens.
An unintended consequence of this approach, which culminated in the bombing
campaign against Serbia last spring, is to make the demise of NATO more
likely. Self-congratulatory rhetoric heard at the Alliance summit in Toronto
this month notwithstanding, the writing is on the wall. On October 11 that
unofficial organ of the U.S. establishemtn, The New York Times, reported that
"a plan to create a defense arm for the 15-nation European Union is stirring
fears among American civilian and military officials" ("Americans Alarmed
Over European Union's Defense Plan," by Craig R. Whitney).
While couching their comments in the language of economic efficiency and
prudent management, U.S. officials privately admit that the key issue
concerns command and control structures that may eventually rob NATO of any
meaning. The process has been under way for some years, initiated by
Franco-German military cooperation, but European Union leaders decided in
Cologne in June to take concrete steps by the end of next year to build up a
capacity for "autonomous action, backed up by credible military forces" in
future regional crises, even if the United States, decided to stay out.
A senior NATO diplomat said that "the Cologne decisions did create some
concern in Washington." In addition, high-ranking American military officers
have expressed concern about a French plan for a European general staff and a
council of 15 European Union ambassadors. At the end of July President
Jacques Chirac sent to all other European Union countries - including four
non-NATO members - an "action plan" proposed both civilian and military
standing committees for a new European defense system. The plan also called
for "a European military staff progressively organized to assume the triple
functions of oversight, analysis and planning."
According to The New York Times, "American ears pricked up at this news.
'We're somewhat skeptical when we hear about a need for a separate European
command structure,' a senior NATO official said." This was reflected in a
concerted lobbying effort by U.S. officials to undermine the French
initiative, with Britain predictably siding with the Administration.
The core French argument that it is unacceptable for Europeans to be spending
60 percent as much as Americans spend on defense, but getting in return only
a small fraction of the defense capability the Americans get for their money.
The reply coming from Washington and London is that the Europeans ought to
carry out a "defense capabilities initiative" within NATO to reshape the
alliance's fighting forces, and not indulge in developing defense structures
parallel with the Alliance. "I don't think the debate will be resolved
anywhere else but within NATO," the new EU commissioner for external affairs,
Christopher Patten of Great Britain, declared at the European Commission in
Brussels recently.
The U.S. initiative is hardly more popular with the Europeans than the French
"action plan." It would demand significant increases in the military spending
by NATO's European members - in Germany's case up to $22 billion more during
the next 10 years - without any major change in the political and military
chains of command. The political price may prove even higher, especially in
Germany, where the Left remainsdeeply divided over the country's role in NATO
in general, and its participation in the war against Serbia in particular.
"NATO bombs that destroyed the economy and infrastructure in Serbia were
aimed against the Serbian people," former leader of the German Social
Democratic party (SPD) Oskar Lafontaine declared in his new book book ("The
Heart Beats on the Left Side"). In excerpts published by the Bonn daily Die
Welt Lafontaine accused NATO of violating the UN charter as well as its own,
and drastically violating international law.
Lafontaine's unwillingness to share the responsibility for the attack
prompted him to quit the government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder on the
eve of the bombing campaign. Condemning the "cynical, pretentiously moral
lamenting" of Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and Defense Minister Rudolf
Scharping during the attack Lafontaine called it "the typical zeal of
turncoats, of former fervent pacifists who are now even more fervent
advocates of war."
Similar sentiments abound among the new members of the Alliance, in Hungary
and the Czech Republic, as well as along the southern flank. The overwhelming
unpopularity of NATO among most Greeks hardly needs restating, and were it
not for the feeble hope that being inside offers better protection against
Turkey than being outside Athens would have left a long time ago.
An almost two decades old controversy has created a fresh bout of anti-NATO
feeling in Italy. In September an Italian judge stirred new controversy about
a 1980 airliner crash off Sicily's coast by endorsing a theory that the
plane's 81 passengers lost their lives in a dogfight between a Libyan fighter
and NATO jets that - he said - has been hushed up for nearly two decades.
Judge Rosario Priore indicted four Italian generals for withholding
information about the incident, alleging they had committed high treason and
other crimes while hiding evidence that U.S. jets were in the area when the
plane went down. Five other military officials were accused of lying when
they denied any role in the military activity, which Priore said must have
been authorized by senior Italian or NATO officials.
NATO officials sought to keep a low profile by branding the controversy an
Italian matter, but the controversy has added to public concerns about the
presence of NATO bases in Italy. Those concerns stem partly from the severing
of a cable car wire by a U.S. Marine Corps jet in northern Italy in February
1998, killing 20 people, and partly from NATO's bombing of Serbia that was
hugely unpopular in Italy, whose air bases - especially at Aviano - played a
central role in the air campaign.
It is too early to predict if and when the unease on the European left will
find its equivalent in a traditionalist backlash against the "new" NATO. A
reaction based on the desire to defend the last vestiges of the Westphalian
order against the post-national, post-civilized ideologues of universal human
rights and global free trade is necessary and eventually inevitable.
The emerging anti-NATO mood in Europe prompted Dr. Henry Kissinger to wonder
in the Los Angeles Times shortly after the end of the bombing campaign if
Kosovo marked "the end of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or at least
as we have known it?" Taking note of "vehement calls for greater European
independence" Kissinger nevertheless failed to grasp the essential point:
that many Europeans are now scared stiff of the United States, which has been
transformed from the protective transoceanic cousin into the unpredictable
neighborhood bully. America is still obeyed not because it is respected or
liked, but because it is feared - and fear is not a sound basis for an
imperial project, as the Soviet leaders had found out.
Europe needs its own Buchanans, able to talk to the Lafontaines and willing
to forge a common front with them in devising a strategy for the Old
Continent's survival in the coming century. Contrary to Chris Patten's views,
that strategy has to be outside NATO - indeed against it.
>From a worthy bulwark of the Free World against communist aggression NATO has
now become an aggressive tool of "benevolent global hegemonists" in
Washington and their European quislings. It has lost more than every
political and military reason to exist; it has lost the right to do so.
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