NATO is an organization built to assure Germany it doesn’t need to rearm. :D And that it’s not a good expenditure of money for the UK, France, or other European countries who could perhaps have the cash to have a proper military, to actually have a “proper” military.
No more European interventionism without American say-so. I know, American citizens view it as the USA paying for European “butter”, defending Europe to the last American, etc, and for the man in the street this view might have some validity, but in the grand scheme of things, no NATO, EU countries arming themselves to try and counter the Soviets, more people with nukes and once EU countries have a “proper” military they might decide to use it in the “wrong” way…
Still, for the almost President of the USA of all people to endanger it, crazy times…
This would be incorrect. You can look here and see a list of current operations as well as other operations that have taken place since since 1991. There are a lot.
Yeah, that’s definitely part of the historical equation. In the context of the Cold War, how to create a buffer in German without the danger of a relapse into the sort of militarism that had bedeviled the region in the recent past, was a problem. West Germany as a state highly dependent on the USA and with its military tightly integrated into an alliance worked pretty well.
Hardly, have you forgotten or maybe didn’t know about NATO operations in the Balkans, and subsequent peacekeeping in Kosovo.
NATO was also involved in counter-piracy operations in the Horn of Africa and the intervention in Libya
NATO has also been involved in a number of smaller operation and some humanitarian operations including Katrina.
But the big one is after 9/11 the US invoke Article 5 (the mutual defense clause), which is why Afghanistan has been a NATO operation for 15 years now. While the US has almost always provided the majority of forces (and the overwhelming amount of combat forces), NATO’s contribution in Afghanistan has been pretty significant. It is more than a little ironic that a treaty originally envisioned that USA would defend smaller countries in Europe ended up that the smaller countries contributed to the defense of the US.
I understand why Trump may see NATO as useless. Because NATO works, we have to wage less wars, so it work troughs peace. Is a deterrant. Trump being a bussines men is on the wrong mindset to see something has a pure expense a good thing. The objetive of society is not profit, he may not understand why societies exist.
DT doesn’t see small eastern nations coming under control of Moscow as a threat to the US.Terrorism is our prime enemy and the only use for our military now besides trying to bully China.
That Trump interview is so weird. He’s basically saying the EU is an enemy because they are a strong economy so it’s better for the US if they break up? Like… our strongest allies in the world, the countries with ideals most like us, it’s good if they go to hell?
Ok, NATO piss farting around in the most recent bout of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans is right at the top of the tree for an alliance forged in anticipation of thermonuclear war. Gotcha. Have a sense of history guys… geeze… the Warsaw Pact is no more and NATO is a shell of what it was, thank God.
The West’s resistance to Putin over the Ukraine has been so minimal as to be a bees dick away from appeasement, and that’s primarily in recognition of Russia regaining it’s sphere of influence and the lack of appetite for conflict on all sides.
@Clay, I don’t underestimate their capability (or the West’s…), but as far as I can figure you’re suggesting Trump is their man and then they batter him around in order to introduce chaos into the system of authority and undermine US confidence in their own government? It would be a colossal sacrifice of one of what would be perhaps the single greatest espionage asset in modern history. Unprecedented. What you’re suggesting makes no sense. They would do what little they could to lower the heat on him and plumb him for strategic gain over the next 4 years.
But it’s fantasy.
If you’re suggesting they have nothing on him and seed a report to a credulous and febrile media in order to undermine the US, that would make more sense. Except again they have much more to gain from a secure and friendly President who is amenable to their regional ambitions than they do from the traditional policy apparatchiks of the two party ruling class.
So the likely answer is the guy needed the work, so he just sat down at his desk and invented most of it or included every rumour he encountered, and it probably snowballed a bit on him. I don’t know why he felt the need to leave his house in fear of Russian reprisals after the story broke, considering it had been in the hands of loose lipped journalists for months. If anything, the allegations are complimentary to the Russians and the ability of their intelligence organisations. If he’d implied Putin and Trump shared the love that dare not speak it’s name, then I suppose he would be picking the polonium out of his cereal. I don’t believe any of it.
Somali pirates!! hahaha, you must be having us on! Masterful! I love it.
I bet that was the first thing on Churchill’s mind at Potsdam. Although we may be quite sure he would have assessed the threat in language not printable today.
To think NATO spent all those years worrying about hordes of tanks rolling through the Fulda Gap, when the real threat lay south of the Suez, in a 40hp banana boat.
I think what people are suggesting is that Russians have something on Trump that they are keeping secret, Western agents found out something that Russians have on Trump, and then one of those Western agents leaked it. Which is not so implausible.
I guess I find it hard to believe that something as rich as that leaks to one individual only, especially if material is possessed by western agencies. The Brits would do their cousins a favour and leak it for them once it broke. I think the reactions we’re seeing so far outside of this report from foreign agencies are cautionary responses to someone who obviously has links to Russia.
The report is not a Russian disinformation campaign because it was prepared well in advance of the election, which means that Russia did not create it, because it ran counter to their interests.
I’m not insensible to the argument that the report serves Russian interests at this point (I disagree, but I can see the logic), but since Russia couldn’t have ensured it wouldn’t have come out before the election there is no way this is Russian misinformation.
It could have been created out of whole cloth by Steele to give Jeb Bush what he was paying for. The fact that Steele is so highly respected does tend to make me give it more weight than I would otherwise do though.
Go to Poland or Estonia or Latvia or Romania and tell them NATO is obsolete. If you talk about NATO in terms only of military operations actually undertaken, then you’ve fundamentally misunderstood (or are deliberately confusing) the purpose of the organisation.
I notice you conveniently ignored Afghanistan, which by any objective measure counts as a big operation.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been play too much EU IV, but I don’t believe there has been 70 year stretch of history in Europe which had only one large shooting war (Balkans).
Absent NATO and the EU it doesn’t take a particularly vivid imagination to imagine this recent immigration crisis to break out into a shooting war between Greece and Turkey, Bulgaria and Macedonia or Hungary, and Serbia.
NATO is like a vaccine, it seems archaic and useless, who gets whooping cough, or small pox, or diphtheria any more.
Yeah, this makes a lot of sense to me. Certainly more sense than the “NATO is totally useless because we haven’t had any wars since we started it” perspective.
D[quote=“BadSport, post:634, topic:127454”]
But it’s fantasy
[/quote]
Uh… but that’s their MO and they have a history of doing it. I’m not suggesting Trump is knowingly involved. Read the Kompromat article. Russia does this all the time and they have done so for years. Except… the US public are so stupid and Trump is such as asshole that it is working now. Monitoring this stuff used to be my job. You are deluding yourself if you think it’s fantasy.
Let me provide more of a step by step of what is likely happening here…
Russia knows Trump is a wheelin’ and dealin’ business man and will possibly use illegal/shady tactics during a negotiation.
Russia knows Trump is a narcissist and not the brightest bulb.
Trump is in Russia for some type of business deal. The whole thing might have been arranged by Russian intel.
Russian intel officers are at the meeting, undercover. They talk him into some type of shady deal, he says some stuff that would come across as shady, they record it. He never knows.
By their luck, he somehow manages to dupe the US public and wins the GOP primary.
Somebody on Trump’s team or Trump himself has some type of business phone call or something with Russia that doesn’t seem bad on the surface.
The DNC (or whoever) hires an ex-intel officer to dig up dirt. The GRU/FSB know this and they dangle some bullshit stories to the man. Except, one of those 100 stories either is true or has enough truth to it that Trump internally knows he’s been had. It’s probably not anywhere near the most scandalous story. However, he’s such a morally flawed man that all of the dangled stories are believable.
The report from the former intel officer starts floating around. Enough of it is fact-based that it cannot be outright disproven. Most media outlets refuse to publish because they cannot prove.
Buzzfeed publishes. Russia’s kompromat succeeds against the unlikeliest of targets. Russia has a little party because they’ve never pulled off anything so brazen before.
Trump, unwilling to listen to the intelligence community, has no idea what is going on and plays right into it by thinking Putin is trying to help him.
Note: the purpose of step 4 is to get something they can use to coerce pre-candidate Trump into a business deal, or to get the upper hand in one.
