27.02.2017
In Memory of Vitaly Churkin
“…the cold war
is still not over”
Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
In the art of war,
financial payment for military readiness is a cornerstone of preparation.
As any serious military historian knows, it is that state-payments among allies
for the expenditures of war is not always calculated in terms
of gold, silver and dollars, but in the hidden costs that are not understood at
the time in the preparation for war. There is a commentary by a research
think tank which commented on such issues after the Persian Gulf War, in which
the author wrote in 1991 “In addition to the direct costs of the gulf conflict,
there are other factors that have to be taken into account in figuring the
total cost of the war. Again, accurate figures are hard to come by, either
because the total will depend on political decisions yet to be made, or because
the economic impacts are difficult to quantify. But in the long run, the
financial impact of these decisions could be much greater than the expenses
involved in fighting the war”.[1]
In the modern situation
of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance, there is always the
issues of who has been more disciplined in paying their fair share of military
expenditures and who, for numerous hidden political and economic reasons, fall
short in their economic responsibilities in a military alliance like that of
NATO. What should be remembered is that the United States, by insisting that
its nominal allies pay for the major expenditures of the Persian Gulf War,
which had not been seen on the world’s stage since Ancient Athens demanded
tribute payments from its allies during its own endless wars. Thus, what
is taking place among NATO allies regarding military payments and the United
States demanding an exact military expenditure is not anything new in history.
In the middle of
February in Brussels, the American Secretary of Defense, General Jim Mattis
(USMC-ret.) brought forth what might be seen as an harsh signal about how the
United States would henceforth come or not come to the aid of its allies within
the military alliance of NATO, should said allies not be more disciplined in
their economic obligations in paying their fair share of military
expenditures. In essence, the current United States regime is not pleased
in the way it feels that it upholds more than its share of the economic base of
NATO, while its allies shrink from their economic responsibilities. A New
York Times reporter and keen observer of the Brussel NATO meeting wrote
“Americans cannot care more for your children’s future security than you do,”
Mr. Mattis said in his first speech to NATO allies since becoming defense
secretary. I owe it to you to give you clarity on the political reality in the
United States and to state the fair demand from my country’s people in concrete
terms”[2], and the reporter went on to
state that American Defense Secretary said evenly “America will meet its
responsibilities,” he said, but he made clear that American support had its
limits. In his speech to NATO defense ministers, Mr. Mattis repeated a call
made by previous American secretaries of defense, for European allies to spend
more on their militaries. His comments on Wednesday give teeth to President
Trump’s expressed skepticism about the alliance”[3]. As when the
Warsaw Pact dissolved after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, so eventually
will the NATO alliance succumb to the earthquake fault lines of history, for no
country is immune from the dialectical forces of history that can tear
nation-states asunder, as peoples from previous political and military
alliances seek out self-determination and
self-autonomy.
In any alliance
there always needs to be a fair share of a quota of military expenditures by
all nation-states involved. However in order for such a grand strategy of
cooperation to take place in terms of preparing for war or defending a group of
nation-states, such an alliance must be creative and practical, as it must be a
community alliance that is not just based on money or through forced, political
coercion. If a political and military alliance is to endure over a long period
of time within the dictate of the current social forces,in order to create such
alliance of nation-states there must be among the leadership a collusion of
genuine culture and social interaction, as well as underlying respect of
national identity. If these subtle obligations are not met, then eventually a
political and military alliance between the communities of nation-states will
fall into the trap of bickering, suspicion and eventual open hostility. The
grand strategy must include the voice of people, and not just the political and
class elite, for without the proletariat, a military alliance is doomed to
failure and self-destruction.
Regarding specific
monetary obligations of the nation-states within the NATO alliance, the New
York Times reported that “The United States spends more of its gross domestic
product on the military than any other NATO member — 3.61 percent, or $664
billion in 2016. NATO countries have committed to spending 2 percent of their
G.D.P. on the military, but the only other countries that meet that criteria
are Britain, Poland, Estonia and Greece. During his remarks on Wednesday, Mr.
Mattis called for the adoption of a plan with fixed dates to make progress
toward getting to 2 percent. For decades, the United States has exhorted its
allies to put more money into their military budgets, arguing that if the
alliance is called on to defend a member country, the United States would have
to shoulder too much of the load. But European governments have different
priorities when it comes to military spending than the United States. Iceland,
for instance, has no military. And Germany, which since the end of World War II
has rejected military force outside self-defense, spends only 1.2 percent of
its G.D.P. on the military”.[4] The disputes among the
various NATO allies regarding expenditures for military spending is not usual
within the historical context of alliances and war which goes as far back as
the ancient Persian and Athenian empires, who sought to exploit their nominal
allies as they attempted to spread their own form of hegemony which in some
ways is no different than that of the desire of the United States to expand its
empire as it, ironically, implodes from within.
The Delian League
that was formed by the Athenians to ward-off or prepare for its military
struggle against Persia, is an example of what can happen in such an alliance
such as NATO when it falls within the hands of one member nation-state. As the
classical scholar, Tim Harding wrote:
Thucydides then
describes how Athens formed a new anti-Persian alliance (known as the ‘Delian
League’ in modern descriptions):
“The Athenians
having thus succeeded to the supremacy by the voluntary act of the allies
through their hatred of Pausanias, determined which cities were to contribute
money against the barbarian, and which ships;…Now was the time that the office
of ‘Treasurers for Hellas’ was first instituted by the Athenians. These
officers received the tribute, as the money contributed was called. The tribute
was first fixed at four hundred and sixty talents. The common treasury was at
Delos, and the congresses were held in the temple.”
The member states
of the Delian League were predominantly those most exposed to Persian attack,
located in northern Greece, Ionia and the islands of the Aegean Sea (Martin
2000, 106; Hammond 1967, 256; Bury 1963, 328; Waterfield 2004, 89). They
swore a solemn oath never to desert the alliance (Martin 2000, 106); and to
have the same friends and enemies (Aristotle 23, 4-5). However, League
policy was executed by an Athenian high command that also controlled the
Treasury, thus concentrating power in Athenian hands from the outset (Pomeroy
et al 1999, 205).[5]
Although the
military leadership of NATO seemingly is one of a democratic cooperation, in
fact the Supreme Allied Commander Europe – or SACEUR – which is one of NATO’s
two strategic commanders, is traditionally a US commander, who is also serves
as theCommanderof the US European Command. One might say that the United States
military has a juggernaut or vice around the nation-states of NATO, who have no
choice but to do the bidding of the NATO commander, as once those ancient city
states in the Peloponnese did the bidding of the Athenian military high
command. The Organisation du Traité de l'Atlantique Nord (North
Atlantic Treaty Organization) was ratified on April 4th, 1949 for
the purpose of the nation-states within the alliance to defend themselves
against an external enemy, that enemy or force being left unsaid, but in
reality, that ‘enemy’ state presumably being the Soviet Union during that
historical period.
The irony
regarding the perceived enemy was that there was no actual military NATO
engagement during the Cold War, and it was only in 1991 during the Kuwait
invasion by Iraq that NATO provided some military support, when Airborne Early
Warning aircraft were sent to provide defense coverage forSouth Eastern Turkey,
and then later a quick reaction force was deployed to that same area of
conflict.[6] In recent modern times,
NATO military forces have been involved in conflicts in such places as Bosnia
and Herzegovina, Kosovo, the Afghanistan War and the debacle in Libya. If
one was to study the involvement of NATO closely, within the sphere of its
military interventions, one may ask how much of an actual say do the peoples of
Europe have regarding the issues of war or peace. We must conclude
that it is the NATO hierarchy which makes the final decisions for the waging of
war or the holding of peace, and that thus far in modern European history there
has been no mandates nor referendums by the peoples of Europe to take into
their own hands as to whether they wish to continue their participation in the
military NATO alliance.
It would not be overly ambitious to state that many members of the NATO
alliance do not have confidence in American leadership to lead them into a war
confrontation. The elite or “the great”, as Machiavelli deemed the
economic elite of any fatherland, are not prone to follow a populist leader,
just as the people who in a manner of speaking can endure an authoritarian
figure, but not a dictator, for long. There is, with the mercurial rise of the
Trump regime, a fear among both the elite and the workers of Europe about who
is to lead them now should war break out in Europe. NATO members are in
essence without a leadership that can draw parity with the Russians, who they
accuse of harboring a desire to invade Europe proper, since Russia has annexed
Crimea and taken a bold position for giving political and military aid to the
peoples of Eastern Ukraine who are seeking to create their own independence and
self-antimony from fascist rule located in Kiev. However, more than just
the fear of Russian expansionism in Europe and the Baltic States, is the
bellicose behavior of the American president, and how his personal hubris has
managed to inflict political wounds within his own presidential regime. The
Russian observer, Valery Garbuzov, who is Director of the Institute for US and
Canada Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, told TASS, when commenting
on the resignation of President Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser,
Michael Flynn that:
“Trump makes
huge political blunders. If the image of the administration making ill-considered
decisions, and without consent of the Congress at that, is created in the
future, that will make things worse for Trump himself. He could become an enemy
for himself. It will be easy to accuse him of authoritarian ambitions, attempts
to solve all problems behind the scenes, without taking into account the
opinion of Congress and the American people."[7]
The domestic,
political blunders that President Trump creates has a political ripple effect
within the NATO Council that promotes a fear and loathing not seen since
diplomats met in diplomatic chambers during the Seven Years War, or during the
early days of the First World War.
There is deep
political irony with one of the NATO members, that being the staunch NATO
supporter, United Kingdom which is now being accused of not paying its two
percent level defense spending as agreed upon by NATO members. In the
Financial Times on UK defense spending it was reported that The International
Institute for Strategic Studies concluded that Britain had only paid 1.99
percent of GDP on defense last year regarding its military tribute to NATO. The
article goes on to state that
“Michael Fallon,
the UK’s defence secretary, told MPs last month that Britain “comfortably”
exceeded the Nato baseline, which he said was a “minimum”, not a target… Last
year, MPs on the House of Commons defence committee questioned the lack of transparency
in how the military budget was calculated. The government said it complied with
Nato standards”. [8]
The military
journal The Military Balance | IISS was accused of
miscalculation by the British Ministry of Defense (MoD) in that “calculations
were “skewed: by sterling’s fall against the pound since the EU referendum” but
that “The think-tank said the ratio between GDP and spending would not be affected
by exchange rate fluctuation”.[9] We see that NATO
membership is wedded in the end to the corruption of capitalism at the highest
level of political intrigues.
At the beginning of
this essay on NATO and military spending, I mentioned the Delian League prior
to the Peloponnesian War. Let us return again to corruption that can ensue from
what seems like the best of intentions within military alliances such as the
NATO alliance. To quote a classical scholar on the beginning of
self-destruction on Delian League:
…The conservative
aristocratic politician Thucydides, son of Melesias (not Thucydides the
historian) censured the transfer of the allied treasury to Athens and the use
of the money to extravagantly adorn the city of Athens (Hammond 1967,
312). According to Plutarch, the people in the assemblies cried out:
“The people has
lost its fair fame and is in ill repute because it has removed the public
moneys of the Hellenes from Delos into its own keeping, … And surely Hellas is
insulted with a dire insult and manifestly subjected to tyranny when she sees
that, with her own enforced contributions the war, we are gilding and
bedizening our city, which, for all the world like a wanton woman, adds to her
wardrobe precious stones and costly statues and temples worth their millions.”
Although the
tribute money was used for public rather than private purposes, such trenchant
criticism can be interpreted as implying a form of corruption, in the sense of
misuse of the money for purposes other than originally intended…
So according to the
standards of the time, it wasdebatable whether Athenian use of allied tribute
funds constituted corruption. There were arguments for and against, as
illustrated by those of Thucydides, son of Melesias, and Perikles. But in
modern times, if for example Belgium started using NATO contributions for
public buildings in Brussels that would almost certainly be viewed as
corruption.[10]One can look back to past
history, but to learn from past history is disputable. To not pay one’s
share of defense spending as a NATO member can also be seen as a form of
corruption, but then it would not be unusual in terms of modern nation-state
corruption, as the pillars of American and European imperialism crack and fall
apart at the base.
At the Munich
Conference in late February, the Vice President of the United States spoke
about how the Trump regime would fully support the NATO alliance, while at the
same time sayingthat, according to a British news outline report, “some of our
largest allies do not have a credible path” towards paying their share of
Nato’s financial burden. Although he did not name individual countries, his
targets included Germany, France and Italy. “The time has come to do more”,”[11]. It was if the American
Vice President, Mike Pence, thought he was playing a shrewd hand of poker, while
not know that his Russian counterpart was playing a deadly game of chess.
In essence, the American regime is thinking that the Russian Government is
naïve enough to think that there is collusion between them, and that a
political wink and a nod will suffice the assurance that Russian Foreign
Minister, Sergei Lavrov, needs to take back to Moscow. But as Lavrov said
so succinctly (and with a subtle warning), "Judging by certain statements
at the Munich Conference, the cold war is still not over," as quoted by
the Russian News Agency Tass. “NATO is still not ready to resume military
cooperation with Russia, and this is regretful”, Lavrov said."Military
cooperation should be resumed, (however) NATO's Secretary General Jens
Stoltenberg surrounded by his deputies yesterday could not say NATO is ready
for it," Lavrov said. "This is regretful."”[12]
We can say that it
is more than regretful, for all wars lead to regret.
[11]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/18/mike-pence-widens-us-rift-with-europe-over-nato-defence-spending
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