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The Russia-Mexico analogy is so obvious and rudimentary that it grinds my gears to have to spell it out for people. It’s after-school special-level analysis.
Especially given that the whole Cuban missile crisis happened. It’s not theoretical, we know how the US reacts.
It is still to this day tought as an “unprovoked act of agression” from the USSR in schools in the US, the United States knows what its doing
NATO expansion was known as a bad thing as early as the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed. Officials in the US and the principle European NATO states (France, Germany) knew that the continued expansion of NATO in Eastern Europe would not be received well by the Russians. In 2008, they made it formal the expansion of NATO to Ukraine and Georgia. In 2014, the US assisted the Ukrainian nationalist, who are right-wingers by the way, to topple a democratically elected government, so they can install a pro-NATO regime. The whole concept is to socially engineer Ukraine to be culturally NATO and EU-centric culturally on the elite level. Ukrainian nationalist are right of MAGA. They are referred to as fascist by Russians for their symbology of neo-Nazi imagery. Neoliberal democrats and republicans say MAGA is bad, well, Ukrainian Ultra-Nationalist are your “far right” buddies that you give a lot of money to fight Russians in what is supposed to be a forever war.
I am not sure if they really believe they are a pure race, or it is just an intimidating tactic against Russians. Either way, within Western circles, it is whiffs like a Nazi, it is a Nazi. Not unless, it serves US interests. Western media and Western officials pretend Ukraine nationalist are liberals. Considering the environment, liberalism does not work in Ukraine, because power politics dominates.
An example of why NATO expansion is bad in certain cases is making a hypothetical example of Warsaw Pact Expansion. Imagine an alternate timeline of events where NATO collapsed, and the Warsaw Pact won the Cold War. The expansion of Warsaw Pact to the West beyond Poland and East Germany would make the US and British very scared. But since Westerners believe they are the good guys, and the world is composed of bad guys vs good guys, they don’t see the obvious instigator of the conflict. They believe in their own BS.
The United States is the principal country in NATO. It runs NATO. Therefore, NATO power is de facto US power, because it runs the show. NATO is how the US controls European policy in Europe. European interests are subservient to US interests. The US is the head of the NATO hierarchy. In exchange, NATO removes security competition among the more powerful NATO states, by paying for most of their defense. When a new country becomes a NATO member, the US wants to install military bases in that country. Let me ask you a question. Does Germany or France have military bases in the US? No, they don’t. That in itself is very telling. The US has no threat in the Western Hemisphere. No Chinese, no Russians, no Iranians, and no North Koreans. Therefore, the US is not a country concerned about defense. It is able to “roam” around the world, and in the process create all kinds of havoc, because it can. So this is about power, and dominance; to dominate the world. Instead, what you hear from the US government, and their narrative peddlers, is that it is about “national security”. This is nothing more than a cover to hide the ulterior policy of power dominance.
The EU is the other component of the militarization of Europe under NATO. The point of the EU is to control member states. It is for EU nations to submit to a central authority. To strip away their sovereignty. The idea is to minimize the concept of nation-states by eliminating borders and to force policy such as mass immigration. Brexit was about this, among other things. Originally, and initially, I thought the EU was simply about economic integration, but it seems obvious it is simply more than just economic integration. It is the submission of its members to Brussels.
The ideology, behind this, is neoliberalism. Things like security competition are ideologically neutral. All nation-states, regardless of ideology, communism, capitalism, whatever, seek security by being dominant. If they can’t, they should navigate wisely international politics. Think small states like Liechtenstein and Singapore, who are simply too small to be powerful to have many options to project power. The Russians are conservative. The EU and NATO are liberal. Not only do the Russians object to US dominance over them, they are also opposite in the views of everyday issues.
NATO is bad on the whole, because the world is not liberal. The world is composed of nation-states. They do not want a foreign power like the US involved and determining their national politics. Take, for example, Afghanistan, and the fake liberal democracy the US installed in that country. Was it their politics, or was it American politics? It wasn’t their politics. It wasn’t their democracy. Furthermore, it was American democracy. Neoliberalism will inevitably run into the stumbling block of nationalism. When multiple nation-states see a single actor as a threat to their national politics, they coalesce. In these cases, US-NATO, and US-Israel are the prime threats to nation-states. The US is the principal financier, supplier, and fomenter of destabilization in the world right now. If you follow the money, whether it is death, and destruction in Gaza, or a repression of NATO in Ukraine, the US is behind it. If you remove the US, neither theaters of conflict would exist. Israeli belligerence would not be anywhere as great as it is now without US support. Israeli’s are clever people. They hijacked middle eastern foreign policy from within the US. For Ukraine; the whole issue is US-NATO, that’s it. The US is the principal troublemaker in the world right now.
Death to NATO but also f*ck shady grifter and friend of the ACP, Andrew deBuys.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I wish NATO didn’t exist.
Because that would mean countries weren’t afraid of their neighbors invading them.
But as long as that happens, NATO is necessary
NATO is the organization that’s responsible for most of the invading since the fall of USSR last I checked.
Lol what?
NATO was created to protect Europe from the USSR continuing to advance after WW2. Even though the USSR had no plans to advance at all, and the allies knew it. Churchill and Truman were ardent anticommunists though, and were making plans to invade the USSR, so NATO was essentially an offensive alliance. Churchill and Truman proceeded to completely ruin the relations of the West with the USSR to create the conditions for NATO to be born as a “defensive alliance”.
NATO has NEVER been used as a defensive alliance. On one hand you could say that maybe its purpose of deterrence is working really well. On the other hand, NATO has been involved in a bunch of offensive wars, notably against Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia.
NATO members are not in any way surrounded by hostile belligerent nations, with very few exceptions. Greece and Turkey is the only real example, but both are members, which means in a war NATO won’t get involved. Poland and the Baltics claim they joined in to protect themselves from Russia, but they’ve had excellent relations with Russia post-USSR. On the contrary, the moment they joined, they started being themselves belligerent with Russia.
NATO’s article 5 ensures that if a madman comes to power in any single nuclear-wielding nation, and presses the button, then every single nuclear power will also press the button at the same time.
NATO is neither necessary, nor good.
NATO membership is a liability, and a risk. Consider Canada, just like the US, no country threatens it. But since they are part of NATO, in a hot war, they’re getting nuked as well. How smart is that? Not very smart at all. Canada does not need a military. Not a full one, at least. In the end, the USSR, and NATO were born out of security competition between two superpowers. However, the issue with NATO is that the USSR and the Warsaw Pact are no more. The US pretends Russia to still be the USSR.
On the US end, every NATO member that joins, the US must now procure defense for it, and assume the risk of conflict. Similar to the US-Israeli alliance, if Israel escalates a war with Iran, the US will be pressured to join in, because of the Israel lobby. We see how the US is entangled with alliances with Turkey and Israel, being non-friendly toward each other. In the fact, the US is allies with Turkey’s enemies, such as the Kurdish resistance in the Levant.
The US thinks by building up alliances and bearing the cost for those alliances is strength. What it does is overstretch the capabilities of the US, since now they have military bases all over the world that are vulnerable to a concentrated attack. For example, like the ones in the Middle East. Iran can wipe off the US military bases off the map if it wants. It has that capability. Not only does the US have to fund, and support Israel, now they have to launch B-52s against the Houthis. They are the principal enabler of Israeli policy. Now the US is fighting a war in Ukraine, a potential escalation in the Middle East, and this does not even consider China who is the most powerful rival the US has on this planet at the moment.
These different alliances the US has is essentially putting its enemies in a position where they need to be closer to each other to survive their common enemy: China+Iran+North Korea+Russia+Houthis. Where is Turkey going? Being shunned by the EU for years, it has no choice, but to look else where. I would question Turkey’s loyalty to a unified NATO.
I would say though that Turkey is unlikely to voluntarily exit NATO. Its military is currently too reliant on Western armaments, and its military industry exports to the West.
Also, historically Turkey has always aimed on playing a balancing act between bigger world powers. It has asked for BRICS membership, but if it can help it, it’ll keep itself a NATO member at the same time. Perhaps distantly so, but still officially a member.
This also secures it in playing provocation games with Greece, and insult games with Israel, which it partly does to appease its nationalist and conservative population.
The only way I see Turkey exiting NATO is if NATO ousts it (which will end up creating huge problems for the alliance, as Turkey is the second biggest military force in NATO, and the US bases in Turkey are considered of great strategic importance in relation to Russia and the Middle East), or if Turkey is pressured by its new partners to leave NATO (which BRICS is unlikely to do, as it would damage their credibility as a solution to US global hegemony). There’s also a third way, where the West commits some sort of unimaginably grave insult to Turkey, that inflames emotions in the country and forces Turkey to leave NATO voluntarily.
