What's Behind the Great Wall of America?: New Age Islam's Selection, 09 February 2017
New
age Islam Edit Bureau
09 February 2017
• What's Behind The Great Wall Of America?
By Belen Fernandez
• Is This Really How Fascism Takes Hold In The US?
By Rachel Shabi
• Is The Arab World Truly Independent?
By Khaled Almaeena
• Moderate Arab Nations Must Lead In The Trump Era
By Ray Hanania
• The Future Of Saudi-Lebanese Relations
By Dr. Ibrahim Al-Othaimin
• Is Lebanon’s Crisis Due To Elections Or To The Regime?
By Diana Moukalled
• Is NATO Obsolete?
By Jonathan Power
Compiled By New Age Islam Edit Bureau
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What's Behind The Great Wall Of America?
By Belen Fernandez
On the Tuesday after Donald Trump's January inauguration as president of the United States, journalist Jonathan Katz tweeted in reference to the unfolding spectacle: "First they came for the Latinos, Muslims, women, gays, poor people, intellectuals and scientists, and then it was Wednesday."
The days continue to progress in similar fashion. On the one hand, there's been the rapidly evolving horror of the Muslim ban. And on the Latino front, it seems that not even Mexicans in Mexico proper may be safe from Trump's reach.
According to the Associated Press, Trump recently informed Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto that "you have a bunch of bad hombres down there" whose bad behaviour is not being properly addressed: "I think your military is scared. Our military isn't, so I just might send them down to take care of it."
Nothing like a casual threat of invasion to keep folks on their toes.
One finds oneself wondering whether a new and improved border wall might not be a fine idea indeed - but as a defensive measure against US incursions.
Extensions of Ego
As Trump tells it, the "big, beautiful wall" he has ordered constructed along the US-Mexico border will keep out Mexican migrants, to whom he has previously referred in characteristic antiracist eloquence as drug dealers and "rapists".
Fox News has reported that construction of the wall alone could cost up to $20bn.
The project has met with opposition even from within Trump's own party - not on account of any ethical considerations, obviously, but rather owing to concerns over the cost and likely ineffectiveness of the migrant-stopping ploy.
Trump himself has made a show of insisting that Mexico foot the bill for the monstrosity, retroactively if need be.
In a recent dispatch for Fortune magazine titled "Trump Doesn't Really Care If Mexico Pays for the Wall", the Centre for International Policy's Laura Carlsen explores possible motives for Trump's determined humiliation of the southern neighbour despite "not appear[ing] to actually expect Mexico to directly pay for the wall".
Beyond the ever-present possibility that the American head of state is merely "acting irrationally" and "wield[ing] executive power as an extension of his personal ego," Carlsen detects a variety of other potential explanations.
These range from the pursuit of increased leverage in a renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to the encouragement of an enhanced Mexican security crackdown on Central American migrants entering from Guatemala, to the likelihood that Trump wants to "keep Mexico-bashing in the news and mobilise his base of supporters for further measures against migrants and Mexican trade and investment".
The 'Security' Business
Trump's ego is, no doubt, a pre-eminent contender on the contemporary world stage - an arrangement reinforced by the fact that he presides over a disproportionate percentage of the earth's wealth.
But there are plenty of other entities that stand to turn a handsome profit from his policy of unabashed xenophobia.
These include but are certainly not limited to those in the business of border "security" - itself a misleading term designed to market the US-Mexico frontier as a de facto war zone as well as an existential battlefield in which American "greatness" is at stake.
The false advertising routine provides a convenient excuse for lucrative militarisation schemes.
You won't hear any complaints from drone manufacturers, for example, with regard to what boils down to a war on Mexican dignity - and the dignity of other refugees and non-elite migrants.
Age of Irony
Meanwhile, it seems border walls have become an industry in their own right.
In one of the great ironies that have come to typify the current era, the Financial Times reported on inauguration day that "the biggest corporate winner" of Trump's border fortification venture "may well be a Mexican cement manufacturer": Cemex, whose shares had just "hit an eight-and-a-half-year high".
This is the same Cemex, incidentally, that - as the popular Electronic Intifada website has documented - has been complicit in the construction of Israel's apartheid wall as well as illegal mining activity on occupied Palestinian land.
When it comes to the profitability of exclusion, of course, the Israelis are masters of the trade - a position underscored by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's notorious tweet of 28 January: "President Trump is right. I built a wall along Israel's southern border. It stopped all illegal immigration. Great success. Great idea."
The tweet occasioned some backpedalling from Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, who endeavoured to imply that Netanyahu wasn't really talking about Mexico.
In the meantime, Bloomberg News has noted in the most sanitised language possible that Magal Security Systems, the "Israeli company that fenced in Gaza" (ie, helped convert the Palestinian territory into the "world's largest open-air prison"), is angling for a hand in the Mexico wall.
One of the ultimate functions of heavily fortified borders is to rally populations against a perceived enemy and thus redirect attention from national shortcomings and unsavoury behaviour - which in the case of the US happens to entail the wanton violation of other people's borders, both militarily and economically.
If only we could look in a mirror rather than at a wall, that might indeed be a "big, beautiful" thing.
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Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, published by Verso. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin magazine.
Source: aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/02/whats-great-wall-america-170208080147744.html
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Is This Really How Fascism Takes Hold In The US?
By Rachel Shabi
There has, lately, been a rush of interest in cultural offerings premised on the return of fascism. The Man in the High Castle, loosely based on the Philip K Dick novel, is back for a second series. In it, the Nazi regime lives in fictional Technicolor suburbia, occupying the half of the US not occupied by co-victors of World War II, Japan.
A revival of the 1935 play, It Can't Happen Here, was staged in Berkeley late last year. The original novel by Sinclair Lewis charts the populist rise in the 1930s of a US fascist promising a return to American greatness. It reportedly sold out on Amazon.com the week after the election of Donald Trump.
Many have revisited Philip Roth's 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, in response to which its author came out of retirement to comment on his fictional work's relevance to current reality. The book dramatises what might have happened if the aviator and Nazi sympathiser Charles Lindbergh, who first talked about "America first", became a fascistic US president.
And a German play, Winter Solstice, features a Nazi who turns up in nice, leafy suburbia, at the home of an educated, liberal family. This family never votes for right-wing parties. One of them writes history books on fascism, for heaven's sake - and yet they cannot recognise its hallmarks in their kindly, elderly visitor who spouts nationalism and cultural purity.
Is History Repeating Itself?
Two weeks into Donald Trump's presidency, the "fascist" label is invoked more frequently - thereby adding to an already loud debate over the issue during his hyper-nationalist, aggressively nativist election campaign.
Trump's Muslim ban, attacks on a free press, overt lying, purging of the State Department's senior staff, firing of the acting attorney general, undermining of a democratic election process by claiming voter fraud, and attacks on the US judiciary - all evoke fascist hallmarks.
But at the same time, we are still undergoing the same reactions that all those cultural depictions of fascism try to warn us about: paralysis over fascism's sudden, casual entry into the political mainframe, and the inability to recognise it once it takes hold.
Even as these plays, books and films ask us to ponder the question, there can be a neutering, self-protective distance between our full comprehension and the horrifying reality we're asked to consider. We are taught, rightly, that Nazi horrors, while uniquely heinous and specific, are premised on potentially universal causes and processes.
And we know, per English novelist Michael Rosen's poem, that fascism doesn't first arrive in jackboots. But still, there is an assumption that the fact of it happening historically protects against a recurrence, in any format. How could it, when we know what we know? Not now. Certainly not here.
Writers have long described a human impulse to normalise the not normal - perhaps because the alternative is so irrationally horrible that it eludes full description.
As one historian notes, in the 1920s and early 1930s US newspapers were downplaying Hitler, seeing him as a joke, or someone who would be moderated by the system.
In 1922, The New York Times noted reliable sources "confirmed the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded".
It is almost impossible to read this today. And it is unsettling in the context of assurances during Trump's race-baiting campaign - he didn't literally mean a Muslim ban, we were told.
Trivialisation of Nazism
These things are separate but bound by an enduring question that we still grapple with: why do warning signs that are so easily identified in hindsight elide recognition contemporaneously?
Historians have been divided over whether to describe Trumpism as fascism. As Gavriel Rosenfeld, professor of history at Fairfield University, told me by phone a few weeks ago, this is a good thing: a rigour in the face of an unfolding situation. It's also true that overuse of the term "fascism" undermines its effect. In understanding "never again" as a statement of fact, rather than as an instruction to remain on guard, it is possible we may have grown complacent and perhaps opened the door to misuse: these days, everyone is a fascist.
Rosenfeld, whose book Hi Hitler! Explores the trivialisation of Nazism, says the internet has played a role in this sort of neutering effect by turning Hitler into a meme, a punchline, or a series of cats-that-look-like-Hitler pics.
Leaders with tendencies that can credibly be defined as fascistic may now, for some people at least, elude such description because the term has been defanged.
Between Normalisation and Alarmism
So we are caught somewhere between not wanting to belittle history, nor make inaccurate comparisons - but also not wanting to underplay current realities either. We struggle to find a useful space between normalisation and alarmism.
But maybe we should just accept that even an accurate invocation of fascism will sound exaggerated, in a world that doesn't believe it possible for there to be a modern-day, Western application.
Reaching for the term "fascist" isn't about applying the ultimate insult, so much as preparing for the right response. It would mean not taking a government or leadership as normal.
And, in broader terms this would be the anti-fascist argument: that fascism, once identified as a political and social force, requires an altogether different form of opposition.
If that's the case, judicious caution in using the term may be keeping us locked into ineffective responses. We remain in the realm of rational debate - itself essential, itself in need of robust defence in a post-truth world.
And yet, hate and bigotry can overwhelm societies when the reasonable are tied up in knots worrying about displaying intolerance or denying extremist haters a megaphone.
Time and focus is exhausted in trying to debate a tide of violent racial superiority, while it is only ever amplified and legitimised by such encounters.
It has potential to overwhelm, this urge to habituate, to be measured in the face of current reality. But sometimes this reasonable, polite response won't cut it.
Sometimes the most effective tool we have is a forceful humanity - one that draws a line, resists the tide to normalise and ensures that far-right hatreds do not find any space to breathe in our societies.
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Rachel Shabi is a journalist and author of Not the Enemy: Israel's Jews from Arab Lands.
Source: aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/02/fascism-takes-hold-170207142614174.html
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The Future of Saudi-Lebanese Relations
By Dr. Ibrahim Al-Othaimin
Feb 9, 2017
The first visit of Michel Aoun, the President of Lebanon, to Saudi Arabia came in an attempt to restore normalcy between the two states after a period of deadlock. This visit had two main sets of objectives
Political objectives: In spite of President Aoun’s close ties with Hezbollah and Iran, he understands that success in the coming days of his presidency necessitates an improvement in relationships with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. The latter may stand as an important channel for Lebanon to open up to the outside world, including the United States and Europe, in light of the ongoing tensions in Iranian-American relations with the advent of the new administration.
Moreover, a Lebanese president, who is devoid of any Arab support, cannot run the state smoothly. So, political settlement with Saudi Arabia, a major Arab and Islamic player, would certainly have President Aoun’s back at both Arab and Islamic levels.
Furthermore, Saudi Arabia plays a pivotal role in Lebanon in terms of the latter’s internal stability. It would undoubtedly contribute to consolidating internal stability and consensus in a state that is known for political polarization between its components on sectarian, ethnic or interest bases.
Economic objectives: The deterioration of Gulf-Lebanese relations over the past two years has had a significant impact on the Lebanese economy. Lebanese investments in the Gulf States are estimated to be over $100 billion, and Gulf investments in Lebanon represent 85 percent of the country’s total foreign investments. In addition, around 750,000 Lebanese nationals work in the Gulf States, half a million of whom are in Saudi Arabia with tens of thousands in other Gulf States. They remit around $4 billion per year to Lebanon. It is said that 50 percent of Lebanese families depend totally or partially on these remittances. According to bank estimates, the value of Gulf assets in Lebanese banks is estimated to be over $20 billion. Therefore, Lebanon’s economic stability is essentially linked to the Gulf States.
However, outcomes of the visit are subject to numerous challenges, particularly, in terms of Hezbollah’s foreign policy and the role it plays in the Syrian crisis, as well as in Yemen, with its operations targeting the Gulf States. It is worth noting that the visit was announced amid Hezbollah’s marking of the execution of the Saudi terrorist Nimr Al-Nimr, who was described by the Deputy Secretary General of Hezbollah, Naim Qassem, as “a prominent figure of jihad in the Arabian Peninsula”. Thus, the major challenge facing President Aoun will be his ability to convince Hezbollah to spare Lebanon and the Lebanese community further tensions in their relations with the Arab world and the Gulf States.
However, those who have a close eye on Lebanese affairs know that such a shift in the Lebanese stand does not indicate Lebanon’s political independence. It is rather a temporary shift imposed by the circumstances that have surrounded the country over the past two years. Such circumstances have forced Iran, Hezbollah, and pro-Iran groups in Lebanon to compromise on some issues.
The Lebanese crisis is deeply rooted in the structure of the regime itself, which suffers from political sectarianism enshrined by the 1926 constitution. It also suffers from an institutional sag caused by sub-State loyalties. Such loyalties take tribal or sectarian forms that serve as substitute institutions to the state, leaving state institutions weak.
Finally, the weakness of the state has allowed foreign intervention that poses restrictions on any deterrence by the state causing its institutions to be paralyzed.
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Dr. Ibrahim Al-Othaimin is a Middle East affairs specialist and security analyst based in Riyadh.
Source: saudigazette.com.sa/opinion/future-saudi-lebanese-relations/
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Is The Arab World Truly Independent?
By Khaled Almaeena
Feb 8, 2017
The number of foreign journalists coming to our part of the world is on the rise. However, what is noticeable is the replacement of seasoned journalists by younger and less experienced reporters.
Gone are the days of David Hirst, Peter Mansfield, David Lamb, Carlye Murphy and many others. Now we have those who are more tech-savvy and are somewhat quicker to jump to conclusions.
Unfortunately, they do not always have the same political and social insight as their predecessors. Moreover, they are also sometimes blinded by their prejudices and mindset. They ask many questions and, of course, it is their job to do so. Those journalists of the past did not ask questions for which they already knew the answer.
However, a couple of days ago, a young journalist asked me a question that made me think deeply. “Is the Arab world truly independent?” he asked. Frankly speaking, this took me by surprise as I remember having written about this some time ago.
It was a good question and my reply to him was: No, you cannot be independent until the major elements of national power are all in place. You cannot be truly independent when food and water security depend on external sources.
You cannot be independent when there are obstacles that prevent free thought and which sow the seeds of self-destruction. Military coups, revolutions and the importing of foreign ideas contribute to all of this.
In order to be fully independent, we have to work hard and relentlessly pursue monetary and financial stability.
I truly mean it when I say that unless we have a holistic approach in evaluating our present situation, we will not get out of the quagmire we are in.
For this, we need the fourth estate – a vibrant media not influenced by political parties or religious groups. We need a media that focuses on societal development and good governance and is a platform for understanding. It should not be a divisive media. To be totally independent, we have to have homegrown solutions that come from within and are not based on what others expect of us.
Look at Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan and others in Asia and take a leaf out of their notebooks. We sometimes tend to look up to those who scoff at us and insult us. Let us take from and learn from those with whom we have some shared valued.
However, to be totally independent, we have to work hard and be able to produce. There is no alternative to that. Let us resolve then to shed the mindset of servility and dependency. We have a strong, young talent of men and women who have the resolve to liberate us from the shackles of the past.
Let us, therefore, concentrate on state building based on self-reliance, self-dependency and human rights.
Source: saudigazette.com.sa/opinion/arab-world-truly-independent/
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Moderate Arab Nations Must Lead In The Trump Era
By Ray Hanania
8 February 2017
Assertions that US President Donald Trump is unfair to the needs of the Arab world are misleading and contradict facts, much like the claim that he “hates” Muslims. Trump’s efforts to crack down on Islamic extremists who have openly vowed to kill Americans has been widely misinterpreted and wrongly denounced as a “Muslim ban.” It is clearly also not true that he has abandoned core issues of justice in the Arab world.
So far, when you look more closely, Trump’s actions are those of a president who is clearly seeking to embrace a more centrist approach to Middle East challenges. Although he met this week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss Iran and the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Trump has already started to build a strong base of understanding with moderate Arab leaders.
His first face-to-face meeting with a Middle East leader was with Jordan’s King Abdallah, who had also met with Vice President Mike Pence in Washington. Trump spoke by phone with Netanyahu two days after his inauguration, but called Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi the next day. Days later, Trump made two important calls, one to Saudi King Salman and another to Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan.
It was not just the calls. When Netanyahu’s extremist government announced it would expand illegal Jewish-only settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, Trump spokesman Sean Spicer issued a diplomatic reprimand.
“The American desire for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians has remained unchanged for 50 years. While we don’t believe the existence of settlements is an impediment to peace, the construction of new settlements, or the expansion of existing settlements beyond their current borders, may not be helpful in achieving that goal,” he said.
“As the president has expressed many times, he hopes to achieve peace throughout the Middle East region. The Trump administration has not taken an official position on settlement activity and looks forward to continuing discussions, including with Prime Minister Netanyahu when he visits with President Trump later this month.”
Pro-Israel mainstream American journalists pounced on Spicer, insisting the statement was contradictory, but Spicer and Trump did not back down. These are not the actions of a president who has written off Arab interests or embraces a “Muslim ban.” But they are also not the only ones.
Last week, as the US State Department was preparing to issue a statement commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Trump intervened. The State Department release focused on the suffering of Jews, but Trump issued a new statement that eliminated the word “Jews.” He was denounced by leading Jewish-American organizations, but a spokeswoman cited Trump’s close family members who are Jewish.
Trump’s daughter Ivanka is married to Orthodox Jewish businessman Jared Kushner, who was appointed a top Trump adviser. Ivanka converted to Judaism for the marriage, and Trump’s grandchildren are Jewish. His spokeswoman said Trump wanted to be “more inclusive.” The Nazis murdered nearly 12 million people, including 6 million Jews and 6 million Russians, Slavs, gypsies, Arabs and others.
During his candidacy, Trump declared that his administration would be “neutral” on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Although he is perceived as pro-Israel, he is very familiar with the Palestinians. One of the most successful Palestinian-American entrepreneurs, Farouk Shami, has known and worked with Trump for years. Long before his election, Shami predicted Trump would be fair in addressing Arab and Palestinian concerns.
It is profoundly foolish and misguided to define Trump on the distorted and biased reporting of the Western media, which has a history of promoting and fueling anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotypes.
Worse is to believe the extremist assertions of the anti-Trump activists who claim to support Palestine, but have done everything possible to prevent the implementation of the only solution to the conflict, the two-state solution, which would create a sovereign Palestine in the territories occupied by Israel.
Trump is much more complex than his critics will allow the public to believe. They have sought to simplify him as a racist, twisting facts about his suspension of immigration from only seven of the 50 Muslim nations. If Trump were truly anti-Muslim, he would have suspended immigration from all Muslim nations to allow time to implement more stringent application screenings.
What the Arab world needs is to assert its moderate voices. That means leading moderate voices must come together to form an effective coalition. Who is this coalition leadership? Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which Trump has already recognized in his outreach.
He presents an opportunity for the Arab world to redefine itself and energize the pursuit of peace and justice. A proactive Arab coalition led by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the UAE can positively impact US politics and make Middle East peace possible.
Arab nationalism as a political force was first embraced by Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1960s. That effort failed mainly because Egypt was militarily ill-equipped to confront Israeli aggression, and because of the turmoil that plagued Syria then, and still plagues a Syria dominated by Iran today.
Trump has given the Arab world a rare opportunity to forge a moderate coalition to advance Arab nationalism and the true rights of the Arab street, not through revolution, protest or violence, but through strategic partnerships. A coalition led by Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and the UAE is the only Middle East and Arab strategy that makes any sense.
• Ray Hanania is an award-winning Palestinian-American former journalist and political columnist. Email him at rghanania@gmail.com.
Source: arabnews.com/node/1051416
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Is Lebanon’s Crisis Due To Elections or To the Regime?
By Diana Moukalled
8 February 2017
Lebanon is only four months away from parliamentary elections, yet the political forces represented in the government and Parliament have not reached a final agreement on the draft of a new election law that will ensure holding the elections as scheduled.
The election law has always been problematic in a country where the political system is based on sectarian divisions. The political debate about the new law usually becomes more heated prior to any election. That is what is happening now. The political forces are very concerned about the outcome of the elections, and always look for a foregone conclusion.
Proposals for the new law include proportional/majoritarian representation and a mixed-member system. All proposals being discussed are limited to the game of allocating seats and quotas between political parties and dominant forces.
Meanwhile Parliament, which has extended its own term twice, faces a crisis of constitutional deadlines — there is not enough time before the elections to discuss, formulate and endorse a new law. This will put the majoritarian election law, also known as the “1960 law,” into effect. In that case, Lebanon will repeat the scenario of reproducing the same ruling political class based on current quotas.
The present situation is not fortuitous; political practice is still the same in Lebanon. What is happening now is a struggle for seats and influence rather than for real reform of the electoral law, which is a prerequisite for ending the country’s political crisis.
Amid Lebanon’s political crises, as well as regional and international turmoil, the country is experiencing a hysterical political and media debate on the electoral law. The problem with the current law is that it is majoritarian with multi-member constituencies, which encourages alliances between parties and candidates.
These alliances, however, are not based on political platforms, and result in the non-representation of a large spectrum of political groups, instability of governance and corruption due to the desire to distribute the spoils to alliance members.
Observers see that the defects in Lebanon cannot be handled by adopting a particular electoral system. The basic problem, overlooked by everyone, lies in the logic of “sectarian counting” of the numbers of Muslims and Christians, instead of the logic of an updated law that overrides sectarianism and narrow interests.
So far, it seems the Lebanese have not settled on an electoral system. Will they maintain the present sectarian-based system or replace it with a nationalistic one?
• Diana Moukalled is a veteran journalist with extensive experience in both traditional and new media. She is also a columnist and freelance documentary producer.
Source: arabnews.com/node/1051396
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Is NATO Obsolete?
By Jonathan Power
8 February 2017
What does US President Donald Trump think about NATO? Twice during his election campaign he rubbished it publically, saying it was “obsolete.” Yet this month, when he met UK Prime Minister Therese May, he told her he supported NATO 100 percent.
A few influential people have argued that it is indeed obsolete. One of them was William Pfaff, the late, much-esteemed columnist for the International Herald Tribune. Another is Paul Hockenos, who set out his views in a seminal article in World Policy Journal. Their words fell on deaf ears. Former US President George H.W. Bush saw it differently, and wanted to see the Soviet Union more involved in NATO’s day-to-day work.
His successor Bill Clinton had another agenda, one that turned out to be dangerous, triggering Moscow’s current hostility toward the West: To expand NATO, incorporating one by one Russia’s former East European allies. His successors continued that approach, with Barack Obama raising a red rag to a bull by calling for the inclusion of Ukraine and Georgia.
NATO’s job, as British Secretary-General Lord Ismay said in 1967, was to “keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.” It certainly succeeded with the latter two.
To some extent, it did find a role after the Berlin Wall came down. It led humanitarian interventions in Bosnia in 1995 and against Serbia in 1999. In 2003 it deployed troops into Afghanistan. At one time the NATO-led force rose to 40,000 for 40 countries, including all 27 NATO allies.
Nevertheless, some of us do not see these as great successes. Most historians who have examined the evidence are convinced that the late Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had no intention of invading Western Europe. World War II was won, the Soviet Union had a ring of friends around its borders, and Germany was divided. The allies had been an invaluable help, and the Soviets did not feel threatened by their former comrades in arms.
So often overlooked is that the Soviet Union bore the brunt of defeating Germany, and lost by far the most fighting men and civilians. Thorough searches by Western historians through Soviet archives, opened under President Boris Yeltsin, have revealed that Moscow had no plans to invade Europe.
Today, despite its deployments in the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, NATO is not a truly multilateral institution of equals. The Europeans do not initiate military action (with the exception of Libya, which led to the overthrow and killing of President Muammar Qaddafi). It is the Americans who do that, and the Europeans follow, whatever their reservations.
Moreover, obeying the US rather than following their own convictions in the former Yugoslavia, they did not seek UN Security Council permission, and then are angry that Russia followed suit with its grabbing of Crimea.
NATO has no relevance to the problems that truly occupy Europe today. Its hands are tied in Ukraine; it has nothing to contribute to the massive refugee crisis; it cannot help deal with the fact, as an EU study concluded, that there will be an increase in tensions over declining water supplies in the Middle East that will affect Europe’s security and economic interests; nor can it do anything to contribute to the fight against global warming, in the long run the most severe threat that confronts humanity.
Regarding the “war on terrorism,” there is little NATO can do as a combined action force. At home, each government deals with the issue itself. In the fight against Al-Qaeda and Daesh in Syria and Iraq, the Americans, Brits, French and Russians battle them in their own way.
In Afghanistan, NATO troops are losing territory to the Taliban year by year, and the poppy crop provides ever-more heroin to subvert Europe and Asia. It is difficult to believe that otherwise sensible men and women in NATO countries believe they should have stayed on in Afghanistan after their original target — Al-Qaeda, the source of the Sept. 11 attacks — was driven out of Afghanistan and dealt a severe body blow.
This was not in their UN mandate, and it has led to America’s longest war with no end in sight. It is a fruitless cause, and the defeat of the Taliban by these means should never have been attempted. NATO countries should have limited themselves to building schools, hospitals, clinics, water supplies, sanitation systems and roads.
The EU should take over most of NATO’s role: Doing more of what it has done in Georgia and stabilizing the Balkans, making use of its massive “soft power,” and thus undergirding world security. Yes, NATO is obsolete.
• Jonathan Power is a British journalist, filmmaker and writer. He was a foreign affairs columnist for the International Herald Tribune for 17 years.
Source: arabnews.com/node/1051376
URL: https://newageislam.com/middle-east-press/behind-great-wall-america-new/d/110008