He went to Poland to meet President Bronisław Komorowski; he received Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin in Brussels; then he headed for Turkey to hold talks with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan: the new NATO Secretary-General from Norway, Jens Stoltenberg, could not have had a better start. A former Labour Party leader and head of government, supported by the “red-green” coalition, he got the prestigious position – as stated in his official biography – because, when he was prime minister in 2005-2013, he made Norway into one of the NATO countries with the highest military expenditures per capita.
Indeed, a dynamic secretary for an increasingly dynamic Alliance in the military arena. In Poland, which hosted NATO’s Anaconda 2014 military exercises with the participation of US forces, Stoltenberg assured that “NATO is here to protect you,” pointing out that since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, the allies maintain in Eastern Europe “a constant presence and are continuously engaged in military activities by land, in the air and on the sea.” The goal is to “send a strong signal to Russia,” defined by Lithuanian Defense Secretary Raimonds Vējonis as “an aggressor who is a potential threat to all European countries.”
At the press conference in Warsaw, President Komorowski asked the NATO Secretary-General to speed up the construction of the “missile shield” in Europe, noting that Poland is committed to bolstering it with its own “shield,” also made with US technologies for a projected cost of € 33.6 billion. For that, he received Stoltenberg’s congratulations. At the same time, Poland hosted the annual NATO Nuclear Policy Symposium, with the participation of all member states, including those like Italy, which joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation formally as non-nuclear countries. In its recent Wales Summit Declaration, NATO specifies: “Missile defence can complement the role of nuclear weapons in deterrence, it cannot substitute for them” and “As long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain a nuclear alliance” because the strategic nuclear forces of the United States (that the Obama administration is beefing up), buttressed by British and French forces, are “the supreme guarantee of the security of the Allies.” As a further guarantee, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Lech Walesa submitted that: “Poland should borrow, lease nuclear weapons and show Putin if a Russian soldier poses one foot on our land uninvited, we will attack.”
The 2014 Anaconda military drills in Poland also involved LANDCOM, the central command of all land forces of the 28 states of the Alliance, established in Izmir, Turkey. Where NATO has over twenty air, naval and electronic espionage bases, upgraded in 2013 by Patriot missile batteries capable of shooting down gliders from Syria’s skies; where it set up military training centers for fighters to infiltrate Syria, facilitating the buildup of the Islamic State forces; and where Stoltenberg turned up to express to Ankara the “solidarity of the Alliance” against the “dangerous threat represented by ISIS.”
Stoltenberg then applauded the recent parliamentary vote to “allow Turkey to play a more active role in the crisis,” and said that “NATO stands ready to support all allies in defending their security”: thereby giving the green light to the plan, formally proposed by the Turkish President, which calls for the creation of a “buffer zone” in Syria, backed by a “no-fly zone” (which de facto already exists today). The “Erdoğan plan,” even if Turkey has its own national objectifs (such as preventing the creation of a Kurdish state), dovetails neatly with the US/NATO strategy.
The summit declaration even claims that “The Assad regime has contributed to the emergence of ISIL in Syria and its expansion beyond.” In other words, we are expected to believe that President Assad, beset by suicidal madness, favored the rise of the same Islamist movement which is determined to overthrow him.
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