If Russia would seriously decide to attack, do you even believe that Poland could be succesfully defended by the NATO forces? They could not even arrive in time before their tanks march over anything that is in Poland and that would be the point where everyone starts his nuclear wapons and it's game over. There is no way that Poland can be secured with military forces. But with nuclear weapons there won't be any attack of Russia. That would be sucicide. We could throw away all those precious weapons and tanks tomorrow that we own in our toy armies in Europe and it would not matter even a little as far as our safety goes, because everyone knows the moment you're crossing the borders with troops, it will be a nuclear hollocaust. What matters is the money you can make with selling weapons based on fear.
Nuclear weapons no longer work as deterrence in the modern age. You would not see Russian troops marching in waving their banners, you'd see little green men, local patriots fighting the fascist regime in Warsaw. The thing is, since we're a NATO country, we can lean on our allies for aid - something Ukraine could not do, since it was recolonized by Russia after being torn apart by oligarchs. The little green men would quickly trade their fatigues for prisoner jumpsuits and wind up serving life sentences for treason. Furthermore, NATO aid (I'm assuming you use it as a shorthand for EU et al) has been instrumental in securing and developing Central Europe, from the Baltics southwards.
We live in a modern age and yet you insist on sticking to 19-mid20-th century ideas of geopolitics. Russia's actions in Ukraine, including the illegal annexation of Crimea, have revitalized the entire alliance.
I am not talking here about something that happend 100 years ago. The NATO I am talking about is the NATO of today. The NATO that has formed and declared new strategies and policies over the last 30 years which had no other target than to destabilize the midle east and militarizing the western nations.
But the NATO of today has ceased to be relevant after the fall of the Soviet Union and the Balkan clusterfuck was pretty much its last attempt at relevance - and it was still under UN mandate, not under NATO's own authority. It was not built up to destabilize the Middle East and militarize the West - for the simple reason that it was the single absolute worst course of action the alliance could take. And it did not.
What ever positive and honorable ideals the NATO ever had during the cold war slowly but steadily gets replaced by mining rights over human rights. Democracies like Germany, France and even the US still maintain a relative good and acceptable freedom for their population, however, at the cost of human lifes in other parts of the world. Securing resources and resource hubs has become a key strategy today. Military companies like Krauss Maffei gain just as much from their alliances with Saudi Arabia, a terror regime supporting countless of militant groups in the midle east, as like US arms industries from Israel.
Again, the nirvana fallacy. They aren't "relatively good and acceptable." They're a fucking benchmark because at this point, the West still remains, overall, the most free part of the planet, including the freedom to not starve and not get shot at random by a corrupt regime during a protest. And no, our freedoms do not come at the cost of other people, because they're a wholly different affair. Do you honestly believe that gay people getting married costs the lives of children in the third world? Really? That your ability to post on this board is paid for by a bus of Syrian boys splattered by a barrel bomb?
The problem with your reductionist logic is that it's simplistic and useless. NATO (as in, the European Union, United States, and other countries typified as the West) is not some kind of evil monolith controlled by an invisible overlord - that's Europa Universalis, which is not a documentary - but a clusterfuck of competing interests, groups of people, corporations, militaries, wealthy people, idiots, geniuses, analysts, laymen, and so on and so forth. It's not "secure resource hubs, win campaign" because life doesn't work that way. Our best bet is cooperating with people and stabilizing the region - but you don't reverse centuries' worth of white imperialism overnight. Especially not when, as you point out, there are people who benefit from the instability.
The NATO doesn't garantee our safety, since our safety is never in any serious danger!
Have you considered that it's maybe
because of NATO? The consolidated power bloc that ensures that any attacker would be facing it in its entirety?
From whom anyway? Russia? China? They have more to gain if we buy their fucking gas and paying our interests.
And yet they antagonize the West. I can certainly understand China, which desires its place in the sun and is an actual superpower (like early 20th century Imperial Germany), but not Russia, which is behind the West on every level. It trashes in Ukraine and Syria, but that's about it - trashing about. It still has an economy based on exporting raw resources, no innovative technologies to speak of (remember Medvedev's grandiose Russian Silicon Valley plans?), and its time would be much better spent focusing on improving the lives of their people and promoting a healthy state, rather than playing empire - a game they are ill prepared for.
Worse yet, it's ordinary Russians - awesome people - who foot the bill.
Those camel humping terrorists in the middle east that are busier fighting and hating each other than sending rockets to us? What the NATO secures is our standart of living, more importantly, the power of our current elites, politcally and economically. Making sure that the American and to some extend the European community stays on top keeping up with the capitalisic system that we established. Those nations that consume the most resources on this planet like there is no tomorrow.
Uh, that's a pretty fucking racist sentiment. And I'm not referring to camel humping terrorists, that's sarcasm. I'm referring to the notion that the poor, dumb people of the Middle East are played against each other by the white ubermenschen masters of the west.
They're not. You hail from the Balkans, you know how much of a clusterfuck the entire region is. Now amp that to eleven, add a couple military invasions and dictatorial regimes, and an even worse history of imperialism and you have a fuckton of people who fight each other not because of the West's manipulations, but because of the long, terrifying history they have, only amplified by the West.
See, it's the same as calling refugees "Muslims" and treating them like a monolithic mass. They aren't. Syrians aren't Jordanians, Jordanians aren't Palestinians, Palestinians aren't Egyptians, and so on and so forth, and everyone has a grudge. Or a hundred.
And yes ... I do even agree with you, there is no alternative to the NATO. For now. Because for there to be a TRUE alternative the NATO would have to dissapear first. And that won't happen, it would end in a third world war so much for sure. So no, a colapse of the NATO would be eventually the worst thing that can happen. How many situations have there beein in history where organisations and/or people gave up on power voluntarily?
A lot of them, actually. Power does corrupt, but it isn't a one-way street.
). You can have a million soldiers run away from a hundred, if not a single one of those million believe in what they are risking themselves for.
