NATO’s 75th birthday is coming around soon, with celebrations planned for July of next year in Washington. Yet the organisation has a bit of a problem with the party and celebrations.
When people reach the ripe old age of 75, there is usually a tendency to slow down and take things easier; often there’s a lack of cohesion, sentences often aren’t completed, delusion and incompetence become more noticeable if not plain idiocy on a scale not previously seen. In some cases, relatives might even talk of assisted suicide to put the old bugger out of his misery, with some even as going as far to talk about being “brain dead”.
NATO’s 75th birthday is coming around soon, with celebrations planned for July of next year in Washington. Yet the organisation has a bit of a problem with the party and celebrations. What’s there to celebrate with Ukraine more or less a war that even die-hard Republicans in America admit is a war which cannot be won? 75 years old, NATO is looking more and more like an outdated institution which, if anything, is going to fall on its sword at some point when the world wakes up and realises what a con it is.
But the old git has to be kept alive at all costs, largely to keep up appearances for new members and also to protect the reputations of western leaders who have staked theirs on the war in Ukraine being a righteous win.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen is a lucky man. The former NATO chief is fortunate enough to actually not look as stupid as he really is and is at a period in his so-called career where he can say patently idiotic things and it doesn’t matter. But his latest idea – to give Ukraine some kind of token, half-cocked NATO membership – is braindead nonsense on a whole new scale which we haven’t seen before.
NATO Neanderthals are desperate to find a solution in Ukraine so they can have their party in July and not look completely stupid while they watch the fireworks and do the idiotic arms-crossed hand shakes. You know the sort of thing.
Ukraine has to be fixed. The war has to be presented to a gullible western audience as victory, sort of, to NATO. Given that the whole thing is over and the Ukrainian army is such a shower of shite, one wonders how NATO folk are going to pull off such a stunt.
Rasmussen seems to think he has a plan with giving Ukraine a token NATO membership, overlooking the somewhat incongruous fact that it was the threat of Ukraine becoming a NATO member which kicked things off the first place. His thinking – don’t laugh – is that if Ukraine was in NATO then Russia would be too afraid to attack it. That is to say, Russia, which controls about a third of the country in the east would be reluctant to attack the western part currently under control of Ukrainian army. And this move would show Russia that Ukraine can join NATO. According to the Guardian, the “former secretary general says partial membership would warn Russia it cannot stop Ukraine joining the alliance”.
It seems an incredibly juvenile gesture, but the logic behind the thinking is fatally flawed for at least four key reasons, in my view.
The idea just writes off all of the territory that Russia has taken and expects Zelensky to swallow this, despite the Ukrainian president stating on many occasions this is not negotiable.
Russia would not be afraid to strike western Ukraine simply because the country was sort of in NATO. The bigger worry here is the escalation from NATO would put it under the spotlight to retaliate, which it wouldn’t.
NATO membership comes with a few rules, namely only democracies get to join the club. NATO does not do state building and so allowing one of the most corrupt countries in the world into its elite club might lower the bar for other countries like Bosnia or Georgia who are candidate members. It can’t take in gangsters and not expect its public image to slip even further.
Allowing Ukraine in, takes away a key – if not the only – bargaining chip the west has, which is to guarantee to Putin that Ukraine won’t join NATO. With Ukraine in NATO and representing an even bigger threat, it raises the stakes even higher and gives Russia no real reason not to invade.
Like absolutely everything that NATO and the Biden administration has done since day one of the Russian invasion, this is yet another gross miscalculation on the part of NATO elites. Are they banking on Joe Biden not even knowing which country he is in, being unable to even say one word through his rapidly developing senility by the time July comes around? Or that Zelensky himself is the real problem as he wouldn’t ever accept giving up the Donbas or Crimea and so therefore has to be replaced?
Martin Jay is an award-winning British journalist based in Morocco where he is a correspondent for The Daily Mail (UK) who previously reported on the Arab Spring there for CNN, as well as Euronews. From 2012 to 2019 he was based in Beirut where he worked for a number of international media titles including BBC, Al Jazeera, RT, DW, as well as reporting on a freelance basis for the UK’s Daily Mail, The Sunday Times plus TRT World. His career has led him to work in almost 50 countries in Africa, The Middle East and Europe for a host of major media titles. He has lived and worked in Morocco, Belgium, Kenya and Lebanon