“America’s determination to manage the Middle East at all costs, its habit of launching a new war every time it needs to deal with the effects of the last one it launched. NATO as a leftover Cold War relic doing more harm than good. And poor, toothless, leaderless Britain tagging along behind because it still dreams of greatness and doesn’t know what else to dream about.”
Silverview
John Le Carré
January 11 2024 — According to Thierry Breton, a French European commissioner responsible for the internal market, with responsibilities including defence, US President Donald Trump told the president of the European Commission in 2020 that the US would “never come help” if Europe was attacked. Follow us on Twitter: @INTEL_TODAY
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“NATO is a relic of the past unsuited for this new era in international politics.”
Why NATO is obsolete
Foreign Policy News
(May 21, 2020)
The exchange between Trump and Ursula von der Leyen at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2020 was described in Brussels on Tuesday by Thierry Breton. [The Guardian : Trump told European leaders that US ‘will never come to help you’]
According to Breton, Trump also said: “By the way, Nato is dead, and we will leave, we will quit Nato.”
In many ways this is not news. Trump has long complained NATO is an obsolete deadbeat. But do you know that President Trump is hardly the only one thinking that the alliance is obsolete.
Silverview, by John Le Carré (2021), appeared nine months after Le Carré’s death at the age of 89. Near the end of the beautiful novel, Le Carré gives his own conclusion about NATO: “a leftover Cold War relic doing more harm than good.”
“More harm than good.” — Pope Francis came to that conclusion long ago. “NATO barking at Russia’s door may have led to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.” And you should know that an institution does not survive two millennia without a good intelligence agency…
According to Thierry Breton, European leaders were shocked. If they were serious people, they would know their history. And then, they would not be surprised.
Did you ever ask yourself why General De Gaulle decided to quit NATO and opted for a French nuclear deterrence? The French president did so, not because he feared Moscow, but because he did not trust the Americans. De Gaulle did not believe that the US president would sacrifice New York to save Paris.
On February 5 1997, the legendary American diplomat George F. Kennan warned that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post cold-war era.”
European people are going to pay a heavy price for that enormous mistake. Stay tuned!
“NATO has become obsolete. Indeed, Washington’s whole Europe-first orientation is anachronistic, a wasteful, expensive holdover from the cold war that ought to have been abandoned years ago and that distracts us from the true dangers we face abroad.”
Seth Jacobs
History professor
REFERENCES
As It Turns 70, Is NATO Still Necessary? — NPR
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Is NATO an obsolete deadbeat? [John LeCarré — Silverview]
“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This [NATO] expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.”
George Kennan (1998)
Intel Today 