Re: <nettime> The War to come ...

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

On 10.03.22 06:02, Brian Holmes wrote:
> Here's the thing though. Should Nato really have denied entry to all 
> those Eastern European states that requested it? Remember that most of 
> those states, they had been taken over but not absorbed by the Soviet 
> Union. They lived for decades under significant degrees of political 
> repression. Did they have a valid reason to want to join Nato after 
> 1989? Looking at the brutality of the current war, it seems suddenly 
> obvious to me that they did -- and by the same token, I have suddenly 
> become less certain of what I always used to say, that Nato is an 
> imperialist war machine that should be disbanded. Russia is also an 
> imperialist war machine, for sure (and the two owe each other a lot). 
> But maybe China is also an imperial war machine? And India, maybe not yet?
I don't think that NATO ever was an imperialist war machine. The US 
doesn't really need NATO for it's imperialist projects in Latin America 
or Asia.
NATO, it seems to me, was always a "cold war" war machine, aimed at 
confronting the SU/Russia, primarily in Europe. To the degree that this 
confrontation was not seen as vital after 1990 (either because the US 
read geopolitics as uni-polar, or the Europeans believed in trade 
leading to peace) NATO languished. Irrelevant for Trump, brain-dead for 
Macron, not worth investing for the Germans.
For the Eastern European countries, for very understandable, deep 
historical reasons, "confronting Russia" remained a vital concern also 
after the end of the cold war, hence NATO was always seen crucially 
important and they entered NATO voluntarily.
History has born them out, but was that really inevitable? Of course 
not, because nothing ever is, but the miss-conception of geopolitics as 
unipolar is certainly a big factor in this.
But the paradox is, to develop a real peace architecture in Europe, NATO 
would have had to deny Eastern European countries membership and work on 
some kind of large block-free zone between itself and Russia. I'm not 
sure such a project would have been popular in Poland, though.







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