The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is, basically, an anti-Russia alliance. It has been led by the USA, though in the last decade or so, the EU has often played an equally influential part, while providing only a fraction of the funding or manpower - something that irks the new regime in America. A key strategy of NATO was to try to surround Russia and a key link in this chain of encirclement was Turkey.
Since Donald Trump became president, certain tensions have become apparent between his government and the EU, especially Germany. Trump has made known his own views that NATO needs reform, that other members should contribute more and that he would prefer to deal with the EU countries one by one rather than en bloc (he would, wouldn't he?). All of this makes relations within NATO somewhat strained.
Then very recently, the US sent a very small force of soldiers to Syria. This is a rather odd move in some ways. It seems to demonstrate US weakness. Is that the best they can do? one is tempted to ask. Perhaps it might have been better not to send anybody at all. There has to be something behind it.
Then, this week, it appears, as far as I can find out - and you won’t find this in the Western press, I don’t suppose - there seems to have been an unpublicised US-Russian co-operation in Syria to thwart Turkish territorial ambitions in northern Syria. So who is on whose side? It is becoming difficult to be sure any more. There has to be a suspicion that Donald Trump intends to make good on his promise to get rid of ISIS (and to do so with no US casualties) by letting the Kurds, Russians and Syrian government do it for him.
Meanwhile, Turkey is escalating a war of words with the EU in general and Netherlands in particular and, at the same time, cultivating its own relations with Russia. Is Turkey, in effect, dropping out of NATO?
Then, there is the reality that quite a number of leading politicians in Western countries, not excepting Trump himself, are known to have some sympathetic connections with Russia. Vladimir Putin has certainly been skilful in the way he has played his hand, and I can’t help feeling that we are going to see some more significant shifts in allegiances over the next year or two.
Personally, it would seem not to be such a bad idea if relations between Russia and other European counties were to improve. This is both because the world might feel like a safer place and also because, in terms of geography and resources, there is a natural complementarity between them. I can’t see Russia ever becoming part of the European Union, but an end to sanctions and the creation of a trade deal beneficial to both sides could be a good start.
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It seems that Turkey is currently negotiating to replace its ground to air defences with Russian equipment. If that goes ahead it will definitely unhook Turkey from NATO integration.
Regarding the original question (NATO) I think it is about time that there was some serious thinking about what is real and realistic in the contemporary world. Things are changing, but the old structures are still in place.
Yes, good point. Everything is doubtable, and the basic threefold question, "Why are they saying that, why to us, and why now?" is so often productive. Language is slanted - are the people in this fight "terrorists", "insurgents", "rebels", of "the resistance", for instance? Another useful line of thought is "What if the boot were on the other foot?" - to use an English idiom: Every week American drones kill somebody in the middle east - what if middle eastern drones were killing somebody in America? How would people react? The West criticised the old USSR for its clamp down on "human rights" but as soon as America suffered a single incident (9/11) there was an immediate clamp down of a similar kind. This sort of thing often reveals that what we are dealing with is human crowd psychology, not good guys and bad guys. And so on. However, the arrival of leaks via the internet, hacking and deliberate false news is making the whole thing worse not better.
Very difficult. I think the best one can do as an armchair based observer is to expose oneself to a variety of sources of information. This sometimes gives you several fixes on a single event and one can then make an educated guess, based on what one knows about the different biasses of the various media, about what might actually have happened. Other times, you find information reported in one set of media that simply does not appear elsewhere. This is also interesting. One has to be cautious about what, if anything, it refers to in reality, but it does help one to assess where the media bias is. There is always spin, not just in how things are reported, but in what gets reported. Thus, people who follow the Syria war story in Western media probably read some time back that Syrian government forces had captured Palmyra from the ISIS. Then, about a year later, they probably read that Syrian government forces had recaptured Palmyra from ISIS. They probably did not see a report in between telling them that ISIS had got it back again. A great deal rests in choice of words and phrases. Over the last three years (since it happened) there have been frequent references in the Western press to the Russian annexation of the Crimea, but if you look at media with a Russian loyalty you read about the West's irrational refusal to accept the results of the Crimea referendum. Well, Crimea has become part of Russia de facto and there was a referendum - beyond that it is all a matter of which way you want to see it. So it goes on. Sometimes, however, there are really big deceptions in play - like Libya renouncing the weapons of mass destruction that it never had in the first place - the truth of which only comes out long after. I'm sure there are many things going on that we never get to know about, but, on the other hand, I am also somewhat dismayed how naive many people are in regard to the information that gets fed to them.
One of the problems is due to the fact that in order to make the news interesting it has to be converted into a story and a story has to have a certain coherence and, usually, a moral tone. There have to be good guys and bad guys and you are told which are which. This can be very misleading. It also means that one or two stories dominate the news and lots of other things then go unreported.