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Tom Worster's avatar

Our host describes activities in the political and diplomatic domain and I have no argument with this analysis. If we want to know why NATO persisted after 91 then we need to consider what other purposes it has served since then and that may help us look to the future. I have two to offer.

First, NATO is a shell organization for moving money from national treasures to elsewhere. If you can influence NATO then you can redirect that money. Complexity in purchasing standards is an advantage for the suppliers that can best master that complexity. In other words the biggest equipment and services vendors end up almost dictating procurement standards to the buyers through NATO and new members need to get up to standard.

Second, and related, is organizational inertia. As in any public or private organization, the component parts are all people with their interests: careers, org charts, budgets, pensions, status and reputations. Only oversight from political leaders can call these people to account when they are acting as a class and that almost never happens because the politicians are acting as a class too, as Aurelien has described at length, and partly due to the influence of donors, e.g. the suppliers I mentioned above, and the revolving door. When Donald Trump made a stink about NATO costing too much for the value it was delivering to the USA, all other politicians (excepting the overtly Trump aligned) sang in a perfect chorus of aghast indignation along with the NATO staff. It's hard to be a mainstream Euro-pol and anti-NATO.

So there exists a complex (did Eisenhower borrow that word from Jung? irdk) mostly visible by its capital extraction and self preservation that only political will could possibly bring under control.

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Ian Greig's avatar

"If there is one thing worse for NATO than the present crisis, it would be some kind of civil war in Ukraine where the alliance was forced to take sides" as opposed to the situation for the 8 years prior to 2022 which can be described as Ukraine in a state of civil war in which NATO chose to take sides? Really this just demonstrates the state of zugzwang that the west seems to have entered with regards to Ukraine: go forwards - lose; go backwards - lose.

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