"NATO provides a commitment to collective defence. The Article 5 Guarantee and the integrated military structures reassure each and every one of our Allies that their borders are inviolable."
Neither Europe nor the world required a further reminder of the fact, but Miliband's words foreshadowed a concrete implementation for NATO military plans in Europe as two weeks later his government proposed "that Nato member states should set up a standing force of 3,000 troops that would be permanently committed to defending the Alliance's collective territory from any future attack."
(Financial Times, February 18, 2009)
At last week's NATO defense ministers meeting in Krakow, Poland Britain's Defence Secretary John Hutton argued "that [a] standing force should be created to underpin Nato's Article 5 commitment to the mutual defence of any member state that finds itself under threat" and "that the creation of the standing force would be reassuring to Nato's eastern European members - above all the Baltic states...."
(Ibid)
American expatriate and current Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves had anticipated Hutton by two weeks when at the Munich Conference he advocated:
"No longer can we assume that international aggression, (as opposed to the civil wars of the Balkans) is excluded as a possibility in Europe....We can and must revisit the assumptions held in the past 17 years about the use of military force in Europe and we must follow our own legislation to ensure that we not become politically hostage to energy supplied by an outside power....NATO itself must deal with the new paradigm of in area armed aggression...."
Between the Munich and the Krakow gatherings NATO's Baltic clients performed their appointed roles with Lithuanian Defense Minister Rasa Jukneviciene stating she plans to tell her American counterpart Robert Gates "that Lithuania would like to see NATO and the United States expand their presence in the Baltics, considering the nervousness that has followed Russia's invasion of Georgia in August."
(Associated Press, February 11, 2009)
Not since the end of World War II, since the advent of the nuclear era, have major powers, ones moreover united in the world's first global military bloc, so openly brandished plans for military action in Europe and just as indisputably named their intended target.
NATO has been pounding a steady, relentless drumbeat for the activation of its collective military plans in the Baltic Sea region and all it will take to bring that about is something as otherwise insignificant as the crash of an Estonian government website or Western proxies in Ukraine refusing to pay standard market prices for Russian natural gas. Nothing more.
Notes:
1). NATO International, Allied Command Transformation, November 13, 2008
2). Interfax, August 14, 2008
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