State Department Reveals 21st Century NATO's Global Priorities
Rick Rozoff
The State Department's top Eurasia hand addressed the House Committee on Foreign Affairs's Subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia on April 26 to present Washington's perspective on and expectations of next month's summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
In a presentation titled "The Chicago Summit and U.S. Policy," the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs, Tina Kaidanow, laid out what the military alliance's main powerhouse and financial backer demands of its 27 allies and in so doing indicated many of the top geopolitical objectives of her department and the U.S. government as a whole for the upcoming years.
Commenting on the fact that the May 20-21 gathering of over fifty heads of state from nations supplying troops for the longest war in her nation's history, that in Afghanistan, will occur in Chicago, only the second NATO summit in the U.S. and "the first ever outside of Washington," Kaidanow reiterated the main purpose of the world's only military bloc:
"Our hosting of the Summit is a tangible symbol of the importance of NATO to the United States, as well as an opportunity to underscore to the American people the continued value of the Alliance to the security challenges we face today...NATO is vital to U.S. security. More than ever, the Alliance is the mechanism through which the U.S. confronts diverse and difficult threats to our security...Our experiences in the Cold War, in the Balkans, and now in Afghanistan prove that our core interests are better protected by working together than by seeking to respond to threats alone as individual nations."
What the House members listening to her, if not the casual reader, would understand by the above comments is that NATO is the chief vehicle employed by the State Department, White House and Pentagon to advance American political, economic and military interests in Eurasia and increasingly the rest of the world. As such, it's well worth the U.S.'s efforts to provide the preponderance of its funding and military assets and further engineer its evolution into an expanding, ultimately global, military-political network.
Kaidanow included an elementary school primer-level synopsis of NATO's history from its founding - "For...40 years...we..stood united in purpose against the specter of communism" - until the fall of the Berlin Wall, after which "NATO helped to rebuild Central and Eastern European countries while integrating them into the trans-Atlantic community of democratic states."
The latter was accomplished by absorbing every former Soviet ally in the Warsaw Pact, and three past Soviet republics, into the alliance from 1999-2009, in the process conscripting troops from every one of them for deployment to war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. No troops from the Warsaw Pact except the Soviet Union had been deployed outside Eastern Europe during the entire Cold War period.
Her presentation dutifully echoed that of her boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in the latter's speech at the World Affairs Council 2012 NATO Conference on April 3. The U.S. is the only NATO member whose leading officials speak authoritatively in advance of the outcome, in fine detail, of the upcoming summit as the nation effectively determines the agenda, with a friendly nod in the direction of its fellow NATO Quint states - Britain, France, Germany and Italy - but nevertheless calling all the important shots. One wonders why, except for a vain propensity for pageantry and pomposity, summits are held at all given that the results have been decided upon long in advance.
Early in her talk Kaidanow invoked the new Strategic Concept adopted at the last NATO summit in 2010, particularly highlighting the bloc's Article 5 mutual military assistance (war) clause, affirming that "First and foremost, NATO remains committed to the Article 5 principle of collective defense."
That article is responsible for the stationing of 152,000 troops, at peak strength, from 50 nations in Afghanistan.
When Kaidanow spoke of "integrating them [twelve Eastern European nations incorporated into NATO from 1999-2009] into the trans-Atlantic community," she was in fact if not openly confirming the practical results of NATO expansion: To provide the U.S. and its Western allies with air, infantry, naval, radar and drone surveillance, missile, strategic airlift, cyber warfare and other bases and facilities east of the former Berlin Wall and legionaries for neocolonial wars and military occupations in the Balkans, Asia and Africa.
She has been no disinterested observer in that process. In her current position and in a post that preceded it, Kaidanow has cultivated and consolidated the power of what are without dispute Washington's two most favored - and pampered - satraps, Georgia's Mikheil Saakashvili and Kosovo's Hashim Thaci, than whom there are no less savory and more malicious heads of state in the world. If the sociopathic ghoul in Kosovo and the megalomaniacal self-styled reincarnation of the medieval King Davit IV in Georgia are indicative of the U.S.'s political alliances, and if an empire can be judged by the foreign stooges it employs, then Washington has plummeted to a new imperial nadir.
Like most of the current American foreign policy elite, Kaidanow cut her teeth in the Balkans in the 1990s, her first State Department assignments being in the U.S. embassies in Serbia (1995-1997) Bosnia (1997-1998) and Macedonia (1998-1999), in the last instance focusing on neighboring Kosovo.
She attended the infamous Rambouillet conference in February of 1999 where the American delegation headed by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright threw down the gauntlet to Yugoslavia with the infamous Appendix B ultimatum and set the stage for the 78-day war that began on March 24. Rambouillet was also the debut of American asset Thaci, then an underworld kingpin and head of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army, who was even then being groomed as the head of state be became in 2008 ahead of Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence in February of that year. Four years later a majority of the world's nations still don't recognize his organized crime-ridden fiefdom as a nation.
Kaidanow was the Chief of Mission and Charge d'Affaires at the U.S. Office in Kosovo from July 2006 to July 2008, until the George W. Bush administration appointed her the first American ambassador on July 19 of the latter year.
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