Other standard demands of the new Strategic Concept were also addressed, including so-called energy and cyber security, with Rasmussen connecting them to NATO's Article 5 war clause and with missile shield deployments:
"NATO is a unique mechanism for collecting information from different sources - We have the means to protect critical energy infrastructure."
"Nowhere is the need to act today rather than tomorrow more evident than in this area....[A] cyber attack can bring a country down without a single soldier having to cross its borders."
"NATO's core task was, continues to be and will remain territorial collective defence of our territories and populations."
"I am not going to prejudge the new Strategic Concept. But I'll make one point very clear: We cannot afford to put missile defence, energy security or cyber defence on the back burner. Because new challenges don't wait until we feel ready to meet them."
The claim that the populations of all 28 NATO nations, including those of North America, Iceland and Denmark's Greenland, face an imminent threat from intercontinental ballistic missiles, ones moreover carrying nuclear warheads, ready to be launched by - to name the West's standard suspects - Iran and Syria calls into question the credibility if not the sanity of the person who made it. On May 5 the NATO secretary general stated in this regard:
"We have...sufficient intelligence to know that we're faced with a real threat, with Iranian aspirations as regards missile technology and nuclear programs," adding that he was "confident" the NATO summit in November would agree to protect Washington, D.C., Ottawa and Reykjavik from phantom Iranian missiles.
References to cyber and energy security, though, are undisguised accusations against Russia, one of the world's two main nuclear powers, and, coupled as they unvaryingly are with NATO's Article 5 mutual defense clause, would alone warrant an immediate demand for the abolition of the military bloc whose strategic doctrine is based on that policy.
This week the Norwegian ambassador to former Soviet republic and current NATO partner Azerbaijan, bordering both Iran and Russia, said that the new Strategic Concept "will cover all member states, as well as NATO partner states." [4]
There are over 40 NATO military partners included in the Partnership for Peace, Mediterranean Dialogue, Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, Contact Countries and Trilateral Afghanistan-Pakistan-NATO Military Commission programs, so NATO reserves the right to intervene on behalf of some 70 nations, including partners like Israel, Georgia and South Korea. In fact NATO arrogates to itself and to its individual members and its partners the exclusive prerogative of using military force outside (and within) their borders.
Rasmussen's visit to Romania is to be followed later this month by one to Bulgaria, "a state of strategic importance in view of future plans for the
deployment of an anti-missile shield." [5]
In late April he visited the bloc's two newest members, Albania and Croatia. After he met with Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha the latter announced "that Albania was prepared to fulfil all commitments that come from its NATO membership, including the positioning of anti-missile defence units on its territory." [6]
Shortly afterward Chief of Staff of the Albanian Armed Forces General Maksim Malaj revealed that a team of NATO experts was headed to his country and that they "will make a thorough analysis of the geo-strategic factors in our country. If they decide to install elements of the anti-missile defence shield, we will give our permission." [7]
NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe Admiral James Stavridis visited Bulgaria on April 26 and 27 to meet with the country's defense minister and military chief.
The Alliance's top military and civilian leaders visited the Southeastern European nations for discussions on the Strategic Concept. They also drummed up commitments for further deployments to Afghanistan and for the stationing of U.S. missile shield installations in the respective states.
The current NATO-integrated regimes on the Black Sea and in the Balkans are sufficiently compliant and obliging to allow the Pentagon anything it demands from them, whether missile interception sites or the transfer of nuclear warheads currently in Western Europe to locations closer to their prospective use to the east and south.
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