At the Strategic Concept seminar on February 23 in Washington Ivo Daalder repeated the sixty-year NATO position on nuclear weapons in stating, "We need to continue to rely on a deterrence based on a mix of conventional and nuclear forces."
He also linked three integral components of NATO's now global strategy - the threat to employ nuclear weapons, a worldwide interceptor missile system and the bloc's Article 5 war clause - in asserting that "we need, in the new environment, to make territorial missile defense a mission of this alliance, a mission to defend against a new kind of armed attack, that which arrives on ballistic missiles, whether these weapons come from Iran and hit Western Europe or North Korea and towards North America. In both instances, they would be a responsibility for Article 5 to be dealt with."
To underscore the point - that NATO would marshal the combined military might of its 28 member states in Europe and North America in alleged defense of any member requesting it - he added, "A defense against ballistic missile attack even those of ballistic missiles come from very far if they attack NATO territory would be an Article 5 contingency."
"We would like the alliance to embrace the notion that the territorial defense of our of that territorial missile defense is a mission of NATO and therefore ought to be a fundamental part of what NATO does on a day-to-day basis. Whether that's in the Strategic Concept or is a separate decision at the Lisbon summit is less important. Article 5 is going to be in the Strategic Concept. Ballistic missiles that are directed at the territory of a NATO state would be an armed attack and therefore fall under the definition of Article 5.
"We believe NATO should be in the business of missile defense. The United States has offered its new approach to missile defense as its U.S.-funded contribution to a NATO system. And we hope that by Lisbon [the NATO summit in November], the entire alliance will embrace this as a mission and we move forward together in defending against the threats that are out there in the 21st century."
Defense Secretary Gates spoke in the same vein: "The threat from rogue nations is real in particular Iran, which is focusing its efforts on short-and-medium-range missiles that could strike most of Europe. Last year, the Obama administration announced a new plan for missile defense in Europe a phased, adaptive approach that will give us real capabilities in a shorter period of time than the previous plan. We consider this a U.S.-funded contribution to NATO missile defense, which is critical to the collective-defense mission...."
Collective defense, sometimes deemed collective self-defense, are the NATO codewords for activating Article 5 and ordering all members to respond militarily to a threat - real or fancied - to one or more members.
Clinton followed suit in stating "Missile defense, we believe, will make us safer because, clearly, we see a threat. We see a threat that is emanating from the Middle East and we see a threat that can only be addressed in the spirit of collective defense."
Targeting the same countries earlier identified by Daalder (two of the three so-called axis of evil nations identified as such by former president George W. Bush), she said, "nuclear proliferation and the development of more sophisticated missiles in countries such as North Korea and Iran are reviving the specter of an interstate nuclear attack. So how do we in NATO do our part to ensure that such weapons never are unleashed on the world?"
In no manner does Iran raise the "specter of an interstate nuclear attack" and Clinton knew that. But it is the pretext required by the U.S. and NATO to base interceptor missile sites along Russia's western borders from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.
The excuse needed to support Clinton's demand that, more than twenty years since the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, NATO members still "need to invest in deterrence, nuclear deterrence as well as missile defense...."
The U.S. nuclear shield, linked with NATO's Article 5, is being extended from Europe to Asia, the Middle East and ultimately the entire world. Global nuclear NATO.
In keeping with the conference held on NATO's new Strategic Concept in London last October 1, hosted by Lloyd's of London, in which the bloc's Secretary General Rasmussen identified no less than seventeen nominal threats - all of them non-military in nature and all of them without geographical limitations - that NATO was prepared to respond to, [18] the Washington conference also highlighted the boundless and timeless mandate that NATO was arrogating to itself.
Rasmussen's speech on February 23 included these observations:
"We must face new challenges. Terrorism, proliferation, cyber security or even climate change will oblige us to seek new ways of operating.
"As we deploy in operations with over 40 participating countries Allies as well as partners we have to move beyond a multinational force to become a truly unified force - a force where information and capabilities are shared among all to the benefit of all, and to get the job done.
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