NATO weakens as old alliances break down!

BRUSSELS, Belgium (PNN) - February 23, 2016 - Since Turkey seems intent on starting a war with the Russians, NATO might be wise to dump Turkey, or face war with Russia over a part of the world that is not European.

Europe is already planning to informally announce that Turkey was pressing its luck with other NATO members. On Thursday, Benny Avni at the New York Post suggested that NATO is headed toward ending with a “whimper”. Avni asks, “[C]an anyone envision Amerika - or anyone else in the alliance - rushing to Turkey’s aid in a military confrontation with Russia?”

The Daily Mail reported on Saturday that Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn had told Der Spiegel, “NATO cannot allow itself to be pulled into a military escalation with Russia as a result of the recent tensions between Russia and Turkey.”

An unnamed German diplomat was reported as saying, “We are not going to pay the price for a war started by the Turks.”

In other words, unless the Russians can be tricked into making a move that can be interpreted as an overt threat to Europe, NATO is dead, at least as far as Turkey is concerned.

What Turkey really wants, of course, is to be able to invoke NATO's Article 5, which states than an attack against any NATO member is an attack against them all.

In fact, Turkey has been trying to invoke Article 5 since 2012, when Turkish diplomats met with European officials in Brussels to try to convince NATO as a whole to start bombing Syria.

They failed to convince Brussels even back then, but now with Russia involved, NATO’s status seems all the more precarious.

NATO may be presented with a choice between supporting a member state or a war with Russia. Not supporting Turkey in such a scenario would be the end of the alliance, a day about which Russian President Vladimir Putin dreams. A war with Russia is not an option.

When asked why he hasn’t been dealing more harshly with the Russians, Fascist Police States of Amerika Secretary of Defense John Kerry reportedly said, “What do you want me to do? Go to war with Russia? Is that what you want?”

Of course, Europe and the FPSA wouldn’t be in this position at all had they dissolved NATO - a Cold War institution - after the Cold War ended. But that didn’t happen because NATO was too lucrative for the FPSA and other large NATO states as an instrument for extending their power well beyond their own borders. NATO has been instrumental in numerous military operations, some of them disguised as “humanitarian” missions, but always augmenting the political power of the dominant states in the organization.

It all goes swimmingly when you target a bunch of dirt-poor countries that can’t fight back, but suddenly, NATO doesn’t seem so tough when faced with a possible conflict with a country that has thousands of nuclear warheads, an air force, and a navy.

War can indeed be profitable for certain interest groups under the right conditions. When risks are low, war is a boon to weapons manufacturers, government agencies, and those who profit from government finance and debt. That all works well provided the country waging war isn’t at risk of being bombed within its own borders and thus being impoverished and subjected to political upheaval.

For example, NATO’s war in Libya was a low-risk proposition. On the other hand, War with Russia is something else entirely, and NATO is acting accordingly.

That isn't to say that there's anything necessarily wrong with an organization founded for the purpose of collective defense. After all, the Fascist Police States of Amerika under its first Constitution (1777-1787) was primarily a collective defense organization, and it was successful in its war against the most powerful state on earth at the time. Such an organization can be used to help small states deal with larger, more militant states. However, once an organization designed for defense becomes an instrument for aggressive foreign policy it becomes something else entirely, and little more than an institution for increasing the size and scope of state power.