As we have just finished observing the 75th anniversary of NATO at the recent Washington summit, it is a good time to consider how that alliance could be renewed.
NATO must be considered the most effective alliance in the history of the world. No other multinational alliance involving a potential responsibility to go to war has endured so long, and none has been more successful. The purpose of NATO was to contain the Soviet Union; it did so successfully for 42 years until the USSR disintegrated without a shot being fired. Since the end of the Cold War, the alliance needs and purposes of the West have evolved considerably, and while there has been some flippant talk in some circles of disposing of NATO, a much better idea is to renovate and partly repurpose it.
The greatest strategic needs of the Western world now are to assist countries that may be under aggressive and unacceptable threats from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Once the adequate levels of resistance against aggression or merely pressure from those countries are in place, and even as they are being established, the West will wish to bring the war in Ukraine to a satisfactory end and, with it, ensure that Russian attempts to unwind the Western victory in the Cold War and reintegrate into Russia by coercion republics, apart from Ukraine, that shall have departed from it, are adequately deterred by reinforcement. This will ensure that those republics can defend themselves and deter aggression against them of the kind that Russia inflicted upon Ukraine.
When these goals have been accomplished, it will be time to address separately the different countries that at the moment have arrayed themselves aggressively against the Western interest. The attempt of the People’s Republic of China to convert international waters adjacent to it into Chinese territorial waters and to intimidate the Philippines and other countries, as well as to strangle Taiwanese independence coercively, must be resisted. The attempt of the Russians to destabilize former Soviet republics and reassert themselves in what Russia calls “the near-abroad” must be met with different levels of resistance depending upon the country involved, but Russia must not be allowed to exercise an influence upon any of them that exceeds what may be reasonably determined to be its historic rights. This relates to Ukraine, the Baltic countries, and the Caucasus countries. Belarus is already a satellite, and the West is not concerned with the Muslim republics.
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