As a result of the ongoing crisis between Russia and the United States and their NATO allies, the impression is spreading that the Atlantic Alliance has regained its cause. his silhouette cold. In this situation, they believe in Brussels that the ‘brain death’ of NATO announced in ‘The Economist’ by the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, about the US withdrawal from Syria, has been neutralized in line with the geographer’s assertion. Michael Kidronin his ‘Atlas of War’: “The international military order, a hierarchy of power based on war, the threat of war and the permanent preparation for war, is a way of organizing world affairs & rdquor ;.
Kidron’s analysis is derived from the ecosystem in which NATO was born, where in a very short period of time several episodes related to security in Europethe most important of which was the berlin lugbrug (June 1948), the culmination of a series of disagreements between the Western Allies and Stalin. That moment of maximum tension brought to light the inefficiency of the Western European Union, created in March 1948, and so it led to the signing of the Washington Convention (April 9, 1949), birth of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the result of a previous agreement between Ernest Bevin, Secretary of State, and General George Marshall, Secretary of State.
Both agreed at the time that heThe security of the United Kingdom was inseparable from that of the mainland, and that fundamental doctrine is still valid, with the additional circumstance that in British ideology the relationship between both sides of the Atlantic involves the maintenance of a special link between London and Washington. Perhaps such a working scheme could overturn with the creation of the European Defense Community (27 May 1952), but the French National Assembly did not ratify the founding treaty and the organization never went beyond a failed attempt by Europe to have some degree of military autonomy.
The consolidation of NATO was final from the Korean War (1950-1953), of the arms race that was out of control from the moment the Soviet Union acquired the nuclear weapon and the basis of the Warsaw Pact (14 May 1955), which provided the USSR with a security cushion by creating an interpositional area between its western border and that of NATO, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. For the NATO promoters, it made perfect sense Article 5 of the Treaty -an attack on a member is tantamount to an attack on the organization and requires a joint response-; For the revisionists of the USSR Restriction Doctrine, which was articulated in 1947 by the diplomat George F. Kennan and corrected by himself, uncertainty increased at the same time as the military management of the rivalry between blocs has progressed.
The truth is that none of the major differences of opinion between East and West have degenerated into a situation of open war. From the uprising in Hungary (October 1956) to the intervention of the USSR in Czechoslovakia (August 1968), through the delicate episode of the Soviet missiles in Cuba (October 1962), mechanisms for neutralizing objectively explosive situations have been the worst. A lexicon was imposed according to unwritten rules – balance of terror, mutually assured destruction, peaceful coexistence, escalation – which led to the President Nixon’s trip to Moscow (1974), the first step in a weakened cold war.
That ‘status quo’ was destined to have a long life; it actually did, but less than analysts expected. The vulnerability of the Soviet economy, the technological race undertaken by the United States, the failure of the reforms advocated by Mikhail Gorbachev and the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc, with theto the fall of the Berlin Wall (November 9, 1989) as an unequivocal symptom of the disease that had undermined him, they changed the landscape. The last act of that historical mutation was the downfall of the USSRon December 25, 1991.
While expressions of satisfaction increased in the West, in the new Russia a double sense of frustration and deterioration. The accession to NATO of the former partners of the Warsaw Pact contributed to this, so that, in practice, the Atlantic border reached that of Russia. But it was also not all good news for Western analysts: new phenomena such as global terrorism, asymmetric conflicts and hybrid wars NATO’s prevention and intervention capacity has eroded. During the 1990s, “Russia was emptied of substance and rdquor ;, as the historian Moshe Lewin wrote, but doubts arose in Brussels about how to face new realities.
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Those coming to power from Vladimir Putin (1999) restored the characteristics of NATO at the same speed with which the Russian President did the same with the nationalism lost and Ukraine on the agenda (annexation of Crimea and invasion of Donbass). “From the conservative Solzhenitsyn to the liberal reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, Russian leaders have seen Ukraine as fundamentally linked to Moscow,” political scientist Fareed Zakaria wrote in The Washington Post. the practical translation of such a principle in terms of security ceased to make sense the day the USSR disappeared.The risks are obvious.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com