I am asking all the people who live in a NATO country:
what exactly is the NATO?
When I was very little, at school, I thought the NATO was a great organization meant to spread peace and to solve the international controversies through diplomacy and political support.
I thought the NATO was synonym with values, with principles of decency, honesty, equality, freedom, solidarity and cooperation.
But when I became an adult, I started feeling nausea, every time I used to think of NATO. Nausea and fear.
Now I feel like vomiting.
Because the NATO has turned out to be a warmongering organization meant to make the ongoing conflicts escalate... and to turn all conflicts into economic operations.
So ...I was wrong when I was little
I thought the NATO was synonym with peace and peacekeeping. Now I know that NATO is synonym with Military-Industrial Complex, with Industries producing Warfare and with Warmongers.
NATO was a product of the Cold War, which came about after WW2. Despite being allies during WW2, there was still a great deal of antagonism and mistrust between the USSR and the Western Allies. That came about largely because the Western powers were capitalist, and the idea of a socialist state where people were treated equally was offensive to capitalists.
They were also deathly afraid that such ideas could spread among their own workers, so the Western governments embarked on a policy of containing the primary socialist state at the time (the USSR), as well as pushing the Red Scare dogma among the masses. (An early example was the Palmer Raids during the Wilson Administration, led by a young government attorney named J. Edgar Hoover.)
Of course, the same anti-socialist fear was evident in Europe, as exemplified by the growth of fascism and right-wing dictatorships forming throughout Europe during the 1920s and 30s. They were pretty much against the Bolsheviks from the very beginning, back in 1917, even before Stalin's rise to power, before the purges, before even the slightest hint of "Soviet expansionism" ever came about. The West even sent interventionist forces to fight against the Reds in the Russian Civil War, before any legitimate pretext for being anti-socialist was even in place yet. Moreover, Russia was hardly any kind of military threat at that point, since they were forced to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and were in a devastated, weakened state - crippled and unable to do much of anything.
The West's fear of socialism is, and always been from the start, purely ideological. So, because the West chose to hate them for no good reason, the Soviets began to develop a fear and strong dislike for the West. It's only natural. This was long before Stalin even came on the scene. Stalin's rise could be seen as a consequence of that fear of the West, as people tend to gravitate towards whom they see as a strong leader when there is great fear (however it doesn't mitigate or excuse any of Stalin's crimes).
The Second World War was, without a doubt, a great gamechanger and watershed event in history. While the West tends to view both the Nazis and Soviets as equally repugnant and evil (although there are multiple variations on this viewpoint), they sided with and cooperated with Stalin in order to defeat Hitler. Stalin was ostensibly seen as the lesser of two evils at the time, so the West chose to side with the USSR against Germany. And the USSR was certainly glad to receive the help and support of the West. Churchill, FDR, and Stalin agreed on a cooperative relationship, along with coordinated military strategies.
But the original mistrust was still there. Between the US and Britain, we cooperated very closely with each other - very friendly and almost "family" like relationship. But with the Soviets, it was different. Friendly on the surface, but still the underlying mistrust and suspicion were there.
The main concern the Soviets had, especially as the war was drawing to a close and Allied victory was in sight, was what to do about Germany. That was the key sticky point, even among the Western Allied governments. The Russians and the French wanted Germany to be totally dismantled, stripped of industry and technology so that it would be virtually impossible for them to make war ever again. Essentially, turning Germany into a giant goat pasture. The British and Americans considered this, but opted instead to rebuild the western part of Germany under their occupation. This infuriated the Soviets, as they believed that the Western Allies were going to rebuild and rearm the Germans to use them to fight against the Russians again. They also thought the Western Allies were being "too soft" on the German Nazis. Patton's refusal to de-Nazify and his statement that "we fought the wrong enemy" probably would not have set well with the Russians.
So, with anti-Soviet paranoia running rampant in the West (launching the political career of not just Joe McCarthy, but also Richard Nixon), along with J. Edgar Hoover in charge of the FBI, which had become almost a semi-independent agency at that point, the US attitude towards the USSR was one of deep suspicion and fear. The National Security Acts and the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency also came about due to this Red Scare mentality at work. For their part, the Soviets were equally paranoid under Stalin. They, too, were very suspicious and fearful of the West, so they ostensibly felt it necessary to install Soviet-friendly governments in the countries they were already occupying. (As I recall, Greece and Italy did not fall automatically into the Western fold, so there were concerns that they might turn communist, but the US was able to prevent that.) Another notable anomaly was Yugoslavia, which was communist but not pro-Soviet. Albania was another story altogether.
But in any case, the battle lines had been drawn in Europe, with the formation of NATO and the Warsaw Pact soon after. This was considered "Ground Zero" in the event of all-out conflict between East and West. But most of the actual fighting took place elsewhere, in far-flung locales such as Korea and Vietnam. Africa, Latin America, and especially the Middle East also became "fronts" in the Cold War, which carried a strong ideological pretext, not a nationalistic one. China was also a complicating third element, as they started off as a Soviet ally when they turned communist, but their relationship deteriorated in the years to follow to the point where they became enemies.
NATO was useful, functional entity within that framework, as were its sister organizations, CENTO and SEATO (which are now defunct). Together, they formed the operational implementation of the US policy of containment, which the Soviets saw as "encirclement" by the West, which they saw as an attempt to bottle up and isolate them from the rest of the world.
NATO and the West always held the upper hand. The Soviet Bloc was in a far weaker and more disadvantaged position, with the West keeping the pressure on incessantly, along with the Sino-Soviet schism that the West was able to turn to their advantage. Their fear of the Chinese actually started to overshadow their fears of the West, who may not have seemed all that bad anymore.
I don't think they ever actually "surrendered" to the West or that the West "won" the Cold War. The Russians themselves just decided to relent on their own volition, as Gorbachev seemed more willing to work with the West and appeared more reasonable than any of his predecessors. After 40 years, it didn't appear that either side was going to attack the other, so there wasn't really any real point in maintaining large military forces on both sides. In a sense, it demonstrated that, whatever paranoid or fearful or xenophobic attitudes they might have carried towards the West, those had dissipated to a great degree. When I was there, I saw that they loved American rock music, American blue jeans, and all kinds of other things about the West they admired and idolized.
The Warsaw Pact disbanded, and the countries previously occupied by the Soviets had elected new democratic governments which were pro-Western and quite resentful of the Soviet Union's long-term occupation of their countries and turning them into vassal states. So, even as the Russians were demonstrating that they were no longer fearful of the West and made numerous peaceful gestures, the West still seemed to not trust them and kept them somewhat at bay. The West did not disband NATO, but instead expanded it, and therein lay part of the problem and planted the seeds for further dissension.
A key event which probably soured the Russians' view of America was back in 1999, when the US bombed Belgrade. It's probably something that most Americans have forgotten about, but it's something that didn't set well with them. Likewise, our incursions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan probably did not warm us to the Russians' hearts or make us appear like the "good guys" we purport to be. We have troops and bases in over 80 countries across the world, so when a country as powerful as ours, with such a tremendous global reach, feels threatened by something, it does make one wonder about the state of the world and our role in it.
So, as it stands, we still have NATO in place, along with similar agreements with our Allies in other parts of the world. The Pacific Rim has been getting a great deal of attention these days, as worries about China persist. Japan has wanted to bolster its alliance with the US, and South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia are also strong allies of the U.S. I've heard talk of a Pacific version of NATO, or perhaps they could just rename NATO to remove the "North Atlantic" portion of it and make it a world-wide organization. They do much more than simply patrol the North Atlantic.
Of course, the result has been to drive the Russians and the Chinese into each other's arms. India seems to be a wild card, although they've generally tried to stay out of any East-West disputes. The Middle East and Africa, and possibly Latin America, could find themselves as Cold War pawns again, if they're not already.
I don't know what the future holds in all of this, whether we're locked in an eternal war between Oceania, Eastasia, and Eurasia - or what it might be. In a few months, we'll get to decide who the "Big Brother" for our side gets to be. Ugh.
