Plug!
In “Pulling the Plug on NATO” (March 2024 Chronicles), Prof. Trifkovic writes “NATO went rogue after the collapse of the USSR, and its shaky military alliance.” As an Orthodox Greek, I would argue that NATO went rogue long before the 1990s. Long before NATO proceeded to become an offensive alliance by bombing Serbia and gradually expanding with new members, NATO indulged and supported external acts of aggression such as the Turkish invasions of Cyprus in 1974.
Even before, NATO indulged the ethnic cleansing of the Greek Orthodox population of Constantinople and the islands of Imbros and Tenedos through terror campaigns including pogroms and forcible mass expulsions. Most recently, NATO refused to intervene when Turkish leaders claiming the islands of Greece threatened to invade. NATO member Turkey recently assisted its ally in Azerbaijan to commit genocide against Christian Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh.
These are in fact additional reasons why NATO should be abolished. When NATO itself is not committing itself to offensive wars as in Serbia, Turkey is gradually carrying out acts of aggression and crimes against humanity. Exactly the same thing that NATO pretends to oppose elsewhere.
—Theodore Karakostas
Boston, Mass.
Prof. Trifkovic replies:
While I agree entirely with Mr. Karakostas about the culpability of NATO—the United States government, really—in effectively facilitating and condoning Turkey’s crimes against the Greek remnant in Constantinople and against the Cypriot Greeks, I believe that some distinction should be made between the crimes of commission and the crimes of omission.
A boneheaded Pentagon planner or CIA operative could claim more or less persuasively, in 1955 or in 1974, that Turkey was too important to alienate in the broader context of then-ongoing Cold War and the country’s huge geopolitical significance to the Western alliance.
That position would be both morally bankrupt and operationally flawed, of course, but at least it could make some sense in the context of the time.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, on the other hand, NATO has been engaged in outright criminality, aggression and subterfuge, well documented by Chronicles authors including yours truly.
NATO’s passivity over the final solution of the Greek question in Turkey 70 years ago and NATO’s proactive role in fomenting the war in Ukraine are indicative of a similar mindset, but the magnitude of the crime and its global implications are “objectively” different (hat tip to V. I. Lenin).
One reply on “ON NATO”
NATO should be disbanded, it was formed to provide a united front against possible Soviet expansion-and that is no longer a threat. Russia has no interest in military aggression towards western Europe, they were promoting increased business relationships with European nations for decades after the Iron Curtain fell-the Peace Dividend we all used to hope for was in the process of being realized! But Western Globalist Elites don’t want peace and good relations between former enemies, they want to use the military, commercial and capital power of the Western Nations to promote their vision of a world guided by the West-with them at the top issuing all the Diktats, naturally. Russia and China are not enemies of America and the West-naturally they are foreign nations and our interests will not always coincide, but we need not be in a continual state of war with each other. NATO no longer has a purpose, other than to advance the interests of a bunch of Globalist Elites. Their problem is the world’s citizens are wising-up about the Elites, who they are and what they want. That is why the vast majority of the world’s citizens-including many in the West-support Russia in Ukraine and support China over Taiwan.