These are the states that forbid others, even in the European context, the right to exercise influence in territories that were an integral part of their country for several centuries, such as Serbia with Kosovo and Russia with Ukraine.
The main Western nations were also the perpetrators of the African slave trade, the largest forcible migration of people in human history with estimates of those transported across the Atlantic Ocean ranging from 10-30 million from the 16th to the 19th centuries.
Those involved included, on one or the other sides of the ocean, often on both, Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Denmark and later the United States.
One of the unspoken foundations of the trans-Atlantic community.
Outdated and discredited terms and concepts like the White Man's Burden, Manifest Destiny, a place in the sun, Lebensraum and empires upon which the sun never sets have been abandoned, but the underlying worldview and geopolitical objectives that motivated them have not and instead have been repackaged under new brand names over the past generation.
Western military forces have returned to nations that thought themselves forever rid of the them; for example, British troops are back in Afghanistan, Iraq and Sierra Leone; French ones in Haiti, returning on the bicentennial of its independence from France, and Cote d'Ivoire; American armed forces are back in the Philippines.
Not just a sum total of individual actions by allied Western powers, what has emerged is a systematic and international nexus of planned and coordinated deployments with precise and extensive geostrategic goals.
Notwithstanding the much-publicized difference of opinion concerning the 2003 invasion of Iraq, all 26 NATO states have military personnel assigned to Iraq and neighboring Kuwait under NATO Training Mission - Iraq.
Less than two years after the invasion the Alliance announced that "NATO's goal is to train 1,000 middle- and high-ranking security officers this year" and "the European Union has agreed to train some 700 Iraqi judges, prosecutors and prison guards."
(San Francisco Chronicle, March 21, 2005)
Later in 2005 then US ambassador to NATO Victoria Nuland, former security adviser to now past vice-president Dick Cheney, asserted "We need once and for all to break down the rivalries — some real, some imagined — between the EU and NATO.”
Her comments were characterized by a military website as advocating that "NATO and the European Union (EU) must establish a much deeper dialogue than in the past to address the wide range of military, political, equipment and funding issues that face the trans-Atlantic security community...."
(Defense News, September 23, 2005)
The US's first ambassador to Afghanistan after the invasion of 2001, James Dobbins, who at the time was director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the Rand Corporation, reflected a similar stance in urging that "It is time, therefore, to stop asking what NATO can do for the EU, and begin asking what the EU can do for NATO. And Afghanistan is the place to start. This might best be done in a triangular dialogue between NATO, the EU and the United States."
(International Herald Tribune, September 30, 2005)
To further demonstrate that the EU-NATO-US triangle affects more than just developments on the European continent, a month after Dobbins' comments Julianne Smith, the deputy director for international security programs of the US think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies, at a conference held by the CSIS, rued the fact that:
"“Yes, they confer on the Balkans, but that is not enough. NATO and the EU should be talking about nonproliferation, the Caucasus, Ukraine, Moldova — the whole package.”
(Defense News, October 14, 2005)
Klaus Naumann, former head of NATO’s Military Committee, spoke at the same conference and revealed more than he possibly intended to in bemoaning that "Europe is again being haunted by the ghosts of sovereignty,” meaning that residual love of one's land and people is an impediment to the further consolidation of NATO's and the EU's unchallenged domination in Europe and beyond.
(Ibid)
The following month the EU's Javier Solana, former NATO Secretary General, said that the EU's expanding military buildup and plans for global deployments were "not about replacing NATO" and instead "by becoming a stronger and more capable international actor, we will be a better partner for the United States," citing the Balkans as the original testing ground for this triumvirate, “Through our concerted efforts, with the United States and NATO...."
(Defense News, November 10, 2005)
