NATO and American officials were equally unequivocal on the deployment of global interceptor missile facilities in Europe and beyond. NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said "Clearly, the development of a common Missile Defence capability will be more efficient and more cost effective if it is developed in common." [6]
More specifically, he said that "missile defense has become a strategic imperative. To my mind, missile defense makes the most sense in an Alliance context. That way, you get forward-based sensors and infrastructure. Allied defense systems can fill the gaps in the US system's coverage." [7]
Daalder linked that project with NATO's Article 5:
In his words, it is necessary "to make territorial missile defense a mission of this alliance, a mission to defend against a new kind of armed attack, that which arrives on ballistic missiles, whether these weapons come from Iran and hit Western Europe or North Korea and towards North America. In both instances, they would be a responsibility for Article 5 to be dealt with."
Specifically mentioning the "120-some-thousand troops" from fifty nations serving under NATO command in Afghanistan and ongoing NATO naval operations in the Gulf of Aden and the Horn of Africa, he added: "Those are the kinds of operations that we are engaged in, that we are likely to continue to engage in, some of which will follow under Article 5. A defense against ballistic missile attack even those of ballistic missiles come from very far if they attack NATO territory would be an Article 5 contingency."
Daalder came to his current post as U.S. ambassador to NATO from being Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and before that director for European Affairs on the National Security Council from 1995-1996, where he was responsible for the Clinton administration's Bosnia policy.
He was an avid supporter of and advocate for the wars against Yugoslavia in 1999 - co-authoring a 2000 book titled Winning Ugly: NATO's War to Save Kosovo - against Iraq in 2003 and against Afghanistan from 2001 to the present.
In his years at Brookings he co-authored a number of articles with James Goldgeier, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, including a 2006 piece called "For global security, expand the alliance" which stated "since the challenges NATO faces are global, its membership should be as well."
The authors added "NATO must become larger and more global by admitting any democratic state that is willing and able to contribute to the fulfillment of the alliance's new responsibilities.
"NATO's ability to bring together countries with similar values and interests to combat global problems is constrained by the exclusively trans-Atlantic character of its membership. Other democratic countries share NATO's values and many common interests - including Australia, Brazil, Japan, India, New Zealand, South Africa and South Korea - and all of them can greatly contribute to NATO's efforts by providing additional military forces or logistical support to respond to global threats and needs." [8]
In the same year Daalder and Goldgeier wrote an article for Foreign Affairs, the publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, entitled "Global NATO." In contents included the contention that "the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has gone global" and that its alleged "forward defense often requires a global military reach." [9]
The new Strategic Concept, in addition to codifying a 21st century and expeditionary NATO (the terms are those of Alliance officials and advocates), will fully launch global NATO, the world's first international military axis.
The project promoted by Daalder and his colleagues since the early 1990s is to be brought to fruition. He was given his post last year to assist in achieving that objective.
In the tendentious journalism he practiced in the pages of major U.S. dailies and journals while senior fellow at the Brookings Institution from 1998-2009 Daalder frequently criticized the ineffectiveness of the United Nations, and his program for a global NATO - his exact term, recall - is meant not to supplement but to supplant the UN. [10]
Madeleine Albright, who delivered the opening and closing remarks at the February 23 Strategic Concept seminar, has similarly derogated the role of the UN; she who was U.S. ambassador to the organization from 1993 to 1997 when she led the successful effort to depose UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1997 after conspiring behind his back with Kofi Annan to obtain UN authorization for NATO's bombing of Bosnian Serb positions in August and September of 1995. (The following month Annan was appointed UN special envoy to NATO.)
In speaking of "our vision for a revitalized Alliance for the 21st century," Hillary Clinton celebrated Albright's efforts throughout the post-Cold War period in her address in Washington on February 22: "She helped bring some of the countries represented here tonight into NATO in the late 1990s an effort that many questioned at the time but which I believe has proven to be a major success. She played a central role in developing NATO's last Strategic Concept eleven years ago."
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
