Unveiling what it called its new Strategic Concept, the summit also issued a Washington Declaration which inter alia stated "We are charting NATO's course as we enter the 21st century" and "We pledge to improve our defence capabilities to fulfill the full range of the Alliance's 2lst century missions." [3]
Video clips and photographs of the summit at the time revealed what 21st Century NATO was intended to become: With the US's Bill Clinton and Britain's Tony Blair at the center of other world leaders, the flags of nearly fifty nations - nineteen full NATO member states, 25 Partnership for Peace affiliates and others - decked the auditorium. As did the NATO flag, a facsimile of a compass with its four arms pointed to north, south, east and west.
The message could not have been more clear, more irrefutable: A new world organization, an expanded version of a Western military bloc, was replacing that which had emerged from the smoldering ruins of a war that had cost over fifty million human lives.
NATO lost no time and spared no effort in implementing its plans for the new millennium. In addition to its military deployment in Bosnia the bloc continued its occupation of the Serbian province of Kosovo.
In 2001 it inaugurated a military deployment in Macedonia, Operation Allied Harmony, after armed invasions of the nation by an extremist offshoot of the NATO-allied Kosovo Liberation Army based in Kosovo, and later in the year it participated in the American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan where NATO continues its first ground war almost eight years later.
It insinuated itself into the Darfur region of western Sudan in 2005 and thus was simultaneously engaged in operations in three continents in that year.
Or as then State Department Deputy Assistant for European Affairs and later US ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker said of 2005, NATO was "engaged in eight simultaneous operations on four continents." [4]
In the last five years of the 20th Century and the first five of the 21st NATO had evolved from a regional alliance based in Western Europe to a global force contending with the United Nations for the number and geographical range of the missions it was conducting.
That expansion in both extent and essence was not limited to frequently overshadowing and nullifying the role of the UN, but has also been a component in undoing the entire post-World War II order of which the UN was the cornerstone.
Results Of World War II Undone: Inauguration Of Post-Post-Yalta World
In early May of 2005 US President George W. Bush paid what the State Department must have intended as a "freedom crusade" tour to the capitals of two former Soviet republics, Latvia and Georgia.
The choices were deliberately selected to antagonize Russia, which has borders with both, as Latvia has disenfranchised millions of the minority residents of the country who are 40% of the total, especially ethnic Russians and other Slavs (Europe's only "non-citizens"), and has permitted the rehabilitation of Nazi Waffen SS veterans as "defenders of the nation," and Georgia has been a thorn in Russia's side since its formerly US-based head of state Mikheil Saakashvili came to power on the back of the "rose revolution" of late 2003 with the assistance of US governmental and non-governmental funds and direction. That antagonism reached a breaking point last August with the five-day war between Georgia and Russia.
Bush overtly baited Russia in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi with comments like "Before there was a purple revolution in Iraq or an orange revolution in Ukraine or a cedar revolution in Lebanon, there was a rose revolution," [5] "In recent months, the world has marvelled at the hopeful changes taking place from Baghdad to Beirut to Bishkek [Kyrgyzstan]," [6] and that thanks to Georgia, "freedom is advancing to the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and around the world," [7] as an image of his face was projected onto a giant screen in the background.
Earlier in the Latvian capital of Riga Bush delivered a blunt and unprecedented attack on the Yalta Conference of 1945 and its aftermath. The historical meeting of Britain's Winston Churchill, the US's Franklin Roosevelt and the Soviet Union's Josef Stalin in February of that year was denounced by Bush with such characterizations of the summit as constituting one of "the injustices of our history," which "followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact," and that "the legacy of Yalta was finally buried, once and for all" in 1991. [8]
This animus against the post-World War II system that evolved out of the Yalta and later Potsdam conferences remained a recurring motif for Bush, who in his last appearance as US president at a NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania in 2008 denounced "the bitter legacy of Yalta" and to demonstrate what the post-post-Yalta era was intended to be added, "I spoke those words on the soil of a nation on the Baltic. Today, on the soil of a Black Sea nation, I have come to see those words fulfilled. The NATO alliance that meets here this week now stretches from the shores of Klaipeda [Lithuania] to the beaches of Neptun [Romania].
"[O]ur Alliance must also decide how to respond to requests by Georgia and Ukraine to participate in NATO's Membership Action Plan. These two nations inspired the world with their Rose and Orange revolutions....
"As NATO allies fight...in Iraq and Afghanistan, our Alliance is taking on other important missions across the world. In the Mediterranean, NATO forces are patrolling the high seas...as part of Operation Active Endeavor. In Kosovo, NATO forces are providing security and helping a new democracy take root in the Balkans....NATO is no longer a static alliance....It is now an expeditionary alliance that is sending its forces across the world...." [9]
To understand the nature of this abiding, visceral, monomaniacal hostility toward what with a comparable degree of venom Zbigniew Brzezinski for years has contemptuously derided as the post-Yalta world, excerpts from a column by Indian journalist Siddharth Varadarajan immediately after Bush's Riga speech of 2005 are quoted below.
"[Bush's] attack on Yalta shows the U.S. is not interested in cooperative security.
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