NATO’s seventh anniversary decorates the highway ‘Trump and Stoltenberg meet’
London … News Time
The meeting of the member states is underway in the British capital London, 70 years after the establishment of the Western Defense Alliance NATO. The NATO summit begins with a ceremony at the British Imperial Palace Buckingham Palace on Tuesday, after which the session was also held at 10 Downing Street. On this occasion London’s highways were decorated with flags of member states. Other meeting and mentor engagements will begin on Wednesday. About 50 important decisions will be made at a 3-hour-long meeting at Golf Resort, north of London. Individual meetings of several partner leaders are also underway at the meeting. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and US President Donald Trump met during the meeting. Meanwhile, Trump called French President Emmanuel Macron’s statement on NATO’s death a tragic one, calling it abusive. However, he rejected criticism of Turkey and called it a good member of NATO. “We have good relations with Turkey,” he said. We stayed on the Syrian border for a long time, but now we have evacuated ourselves from those borders. Turkey has been a great help in the fight against Baghdadi, the terrorist organization of ISIS. There was no better help and no more could be done.
At a meeting in London on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of NATO, the warmth may be lower than the expectations of the people involved in the alliance, but it is hoped that this will not be the last anniversary of the organization. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed in 1949 as a political and military alliance in the early stages of the Cold War to jointly defend its member states. The 29-member US-led coalition is meeting in London on Tuesday and Wednesday, and even though its supporters call it the most successful military alliance in history, questions remain about its future. Do we still need this unity in the changing world after 70 years with fundamentally different priorities? In recent times, coordination among NATO member states has been minimal. This organization or other member states have been criticized by the United States, France and Turkey. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed as a result of World War II by 10 European countries, in addition to the United States and Canada. The main purpose of this alliance was to deal with the then Soviet Union. After emergence as a conqueror of the war, a large number of Soviet troops remained in Eastern Europe, and Moscow gained considerable influence in many countries, including East Germany.
The German capital, Berlin, was occupied by World War II victorious forces, and in the middle of 1948 Soviet leader Joseph Stalin began the blockade of West Berlin, which was then jointly under US, British and French control. Confrontation was successfully avoided in the city, but the crisis had sparked the formation of an alliance to counter Soviet power. And in 1949 the United States and 11 other countries (Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Norway, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal, Iceland and Luxembourg) formed a political and military alliance. Greece and Turkey were annexed in 1952, while West Germany joined the alliance in 1955. Since 1999, it has also welcomed the countries of the former Eastern Bloc and the total number of its members has grown to 29. Montenegro was the last country to be a part of it in 2017. The goal of NATO’s establishment is to protect the independence, shared heritage and civilization of its member states by promoting stability and well-being in the North Atlantic region. The NATO Treaty proves that an armed attack against a member of a NATO country will be considered an attack against all of them, and that they will help each other. In practice, the Alliance ensures that the security of European Member States is not separate from the security of North American member states. The organization saw the Soviet Union and Communism as the greatest threat to its security. But since its creation, NATO’s borders have grown closer to 1000km in Moscow, and now the organization counts its members as members of the former Soviet Union after the revolutions in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.
Now, if there is no Soviet Union, then why does NATO exist? Today, under NATO command, there are approximately 17,000 troops in Afghanistan as a mission to train, guide and assist the Afghan security forces. The end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union did not mean that the West had stopped thinking about Moscow. In 2003, Jamie Patrick Shea, a top NATO official, said in his famous speech that nobody was convinced that the sudden collapse of communism would make the world a paradise, creating a golden age in which the Allies can survive without armed forces, or survive without defense. There is also the fact that Russia remained militarily powerful and the war returned to Europe in the 1990s with the collapse of Yugoslavia. Subsequent conflicts saw NATO change its role to an interventionist organization: military operations included aerial operations against Bosnia and Serbian forces in Kosovo, as well as naval blockade and peacekeeping. In 2001, NATO conducted its operations outside Europe for the first time: it took over the United States-approved Allied Strategic Command after the September 11 attacks. In 2016, when he was still the presidential candidate, he called NATO a deputy, saying that if that organization was broken he would have no problem. Trump also hinted that the United States could even leave the organization to pledge to defend allied members in the event of an attack. He also complained that Washington was spending more money on defense than other NATO member states. He tweeted in September 2018 that the United States was spending more on NATO than any other country. This is not appropriate nor is it acceptable. And perhaps their point of view is correct because the US pays about 70% of total spending on defense of all NATO member states 2018 (according to statistics). And though in 2014, all NATO members agreed to increase their defense spending by 2 percent of GDP by 2024. However, so far only a few member countries have done so.
The NATO summit is taking place in London a week before the UK general election, with results uncertain about the outcome. The UK has not yet made a decision on the terms of separation from the European Union. A bitter Brexit could create disagreements in the NATO alliance, which currently has 22 of the 28 EU countries. Currently, only the United States of the NATO countries spends more on defense than the UK. Former NATO deputy secretary general Alexander Vershbow told NPR radio earlier this year that while we are facing an aggressive Russia, we need NATO for its core mission of collective defense and instability. So I think (in NATO) it’s been at least decades and maybe 70 more years. It is also important that despite the criticism of Trump, the US Congress voted in favor of legislation last January to prevent the country from leaving NATO. It was strongly supported by both the Democrat and Republican parties, with 357 votes in favor and only 22 against it. At the meeting on the occasion of NATO’s 70th anniversary, the warmth may be lower than the expectations of those involved in the alliance, but it is hoped that this will not be the organization’s last anniversary.
