NATO’s Purpose Today

Are the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union tight coalitions of democracies, ready to defend their system and way of life?

There are droplets through which you can see the ocean. That is where you can usually see developing cyclones that will devastate continents tomorrow. For that reason, ominous droplets typically do not get media attention and attract an audience glued to Facebook and Twitter. Maybe it’s better this way. Convicts also are not given the time of their execution, to not to deprive them of hope.

One such droplet is Turkey’s ending of the port arrest of a Russian ship carrying grain stolen from Ukraine. I wrote about this arrest a week ago in the hopes that Turkey would fulfill its role as guardian of the Bosporus Strait and NATO member. Now it’s withdrawing from the scene, allowing for much more than a war robbery. This is consent to terrorism given by a state that has a mouthful of anti-terrorist slogans, but only when it comes to fighting Kurds striving for autonomy and survival. This consent to Russian state terrorism is far-fetched and no less important to the Kremlin than the successive offensives in the Donbas.

By blocking the export of Ukrainian grain and stealing it from the occupied territories, Russia will soon cause a famine in Africa and parts of the Middle East. The same purpose will be served by the Russian veto that closes the only humanitarian corridor in the vicinity of the Syrian city of Idlib, where troops fighting the pro-Russian Assad regime have survived. In any given month, millions of desperate people will go to Europe, dying on the way, but still hoping for shelter in Warsaw, Berlin or Paris. In this way, you can wage war more effectively than with tanks and artillery. After all, the ancient plunderers also rushed crowds of prisoners in front of them, seizing their lands behind their backs and collecting loot.

That is why today the nations and governments of the West (after all we are part of it!) are faced with the irrevocable question: Are NATO and the EU a loose tangle of states that once shared their founding values? Or are they tight coalitions of democracies ready to defend their systems and ways of life? Our government will not stutter out such an answer, because it has its own issues. The new government (if Law and Justice loses the election) will be too busy cleaning up after its predecessors. And the question remains before us today; embarrassed silence is the abandonment of everything we had so far for Europe.