NATO STRUCK SPAIN, PORTUGAL AND GREECE

Alliance will deprive economically unwell Southern European countries of their usual sources of incomes

Alliance attempt to “lose weigh” will strike those NATO members, which are better left well enough alone. Crisis-stricken European countries will lose the incomes from deployment of command centers at its territories. Preliminary negotiations inside of NATO brought no wishful solution and were characterized by the Western media as a “family quarrel because of money”.

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When Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen was elected the NATO Secretary General after lengthy discussions two years ago, almost nobody paid attention to one thing he said during one of his first speeches — that from now then NATO was to adjust its plans with the financial abilities.

He made first actual steps towards realization of his thesis in November of 2010, when he presented his concept of NATO command staff cutback at the Lisbon Summit of the North-Atlantic Union. Economy became an integral part of the new strategic doctrine of NATO, which substituted the document adopted in 1999 that has been effective until recently. New concept stipulated the reform of Alliance command structure via reduction of command centers’ number from 11 to 6, and its staff cutback from 12 to 8.95 thousand people. Now the time to bring Lisbon decision to life has come. Rasmussen offers to get rid of the following NATO structural units:

— Two command centers in Lisbon;

— NATO Corps command in Spain;

— Command center in Naples;

— Radar base in Greece;

— Infantry command in Germany (Heidelberg).

The decision is to be made at the meeting of Defense Ministers of NATO state-members during the business-dinner in Brussels. However, judging by the number of discords, dinner time was not enough to reach consensus upon the issue that affects the interests of all NATO members. Portugal, Italy, Spain and Greece expressed the utmost displeasure with the forthcoming cutback. It was caused by the prospect to employ the “dismissed” officers within their own armed forces — which is fraught with extra spending — rather than worries concerning the state security. Besides, crisis-stricken European countries will lose the incomes from deployment of command centers at its territories. NATO servicemen with their substantial salaries are willingly spending this money in the places of their stationing. Incomes of restaurants, cafes, hotels and shops located there grow by leaps and bounds and condition the temporary blossom of the utmost unremarkable towns.

While presenting his cutbacks, Rasmussen himself used to say that goal of the reform is to “make NATO losing weight, getting rid of fat, yet retaining the muscles”. Insufficient funding made its contributions to the scheduled change of NATO role in Afghanistan since 2014, where the Alliance is going to pass its authority to Karzai. Simple calculations allows us to draw a conclusion that it’s much easier to maintain the low-paid Afghani armed forces — even taking the extraordinary level of corruption into consideration — rather than deploying NATO armed forces in that country. Preliminary negotiations inside of NATO brought no wishful solution and were characterized by the Western media as a “family quarrel because of money”.

During the two-day-long negotiations of NATO Defense Ministers, fallen-out members of NATO family seemingly failed to make peace with each other. Moreover, when the participants stood up with the concluding statements at the press-conference, this subject was either avoided at all, or mentioned in the passing. Secretary General A. F. Rasmussen has laid special stress upon the NATO operation in Libya, counteraction to cyber-attacks and creation of BMD systems in his speech at the end of the meeting.

Commemorative picture

Results of the NATO-Russia meeting made up a separate line in the resumes of the event. It was stated that creation of a joint anti-missile defense is impossible and that was quite expected.

As for “losing weight”, common public was never informed of all the details. It seems that the members of NATO family somehow interpret the term “fat” differently.