Pretending to have achieved some kind of victory in Afghanistan, President Obama and the NATO leaders have pushed ahead on the globalist agenda to transform NATO more fully into the global military arm of the United Nations.
“We’re now unified behind a plan to responsibly wind down the war in Afghanistan,” declared President Obama, at the conclusion of the May 20-21 NATO Summit in Chicago.
But don’t pop the champagne corks just yet; America’s longest war, now over a decade in duration, is not ending any time soon. What does “responsibly wind down the war” mean? According to President Obama and the other NATO leaders, it means NATO “combat troops” will have left Afghanistan by the end of 2014. Which is another way of spinning the grim fact that they intend to keep NATO forces (primarily U.S. forces) fighting in Afghanistan for another two-and-a-half years. And after 2014, an unspecified number of NATO/US forces will remain for “training” purposes for an indefinite period.
The Afghanistan War, which has already cost half a trillion dollars (and over 12,000 American casualties), has succeeded in establishing Hamid Karzai and his clan in a ruling regime that is universally recognized as thoroughly corrupt and anti-American. It is also a regime without popular support that is sure to collapse after our withdrawal — if not before. And when the country breaks down into a bloody civil war? Well, in order to prevent that, President Obama says someone must come up with $4.1 billion per year to finance the equipping and training of the Afghan army and police force.
The Washington Post reported:
The United States spent $12 billion last year, 95 percent of the total cost, to train and equip an Afghan army and police force that is expected to total 352,000 by this fall. With a gross domestic product of about $17 billion, Afghanistan is incapable of funding a force that size.
As it looks for a way to cut future costs and assumes an eventual political solution to the war among the Afghans themselves, the administration has projected that Afghanistan’s security needs could be met even if the force were cut by up to one-third. It estimates the cost of sustaining the reduced force at about $4.1 billion a year, half of which the United States would provide. Afghanistan would pay about $500,000.
President Obama, always generous with the taxpayers’ money, offered to cover half the costs of the “transition.” However, the other NATO partners failed to put any money on the table at Chicago. France said it was pulling its troops out.
NATO, impressive on paper, with its 28 member states and an additional 22 countries in its Partnership for Peace, is totally dependent on U.S. funding and U.S. military equipment and manpower. America’s foreign policy elites, as exemplified most especially by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), have been laboring for decades to empower the United Nations with its own global military, one that could carry out UN mandates without having to seek ad hoc military coalitions from often-reluctant member states. For the past two decades, NATO has increasingly filled this role: in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf of Aden, Libya.
The one-worlders at the CFR want to go further. Anne-Marie Slaughter is a professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and a former director of policy planning in the Obama/Clinton State Department (2009-2011). Besides being a member of the CFR, she has served on its board of directors. She is one of the big guns in the CFR opinion cartel and can be counted on to push relentlessly for treaties and arrangements that will ever erode American sovereignty and increasingly subject the United States to “international law” and international institutions. In her syndicated column of May 19 (timed for the opening of the NATO Summit the next day) entitled, “Globalizing NATO,” Professor Slaughter signified that the globalist dream to arm the UN with its own military is still alive, and NATO is the vehicle to achieve it. She declared:
Even skeptics of NATO expansion and operations like the intervention in Libya now recognize that joint operations by member countries, operating under a UN mandate and in conjunction with regional partners, is likely to be a model for the future. As General Brent Scowcroft, National Security Adviser for President George H.W. Bush, observed recently, the UN Charter originally envisioned a standing military force to enforce Security Council resolutions – a vision that the NATO partner model might ultimately realize.
On May 22, Charles A. Kupchan, the CFR’s Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow (and a Professor of International Relations at Georgetown University) wrote in his blog on the CFR web site that:
NATO’s Chicago summit went more or less according to plan. The allies agreed upon a timetable and strategy for winding down the war in Afghanistan…. And the presence at the summit of more than thirty non-NATO leaders advanced the alliance’s commitment to developing new partnerships and deepening its global engagement.
Prof. Kupchan did not expound in detail in his blog about the referenced “new partnerships” and “deepening global engagement.” However, in his recent testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for its hearing on “NATO: Chicago and Beyond,” he asserted that “NATO should intensify and expand the numerous programs it already maintains” and initiate new ones. Here are some of the details he provided at the hearing:
Some of the most important security institutions of the 21st century are likely to be regional ones – such as the Gulf Cooperation Council, the African Union, the Association of Southeast Asia States, and the Union of South American Nations. NATO should be investing in the efficacy of these regional bodies.
In pursuit of this objective, NATO should intensify and expand the numerous programs it already maintains to advance these goals, including:
• Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council and Partnership for Peace: engages 22 European partner countries in multilateral and bilateral relations with NATO.
• Mediterranean Dialogue: engages Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia in NATO activities.
• Istanbul Cooperation Initiative: provides training and exchanges with Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates.
• NATO Partners: engages non-NATO members in NATO operations, including Australia, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Mongolia.
• Support for African Union: provides NATO assistance to the AU mission in Somalia and to AU peacekeeping capacity.
• Training Mission in Iraq (2004-2011): trained Iraq’s armed forces.
In similar vein, CFR Fellow James M. Goldgeier authored a Special Report for the Council in 2010 entitled, The Future of NATO (a pdf of the report can be downloaded here).
Goldgeier, who is Dean of the School of International Service at American University, regularly writes columns favoring greater empowerment of NATO and the United Nations. He has teamed up in the past with Ivo Daalder (CFR) to co-author some of these columns. Mr. Daalder now, of course, is President Obama’s U.S. Permanent Representative on the Council of NATO, a position more commonly referred to as our “NATO Ambassador.” Before assuming this post, Daalder was on the staff of Bill Clinton’s National Security Council and served as an International Affairs Fellow at the CFR.
The internationalists at the Council on Foreign Relations have been pushing for providing NATO with its own independent, permanent military assets, so that national politicians responding to war-weary voters will not be able to stifle the globalist agenda. That has been partially achieved with adoption at the Chicago summit of the “smart defense” advocated by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
CFR globalists like Slaughter, Scowcroft, Kupchan, Daalder and Goldgeier are deliriously happy that NATO has gone “out of area,” that is, that it no longer restricts itself to the North Atlantic (European) area it was formed, ostensibly, to protect against Soviet aggression. This is part of NATO’s “evolution,” of “reinventing itself,” of “finding a new purpose.” So where does this evolution end? Where does it take us?
Elmo Roper (CFR) explicitly spelled out the globalist vision in a 1960 speech to the Atlantic Union Committee entitled “The Goal is Government of All the World,” which was subsequently published as a pamphlet under the same title. Roper, who was then treasurer of the AUC, declared:
But the Atlantic Pact (NATO) need not be our last effort toward greater unity. It can be converted into one more sound and important step working toward world peace. It can be one of the most positive moves in the direction of One World.
Roper continued:
For it becomes clear that the first step toward world government cannot be completed until we have advanced on the four fronts: the economic, the military, the political, and the social.
Few of the one-worlders speak as candidly as Mr. Roper did in that speech. Vice President Joe Biden, however, comes close, vigorously championing the transformation of NATO’s armed might into the operational arm of the United Nations. During the Senate confirmation hearing for Warren Christopher (CFR), the nominee of President Bill Clinton (CFR) for Secretary of State, on January 13, 1993, then-Senator Biden stated:
[O]rganizing for collective security — means strengthening the U.N. by assigning to the Security Council certain predesignated
military forces and facilities: a conception unanimously endorsed by this committee last October. It also means converting NATO into a military instrument for peacekeeping, and peacemaking, under U.N. or CSCE auspices. (Emphasis added.)
Sen. Biden went on to invoke Woodrow Wilson and to endorse Wilson’s radical vision of “world order” under a League of Nations with its own global army and navy. Said Biden:
Collective security, a multinational commitment to repel aggression and defend the peace, was the central precept of Woodrow Wilson’s vision. Wilson recognized it as a principle so essential to world order that he would not yield it in the fight over the ratification of the Versailles Treaty. It is the principle that the Senate finally accepted in 1949 with the advent of NATO, though it took the carnage of the Second World War to prove Wilson right. And it is that principle we must now extend, by empowering the U.N. and transforming the Atlantic alliance.
Finally, Sen. Biden called for a Wilsonian “new world order” with “sweeping, visionary change”:
Today we stand at the threshold of this new world order. I believe the people and governments, in growing numbers worldwide, recognize what needs to be done. And I believe the American people are prepared to see the United States take the lead in engineering sweeping, visionary change.
As a Senator and as Vice President, Joe Biden has helped propel that “sweeping, visionary change” forward. He was visibly elated when NATO went “out of area” to effect regime change in Libya. “NATO got it right,” he declared. “In this case, America spent $2 billion and didn’t lose a single life. This is more the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has in the past.”
This “prescription” which he enthusiastically endorses (along with President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and much of the political establishment) is a prescription for endless illegal wars, fought without the constitutionally required declaration of war by Congress, that would drain America of her blood, treasure, and her liberty.
Related articles:
NATO Chicago Summit: Protests, Bomb Plots … And Expanded NATO Missions
Chicago Prepares for NATO Summit
NATO Summit in Chicago: Putin, Afghanistan, and Convergence
New NATO Chief Outlines Priorities
