DISINFO: NATO wants return to Cold War conditions
SUMMARY
NATO wants the conditions of the Cold War back. NATO has doubled its power within six years not far from Russia’s borders. The North Atlantic Alliance wants the conditions of the Cold War back: military facilities in Eastern Europe are being strengthened, missile defence facilities are being expanded. The NATO group in the Baltic States will certainly not diminish. This kind of cooperation with the USA is too convenient for the rulers in the Baltic states. It demonstrates to voters that efforts are being made to counter the ‘threat from Russia’, thereby concealing all other issues such as the miserable economic development, the under-utilised Baltic ports, the resentment of the Russian-speaking minorities.
RESPONSE
Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative, portraying NATO as having a belligerent agenda against Russia and claiming that the “Russian threat” is a false idea. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has introduced sweeping changes to its membership and working practices – changes made clear by its adoption of new Strategic Concepts in 1999 and 2010. Accusations that NATO has retained its Cold War purpose ignore the reality of those changes. Over the same period, NATO reached out to Russia with a series of partnership initiatives, culminating in the foundation of the NATO-Russia Council in 2002. No other country outside the Alliance has such a privileged relationship with NATO. As reaffirmed by NATO leaders at the Brussels Summit in July 2018, "NATO does not seek confrontation and poses no threat to Russia." This is NATO's official policy, defined and expressed transparently by its highest level of leadership. As an organisation which is accountable to its member nations, NATO is bound to implement this policy. Moreover, Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and destabilisation of Eastern Ukraine in early 2014 was widely viewed both in North America and in Europe as violating the basic rules of the post-Cold War European order, especially the rule that borders are inviolable and the states should not use force to alter them or take territory from other states. As a result of Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine, many Western states have critically reassessed their “strategic partnership” policies towards Russia and began to view Russia as a serious challenge to the European security order. Josep Borrell writes:
We live in a world where interdependence is becoming more and more conflictual, in particular with the growing strategic rivalry between the US and China. We also see a broader trend towards competition between countries and systems, especially with some of our neighbours such as Russia and Turkey who seem to want to return to a logic of empires.
In 2014, NATO leaders at the Wales Summit adopted the Readiness Action Plan, a comprehensive package of enhanced collective defence and deterrent measures designed to ensure the transatlantic alliance could respond swiftly and firmly to changes in its security environment. Read similar disinfo cases alleging that the idea that Russia is a threat to Europe exists only in the minds of Cold War nostalgics and that NATO is an ineffective relic of the Cold War.