Some find NATO's gathering in Warsaw ironic on the basis of the fact that NATO is a military structure that was founded against the Warsaw Pact. However, the Cold War world has become a thing of the past, so much so that it can no longer be called an irony. Here, the real irony is that a military alliance, which was founded to prevent a total war and which essentially aimed for "deterrence," knows that a total war will not break out and overlooks a continuous and endless state of war, which has replaced a total war. Today, the continuous state of war persists by nourishing profound sociological problems like the refugee crisis. As such, we need to readdress whether NATO is a deterrent power that can prevent wars and ask some questions accordingly. Certainly, countries like Turkey that suffer the most from terrorism must ask these questions and thoroughly discuss the threats arising from terrorism. Will the NATO Summit be an opportunity for this?
The summit, being held on the days when terrorism is gaining a new dimension and becoming global, only boosts the significance of the summit. Frankly, however, I do not think that NATO will be able to respond to this new situation as a united military force and that NATO members will be able to reach a general agreement on the issue during the summit. This is because the U.S. and the U.K., which have been dominant powers in NATO since it was founded, consider the global terror threat as a new form of war and do not regard the terrorist structures that they control as a threat. Turkey counts DAESH as a terrorist organization and struggles against it in the most efficient way. However, it has difficulty understanding the support provided for the People's Protection Units (YPG), a separatist terrorist organization, in the same region. Contrary to what is believed, structures like the YPG do not fight DAESH, but function to legitimize them and provide mass support for them. In this regard, all terrorist organizations complement each other like two sides of the same coin and they cannot exist without each other. NATO must understand this and acknowledge that global terrorism is an important and permanent threat. Certainly, it is a very important part of the fight against terrorism to follow armament and arms trade more closely.
Today, conventional, chemical and nuclear armament is one of the most effective ways of economic sharing, producing and possessing technology, and controlling markets through these means. Who possesses the produced arms and arms technology is not independent from the states that produce these arms. This arms cycle and trade is also a direct reflection of a new global war on sharing.
When we look at the basic strategies and relevant concepts that NATO has developed since it was founded, we see that they coincide with certain economic and political periods. For instance, the Cold War period (1949-1991) was an era when the U.S. and the Soviet Union made a sharing and maintained it through the Cold War. NATO conducted all kinds of overt and implicit military activities in member states throughout this period. NATO was laying the foundations of a new era in Eastern Europe and the Middle East from 1991 to al-Qaida's 9/11 attacks in the U.S. in 2001. These foundations began faltering in the beginning of the 2000s. The system, which was mainly based on neoliberal arguments, began deadlocking in Europe before the U.S. crisis. The EU's integration with the U.S. and the U.K. could not be ensured despite a monetary union that was raised at the beginning of the 21st century.
The profit falls arising from German industry, which was delayed through the unification with East Germany in 1990, continued to accelerate across Europe until the end of the 1990s. Therefore, Germany turned the Yugoslavian civil war into a Balkan war, making the second largest move following its East Germany operation. However, Germany's "Balkanization" strategy in the Balkans was not only a civil war scenario originating from Continental Europe. For instance, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was a National Security adviser to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, drew a new "Asia-Balkanization" map including Turkey and spanning to China in his book titled "Second Chance." This map starts from Ankara and reaches China's hot spots by including the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa coasts, the entire Caucasus and Russia's immense steppes that have rich energy fields. As is known, this whole region was a new Balkanization area that was declared a "war territory" firstly by George H. W. Bush and then George W. Bush to establish new American hegemony.
Brzezinski proposed the status quo of a new "political stability" on these territories largely by protecting the existing situation without democracy. This was a second chance for the neocons. It was also a chance for Europe, which was in two minds about whether to unite or separate in the post-Cold War period, to form a German and French-led central Europe.
Today, we see that this strategy is over and Turkey has a large part in this, as it did not accept the existing situation and opted for further democracy and welfare.
I think the NATO Lisbon Summit is the history of NATO summits in one. Here, the Euro-Atlantic line was accepted as the reference of stability and the concepts of democracy and common defense, crisis management and cooperative security policies were developed. Rather than a threat of a total conventional war against the Euro-Atlantic line and NATO members, a threat of terrorism and an attack against territorial integrity was brought to the fore. And for this reason, common defense, crisis management and cooperative security institutions were developed.
Considering everything that I have expressed above, we need to ask some questions about the summit. For instance, how the cooperative security institution that NATO developed in the Lisbon Summit and the sharing of crisis management operate for countries like Turkey that are adjacent to perpetual civil war areas and that are directly vulnerable to terrorist organizations. Will NATO take an interest in the move of the "Balkanization" processes that are clearly expressed by Brezezinski to countries through terrorist organizations once again? Or, will NATO consider this to be "insurrections" within the values of the Euro-Atlantic line? I hope the Warsaw Summit will ask these questions and find clear answers to them.
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