The Outcome Of The Inauguration Of The New NATO Headquarters: A Further Alienation Of Russia In The Search Of World Peace

“You can use war to break your adversaries but it would not leave you where you will be pleased”- Niccolo Machiavelli.

The US President Donald Trump together with some major European leaders converged in Brussels on the 25th of May 2017 to open a magnificent edifice as the new headquarters for their military alliance – NATO.

Inside that new building stands two important artifacts which marks an epoch in the history of the world: a portion of the Berlin Wall and a metallic piece taken from the World Trade Centre.

NATO stands for North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. The treaty to establish it was signed in 1949 in Belgium with the membership of 28 states. With the accession of Montenegro, its membership would swell to 29. Its objective principally was to deal with Soviet aggression. The treaty commits the members to treat an attack on of them as an attack on all of them and for all to assist the country attacked by such actions as deemed necessary. Troops are contributed from the member countries. On the other hand, the Soviet Union in 1955 moved to create the Warsaw Pact as a response to that of the West forming NATO. At the signing of the treaty to establish the Warsaw Pact were Albania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland Romania and the USSR. The bloc also had a political purpose of installing communism in other parts of the world.

Taking some steps back to examine the significance of the two relics in the new NATO headquarters, the Berlin Wall denotes the end of the Cold War and a thaw in tensions between the West( US and its allies) and the East( Soviet Union and allies). Also, the portion of the World Trade Centre which is one of the epicenters of the September the 11th attacks on the USA on display signifies a new threat to global peace- terrorism. The latter threat requires cooperation and collaboration from all states in the world to effectively combat.

The paradox is that NATO has formally applied to join the war in Syria, an action that many scholars have pointed out that it is an attempt to rally a some what multinational force to oppose Russia in the fight against ISIL and the Assad government. The US’s unilateralism is becoming problematic in the world stage hence the need to take an obscure strategy.

Many political science scholars and security analysts have all argued that with the coming to an end of the Cold War, inter-state warfare are over because the ideological differences which are the sources of conflicts no longer exists. That cultural communities are now replacing Cold War blocs and that the faultlines between civilizations are the central lines of conflict in global politics. Furthermore, they warned that terrorism which has now assumed global reach should be the headache of the global community. They contended that the world population should learn to co-exist by respecting and honouring the civilization of others. “… the need for people everywhere to learn to co-exist in a complex, multipolar, multicivilisational world” (Huntington, 1996).

Islamic civilization often referred to as challenger civilization to Western civilization(one built on the values of the Papacy), is struggling for recognition and to attain this in a world so dominated by US hegemony and unilateralism, they found solace in “politics of other means” or “the weapon of the weak”(terrorism).

Besides, if the warnings given by the scholars are anything to by, then NATO must embrace Russia in the fight against terrorist organizations and the search for world peace. It is time the USA and its allies trade off their Cold War soldier uniforms that it had found so hard to shed after 1991. In addition, the West need to be told that standing against the forces of communism is different from standing against the forces of terrorism. Furthermore, the global population must avoid the negative effects of crash of civilisations. World leaders must co-operate and to maintain multicivilisational character of world politics rather than the imposition of one culture on the rest of the world. The Cold War mentality of the West to further alienate and contain Russia, a super power would always prove counter productive in the collective fight against global terrorism. The latter should not be perceived as a pariah and a misfit state in the conduct of international politics by the West.

Felix Ahadzi
Police Public Relations Department
Koforidua
f [email protected]