NATO troops deployment plan grandstanding: Commentator

Press TV has conducted an interview with Joaquin Flores, a member of the Center for Syncretic Studies, in Belgrade, to discuss a NATO plan, over which Germany has expressed reservations, to increase troops near Russian borders.

Press TV: It is interesting, isn’t it? We are seeing this gap coming out between Germany and the US over this issue.

Flores: You know it certainly is a very interesting development. I think the Germans have long expressed that the sanctions regime that the US has rolled out against Russia really does not work for them. You know, people have long wondered about the end of the American empire and how it would go out, with a bang, with a whimper. But you know if you have really accurately predicted that they have gone out like this with just really kind of strange a series of embarrassing, ineffective, and incoherent maneuvers which neither fool nor frighten anyone, and I think we can see that this move is really rather ineffectual. It is purely symbolic and it comes in the wake of a series of Syrian and Russian victories in the Middle East against Daesh and it comes, of course, in the wake of the US being unable to put down an uprising in the east of Ukraine which of course is seen a lot of progress made in the direction of peace in that conflict.

And so, you know, the general way to see this of course is that NATO military doctrine is out dated, its equipment was designed under extremely corrupt and arrogant systems which really lack the system of a competitive bidding and it relied heavily on its nuclear arsenal and air superiority.

Now we live in a time of course when air defense systems trumped even the latest generation of Air Force and so the balance of power is shifted in the direction of national sovereignty and self-determination where countries liken get their hands on air defense systems. So I think no one really afraid of this. I mean you know the Chinese have told the United States, “You are gonna stay out of South China Sea and Russia saying, “You are not gonna put a no fly zone over Syria”.

So they have to do something, they have save face and it looks like a series of strange ineffectual maneuvers that really have no strategic or geopolitical point to them.

Press TV: Many people said, you know for a while now, that we are going to see a confrontation at some point between Russia and likes of NATO. Do you think that is likely or is all this is grandstanding on the part of NATO?

Flores: So much of it is grandstanding. You know really what NATO would have to do is a NATO command that would have to invoke Article 5 of NATO which compels all NATO members to act on behalf of the general command of NATO which is run chiefly by the United State.

 They did this now of course after 9/11. That was the first and the last time they have done in the history of NATO. Afterwards, I think in 2012 Erdogan in Turkey mentioned Article 5 but of course NATO would probably never act on behalf of Turkey or you know cause world war III because of Turkish interest alone.

So you know clearly when you see countries like Germany saying that they do not want to see Russia as a permanent enemy, I think that is a very important sign. NATO without Germany and without France, of course also we have seen Hollande expresses his ….with NATO command. So you that put to together what NATO is. It just looks like rebranding the US. You know they will not go to war alone and I really do not think that they have, like as I mentioned for reasons, just now the capacity to actually wage effectively a war against Russia. 

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