Western elites are dysfunctional. Here’s proof from the latest NATO Summit

Western elites are dysfunctional. Here’s proof from the latest NATO Summit

RT

Thirty-four years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed and the West became convinced that this signaled the “end of history”. Western liberalism, they assumed, was the pinnacle of historical development and would gradually be adopted by all countries. They also believed that NATO would be its spearhead.

This ideological doctrine naturally gave rise to an idea of endless expansion – since the West leads the way towards the ideal and has the necessary global organizations for this, then everyone should strive to join it. How could it be otherwise?

At the time, it indeed made sense for countries from the former Soviet bloc and the Third World to join Western-controlled economic organizations which promised a common market, loans, portfolio investments, trade rules, and so on.

From the beginning, many people realized that this looked a lot like economic colonization, but, like any colonizer, at first the US convinced its new colonies that they would get all the perks of a large civilization. This made sense, and many countries expressed the desire to join the Western world.

For East European states, the idea of joining the European Union made even more sense. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell once compared Western Europe to a “garden,” and in the early 1990s the bloc indeed resembled a thriving garden. There were certain challenges, but at the time, the Old World came close to the ideal of a flourishing and prosperous society. It looked like it had found a balance between the market economy and socialism, and naturally, many countries wanted to join this community and also prosper.

It seemed that with the collapse of the USSR, there was no need for the third pillar of the Western-centric world order: military power. The main enemy had been defeated, communist ideology was ridiculed and trampled on, and it looked like a big war could never again break out.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the prevailing opinion was that from now on, US-led military alliances – primarily NATO – would have a more “educational’ role – such as bringing some wayward dictator to his senses, dispersing isolated terrorists and turning them onto the path of democracy, or, in the case of the former USSR, carefully “guiding” what remained of the superpower and growing new life on the corpse of its former enemy. 

From a full-fledged military bloc – that was created to wage a big war – NATO largely turned into a political organization.

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