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Warsaw Pact is Gone, Why Does NATO Exist?

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Ahead of its meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday in London to mark NATO’s 70th anniversary, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg gave details of increases in its military spending.

DAVID GIBBS, dgibbs at arizona.edu
Gibbs is professor of history at the University of Arizona and has written extensively about NATO.

He said today: “During the past 30 years, NATO has become an extremely expensive anachronism. The purpose of the NATO alliance disappeared altogether when its communist counterpart, the Warsaw Pact dissolved in 1990, with the end of the Cold War. Since that time, NATO has expanded relentlessly into the former Eastern Bloc states, in violation of an explicit U.S. pledge that NATO would not expand. At the present time, the main function of NATO is to escalate global tensions and to plant the seeds of a new and totally unnecessary Cold War with post-communist Russia.”

His books include First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, published by Vanderbilt University Press. See his 2017 interview: “Does NATO Confront Threats, or Create Them?