EDITOR, The Tribune.

Since 1989, NATO has had no good reason to exist.

In the halcyon years of the 1990’s, which certain euphoric westerners hailed as the “end of history”, US and European politicians assured an alcoholic Boris Yeltsin that the alliance would expand no further east to menace his country and would somehow morph into a feel-good club of peaceniks, uniting east and west in a Eurasian heartland that has spawned most global violence since the 1500’s.

But it quickly betrayed these undertakings to Russia, bombing Serbia mercilessly and relying on the good services of the CIA to turn Russia’s neighbours, one after another, into instruments of encirclement, advancing confrontation under the guise of “democracy”. The 2014 coup in Ukraine was perhaps a bridge too far.

It also ventured outside its North Atlantic base, reducing Libya (the African country with the highest Human Development Index in 2010) into a jihadist cesspool with open slave markets. Its sponsors now enjoy unfettered access to Libyan oil.

Most recently, it considered admitting Colombia to membership (coincidentally, of course, to its subtle desire to ‘regime change’ neighbouring Venezuela and take its oil).

All the while it has burdened the US taxpayer with a disproportionate bill for its adventures abroad, none of which has remotely answered the daily needs of the American people.

Donald Trump’s realisation of this was a rare redeeming quality.

In the years since 1989 (the year of Tianaman Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall) China has moved from the 10th to the second (and arguably the first) global economy in size. Meanwhile, the demonised Mr Putin has more than doubled his countrymen’s wealth per capita and moved Russians into the “High Human Development” category for the first time in their history – a fact you won’t learn from MSNBC, CNN or even the BBC.

Meanwhile the west has floundered and stagnated, its middle class shrinking as its military industrial complex (and the corrupt politicians that it employs) are enriched by the endless militarism it advances under an umbrella of propaganda and lies.

It is time for NATO to go gently into that good night. If Mr Putin does not expose its weakness and hasten that eventuality, then Mr Xi (its obvious next target) surely will. Good riddance.

ANDREW ALLEN

Nassau,

February 25, 2022.