From Daniel McAdams at ronpaulinstitute.org:
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, a former prime minister of Norway, took the podium during last week’s meeting of NATO defense ministers to hype the Russian threat to NATO while downplaying recent NATO military moves on Russia’s border.
While criticizing “a more assertive Russia investing heavily in defence,” Stoltenberg countered that, “We do not seek confrontation [with Russia], and we do not want a new arms race.”
He then announced that the new enhanced NATO Response Force will triple in size to include 40,000 personnel instead of the originally announced 13,000 and that NATO would be setting up six new east European mini-headquarters in Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania.
A joint statement of the NATO defense ministers underscored Stoltenberg’s Russia points:
Russia is challenging Euro-Atlantic security through military action, coercion and intimidation of its neighbours. We continue to be concerned about Russia’s aggressive actions.
If NATO is to be taken at its word, these accusations should set off alarm bells. One would think that NATO member countries, faced with these “aggressive actions,” would be scrambling to ramp up their military spending to whatever is necessary to counter this military threat from Russia.
Yet strangely the opposite is happening. Despite the heated rhetoric coming from Stoltenberg and his spin factory, NATO HQ is having a difficult time getting its member states interested at all in the Russian threat. NATO member countries — particularly those most geographically vulnerable to the claimed Russian aggression — are not only not ramping up military spending, but in some cases are actually cutting their budgets.
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