PARIS, March 14 (Nouvelle Solidarité) – In name of the “Cercle de Réflexion Interarmées,” an independent think tank of former senior French military officials, French Gen.Grégoire Diamantidis (ret.) wrote a powerful open letter to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg blasting NATO’s latest prospective study “NATO 2030” as a threat to world peace and an additional step towards a world government, doing away with the last bits of the national sovereignty of nations. [https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/2020/12/pdf/201201-Reflection-Group-Final-Report-Uni.pdf]
The full text of the open letter was posted on March 11 on the website of the French economic monthly Capital. https://www.capital.fr/economie-politique/otan-2030-il-faut-stopper-ce-train-fou-avant-quil-ne-soit-trop-tard-1396756
On Feb. 18, NATO published its latest prospective study called “NATO 2030” indicating its missions for the next ten years. “From the outset,” writes General Diamantidis, “it appears that NATO’s entire orientation is based on the paradigm of a dual threat, one from Russia, presented as being active today, and the other from China, a potential threat to come.
“Two major ideas emerge from this study. The first is the enlistment of Europeans against China’s global domination, in exchange for American protection of Europe against the Russian threat. The second is the circumvention of the consensus rule [in NATO’s command], in several ways: operations in coalitions of the willing; implementation of decisions that no longer require consensus; and above all the delegation of authority to SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe, an American general officer) on the grounds of efficiency and speeding up decision making.”
For the French military, NATO 2030 project “clearly reveals a monument of tranquil bad faith, of quiet disinformation and of instrumentalization of this ‘Russian threat,’ a ‘threat’ patiently created and then maintained, so as to ‘bring to heel’ the European allies behind the United States, in the perspective of an forthcoming battle with China for world hegemony.”
The open letter then examines in great detail how NATO did everything to transform the image of Russia into that of the “nasty” Russian Bear of today.
—NATO enlargement up to Russian borders contrary to the assurances given in 1991;
—Bombing of Serbia for 78 days without any UN mandate;
—Rejection by NATO, in 2008, of the European Security Pact proposed by Russia to settle unresolved conflicts in Eastern Europe (Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia);
—Western decision to back the Euromaidan, “a real coup d'état that led to the elimination of the legally elected Ukrainian President … We know what happened next, with the secessions of Crimea and Donbas.”
—Transformation of the Ballistic Missile Defense system “into a global ballistic missile defense architecture in Europe (BMDE) ... turned against Russia and not protecting it.” NATO “neglected to specify that in reality these launchers (MK 41) of ABM missiles could just as easily be used to fire Tomahawk offensive missiles.”
As a result, “the potential threat thus created to Russia’s second strike capability, the basis of its nuclear deterrent,” pushed “Russia to suspend all cooperation within the NRC (NATO-Russia Council) at the end of 2013, thus even before the 2014 Crimea affair,” an action then used “by NATO to justify—a posteriori—the BMDE protection of Europe in the face of the new ‘Russian threat’!”
“So yes, Mr. Secretary General, at the end of these 20 years of sustained efforts on the part of NATO to recreate the ‘Russian enemy,’ which is indispensable for the survival of an organization that is theoretically purely defensive, yes, Russia has finally stiffened, and sought in the East the cooperation that the West refused it.
“The effort to drive a wedge between Russia and Europe, patiently carried out over the years by your predecessors and by yourself under the constant authority of the United States, is today well under way, since Russia, at last, once again ‘the Russian threat,’ justifies the most provocative exercises, such as Defender 2020, postponed to 2021, increasingly close to its borders, as well as the most insane new concepts of mini-nuclear use in the European theater under the authority of the American ally, which alone holds the key.
“But no, Mr. Secretary General, today, and despite all your efforts, Russia with its military budget of €70 billion (barely double that of France), does not constitute a threat to NATO with its €1 trillion, of which €250 billion is for all the European countries in the Alliance! But that is not your concern, because what is being aimed at through this new NATO 2030 concept is a much larger project: to involve the Atlantic Alliance in the struggle for world hegemony that is taking place between China and the United States.
“The actual threat is that of terrorism. The study does devote a section to this, but without ever abandoning the word ‘terrorism,’ nor characterizing its sources, its motives, its ideological and political foundations.”
The problem is, writes General Diamantidis, that terrorism “is even supported ideologically by Erdogan’s Turkey, a member of NATO, as well as by Saudi Arabia, an staunch ally of the United States.”
NATO, initially a defensive alliance, is being transformed into “an offensive alliance against an enemy that does not exist for Europe, (even if we are not fooled by China’s territorial ambitions, the impact of its economic power and the totalitarian character of its regime)....”
The NATO 2030 policy document calls for a massive increase of its powers and that of its secretary general, above member states and allies whose capacity to shape NATO’s policies would become close to zero.
Therefore, the French general concluded, NATO “tends today to become a danger for Europe.”
“For, not content with having denied Europe the opportunity of a truly sustainable peace desired by all, including Russia, NATO, driven by the sole concern for its survival, and the justification by its expansion, has only provoked a vast rearmament on both sides of Russia’s borders, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, endangering peace in this Europe, which it now considers only as its future battlefield.”
And now, he tells Stoltenberg, you “would like to justify the military tool of this alliance in the future by transforming it into an inescapable political instrument for the management of large-scale international coalitions for the benefit of a true global governance, even going so far as to override the decisions of the UN and crushing national sovereignties!”
“So no, Mr. Secretary General! We must stop this mad measure before it is too late! As for France, in line with the principles enunciated more than half a century ago by General de Gaulle, it cannot, without serious failure, lend itself to this adventurous agreement of American tutelage over Europe.”
General Diamantidis, 75 years old, was a fighter pilot, an Air Force general, and former mayor of Lédignan in southern France. Following his military career he served as a diplomat in the OSCE, participating in the disarmament of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, as well as the former Yugoslavia.
