Former Marine Corps intelligence officer and former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter gave an interview to Sputnik on his response to the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy released in November. Ritter said the document is “an extraordinarily important document because it literally represents a divorce of decades of legacy policy that postured the United States and Russia as opponents who should be preparing to fight each other.” Further, it indicates that the White House has been “able to free itself … from the legacy of post-Cold War-era Russophobia,” which had been seeking to weaken and “strategically defeat” Russia.
Ritter also said that the document is based on “the reality that Russia is not a threat to Europe or the United States, recognition that Russia has been artificially cast as such a threat now for decades, and [that] the consequences of this miscasting” have been an unmitigated “disaster for Europe and a threat to the national security of the United States.” The NSS “drives a stake through the heart of the beast of Ukraine’s unrealistic expectations regarding NATO membership, and Europe’s equally unrealistic expectations that at some point in time, Ukraine could become a member of NATO,” Ritter said.
Because of the document’s insistence on no NATO expansion, and the removal of Russia from the prime list of U.S. enemies, means “there’s no legitimate reason for NATO to exist,” Ritter believes, unless it can be transformed into a genuinely defensive alliance. “NATO, as it currently exists, will no longer exist. If [it] is to continue to survive, it must re-identify itself as a defensive alliance focused on securing a reasonable and rational Europe, and not this alliance capable of standing toe-to-toe with Russia, expanding … ever eastward towards confrontation with Russia, and a NATO that embraces a strategy of the strategic defeat of Russia. That NATO is dead. That NATO will never be resurrected.”
