Obeying Washington? ‘New’ NATO strategy parrots hawkish US posture

While details of NATO’s new military strategy are still unknown, odds are the alliance is simply falling in line with recent updates to US doctrine and seeking to outgun all potential adversaries, a military expert tells RT.

Citing a “new security situation” as well as “challenges in the east and the south” and a “nuclear threat” from Moscow, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced last week that the alliance has adopted a new military strategy. Details of the document are not yet public.

“What’s surprising is not that NATO has updated its military strategy, but that it took so long to do so,” Mikhail Khodarenok, retired colonel in the Russian Aerospace Forces, told RT.

Washington updated its national security strategy in 2017, national defense strategy and nuclear posture in 2018, and missile defense posture in early 2019, the military analyst noted. NATO’s new strategy document is probably just catching up with all of those, he added.

“Basically, Brussels simply reported to the big brother that ‘an adjustment of NATO documents was made according to your instructions and considerations’,” said Khodarenok, noting that “there is nothing new there.”

...NATO is basically the US military plus some window dressing.

According to the analyst, there is no grounds to claim that a new NATO strategy will translate into a new nuclear arms race. All efforts of the NATO military-industrial complex will be focused on developing either the new weapons of war or the means of countering them, and nuclear weapons will be far from the most important in that regard.

“Of course, the modernization of strategic nuclear forces in the US, Britain and France will be carried out according to the plans already outlined, but it would be wrong to say that the West will focus all of its resources and brainpower on this,” Khodarenok told RT.

Western military researchers will most likely concentrate on catching up to Russia and China in developing weapons such as lasers and hypersonic missiles, or the countermeasures to them – which presently do not exist and the big question is whether they ever will.

Looking at potential NATO military action against any of the alliance’s hypothetical adversaries – Russia, China, Iran and North Korea – Khodarenok believes some kind of action against Iran seems most probable. However, it is unlikely to involve NATO as a whole, but rather a coalition involving the US and one or two alliance member states, along the lines of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

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