‘NATO’s a dinosaur in the modern world’

The aim of NATO’s largest-in-a-decade drills is PR for a dying alliance and an attempt to boost fear among taxpayers to make them think they need to pay for such nonsense, says Jan Oberg, of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Research.

NATO’s largest military drills in over a decade, Trident Juncture, wrapped up Friday. About 36,000 troops from more than 30 nations took part in the exercise.

In Spain and Italy, where the drills were taking place, people took to the streets earlier last week in protest the international military alliance.

RT: What’s the aim of these massive NATO drills?

Jan Oberg: Their aim is public relations for a dying alliance, which is a kind of a dinosaur in the modern world. This is a military-industrial-media-academic complex playing its games. In order to get the payers to pay for this kind of nonsense you have to have what we in the social psychology call “fearology”; you have to boost a fear among the citizens so that they think that this is relevant and necessary to do this and other kinds of things. Secondly, it’s a cover-up for the fact that the Ukraine crisis was

basically created by the neo-cons in Washington…and the cover-up of the misguided wars that we’ve had everywhere from Afghanistan over Iraq, to Syria and Libya. You can see how this is attracting media attention, how the pictures are done…It’s [about] chest-beating “We are still strong, we can do things!” To me it comes across as a very ridiculous and potentially dangerous thing…    

RT: But there are threats, these cannot all be about PR, can they?    

JO: No. But…it’s human folly; it’s unintelligent to believe that whatever problems you have in the Middle East is something you can solve by these type of exercises, this type of military force. ISIS is a product of these wars, it is not something that has come out of the blue. It’s a product of the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq and the misadministration of that country. And now it’s spreading…We have tons more terrorism today than we had in 2001, 9/11. We are doing a counterproductive thing and we are learning absolutely nothing.