Live Streaming Tweets – Monitor NATO’s 25th Summit in Chicago and Anti-NATO Protests – Blogs of War. What happens to NATO after Afghanistan? NATO's largest mission is coming to an inglorious end. Offcially, the alliance still claims that 2014 is the year it will disentangle itself from Afghanistan. Even before the recent bloody incidents, however, key members of the alliance were talking about an earlier departure.
The violence sparked by revelations of Koran burning and the murder of Afghan civilians by a U.S. soldier have sapped already low levels of trust between the alliance and its Afghan partners and made an early exit more likely. What happens to Afghanistan--and to the region--after NATO's departure is the most obvious question. But the alliance's coming retreat from Kabul raises another issue: what happens to NATO after its largest mission ends? Barring some new development, however, NATO activity will soon be at its lowest ebb since the early 1990s.
Expansion of the alliance has mostly run its course. There are several different scenarios for the alliance: NATO Reaffirms Faith in Antimissile System. PrintShareEmailTwitterFacebookLinkedIn Efforts to establish a European missile defense system are moving forward smoothly, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told the Associated Press on Monday (see GSN, April 27).
The 28-member alliance intends at a summit in Chicago next month to formally declare that the first components of the shield are in place, Rasmussen said. "This will make it possible to protect parts of NATO territory, and that concept will be further developed in the coming years so that we will gradually be able to protect all the populations in European NATO countries," the official said. "As far as NATO is concerned, we have tested the systems and they work. " The White House's "phased adaptive approach" through 2020 is to field increasingly advanced Standard Missile 3 interceptors on bases in Poland and Romania and on Aegis-equipped missile destroyers home ported in Spain. An accompanying long-range radar system has already been established in Turkey. Reports cast doubt on European missile defense. The Real Price of Ballistic Missile Defenses | WMD Junction. Russia threatens to strike NATO missile defense sites.
Russia’s top military officer warned Thursday that Moscow would strike NATO missile-defense sites in Eastern Europe before they are ready for action, if the U.S. pushes ahead with deployment. “A decision to use destructive force pre-emptively will be taken if the situation worsens,” Russian Chief of General Staff Nikolai Makarov said at an international missile-defense conference in Moscow attended by senior U.S. and NATO officials. Gen. Makarov made the threat amid an apparent stalemate in talks between U.S. and Russian negotiators over the missile-defense system, part of President Obama’s policy to “reset” relations with Moscow. The threat also elicited shock and derision from Western missile-defense analysts. “It’s remarkable,” said James Ludes of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University in Newport, R.I.
“He must have been drunk,” said Barry Blechman, a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center think tank. In March, Mr. Ms. NATO’s Nuclear Groundhog Day? » FAS Strategic Security Blog. . By Hans M. Kristensen Does NATO have a hard time waking up from its nuclear past? It would seem so. Similar to the movie Groundhog Day where a reporter played by Bill Murray wakes up to relive the same day over and over again, the NATO alliance is about to reaffirm – once again – nuclear status quo in Europe. The reaffirmation will come on 20-21 May when 28 countries participating in the NATO Summit in Chicago are expected to approve a study that concludes that the alliance’s existing nuclear force posture “currently meets the criteria for an effective deterrence and defense posture.”
In other words, NATO will not order a reduction of its nuclear arsenal but reaffirm a deployment of nearly 200 U.S. non-strategic nuclear bombs in Europe that were left behind by arms reductions two decades ago. Visions Apart? President George W. Since then, current and former officials have been busy attaching preconditions to further reductions of non-strategic nuclear weapons. Creating Conditions.