...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Originally it was a mutual defense pact directed against an expansionist Soviet Union. In later years it evolved into a mechanism for picking the American pocket while criticizing the cut of the American pants...
, the U.S.-led military alliance that has protected America and western Europe from attack since the end of World War Two, is no longer fit for purpose.
The growing aggression of Russian president Vladimir Putin
...Second and fourth President and sixth of the Russian Federation and the first to remain sober. Putin is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from polonium poisoning. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to Putin. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead...and his territorial ambitions, as displayed in his annexation of Crimea and his supplying pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine, has shown the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to be ill prepared.
There is even doubt whether major powers like the U.S., Britannia, La Belle France and Germany would be prepared to intervene if smaller NATO nations, like the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, were invaded by Russia.
That is the stark verdict of British politicians, members of the Commons Select Defence Committee. In a scathing assessment of NATO's inability to respond to emergencies such as Russia's war against Georgia and Ukraine in Crimea, and Russia's use of stealth methods to destabilize Ukraine, they conclude that the Atlantic alliance has been "too complacent about the threat from Russia, and it is not well prepared." They call for the next NATO summit, to be held in Wales in September, to station more military forces in the Baltic states to deter a Russian invasion.
"NATO is currently not well prepared for a Russian threat against a NATO Member State," the committee's report says. "A Russian unconventional attack, using asymmetric tactics â"" designed to slip below NATO's response threshold would be particularly difficult to counter. And the challenges which NATO faces in deterring, or mounting an adequate response to, such an attack poses a fundamental risk to NATO's credibility."