You might be interested in Michael Tracey’s reaction to the NATO Summit recently concluded. The TL;DR version is that it was a highly orchestrated exercise in re-enforcing the preferred narrative which is much what I would have anticipated:
In order to attend, you have to surmount a number of obstacles. The first being cost: unless you’re a local in Spain, just getting to the Summit is going to be a significant expense, with airfare and hotel and such. I’m not breaking any news when I report that prices of plane tickets right now are absurdly high. So the journalists who manage to find a way to incur these costs are going to be a relatively affluent bunch, or work at publications willing to pay their relatively burdensome expenses. And if they’re willing to go through the trouble of organizing such a trip, chances are it’s because they already revere NATO, and are already ideologically invested in what they believe to be NATO’s noble mission. Natasha appears to fall in this camp.
My own view is that NATO is past its sell-by date. To reinvigorate it, the most powerful European countries need to be willing to, at the very least, bear the cost of their own defense. And expanding NATO’s operations into Asia is exceeding its charter rather dramatically.
TL;DR? Sure, but even if it were a lot shorter I would give up 1/3 of the way into the lengthy complaint about other journalists and who it was expensive to go to the summit. I am sure journalists find it irritating that journalists they think are wrong or not as talented get to go to the same summit. Bummer for them. I am not interested in hearing about it.
Steve
It’s not must that they get to go but that they receive preferential treatment while there.
Considering the lunatic, revanchist regimes in Lithuania and Poland, NATO is a direct threat to the security of the US and the safety of Americans, and that alone is reason to disband it.
A sane US/NATO leadership would have accommodated Russian security concerns, and least it would have if it were seeking peace. But US/NATO seeks domination and empire, and so the Ukrainian war was inevitable.
But then, under a sane US/NATO/EU regime, Russia would be a member of both the EU and NATO, just as Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Medvedev, and Putin wanted.
Now the problem is to diffuse the Kaliningrad crisis. The Lithuanian blockade is the sort of thing that leads to major wars.
Reads like the PowersThatBe have become even more lax in hiding their ability to manipulate the press.
I am curious what will be the reaction in Asia to NATO pronouncement of interest in the continent.
Not just by the target of the pronouncement (China), but India and all the “non-aligned” powers there (Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Pakistan).
The barely noticed part of the summit could be as consequential as the Bucharest declaration in 20 years.