Martin Sieff
"Old Age," the great French President Charles De Gaulle famously said, "is a shipwreck." We should certainly feel that way about the 70th birthday celebrations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization - the most venerable security alliance and organization in the world.
The London Summit made it clear to the whole world: NATO at 70 has become a global joke.
NATO does not strengthen the defensive capabilities of its members against real threats such as illegal immigration, pandemic diseases, transnational crime, drugs and human trafficking and the destabilization and smashing of state structures around the world. On the contrary it has become a major factor in destroying resistance to those pathologies.
The Atlantic Alliance is a simulacrum - a counterfeit: It offers an alluring image of security to its member states while in reality encouraging them to tear down the defenses and security agency antibodies they need to maintain true security and sovereignty.
Those major nations like Russia and China that successfully strive to protect their own integrity, sovereignty and security are then subjected to waves of abuse and attempted destabilization. Then they are accused of the very crimes and excesses that NATO's leading members are themselves guilty of.
NATO was allegedly created to protect the nations of Western Europe from the threat of the Soviet Union and also to provide a security framework that would unite the nations of Western Europe and prevent them from going to war ever again.
But as early as 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis had convinced De Gaulle, the greatest European strategist and diplomatic thinker of the past three generations that the opposite was the case. He defied very real and formidable pressures from Washington, London and Brussels to pull France out of NATO"s unified military command structure, while keeping the United Kingdom out of the then-small but tightly integrated and very dynamic six-nation European Economic Community.
Almost 60 years ago, De Gaulle could already clearly see that far from bringing peace and security to Europe, the NATO Alliance was generating fear, distrust and a hugely expensive arms race instead.
The London Summit that was meant to showcase the Alliance as the glittering capstone of global security in the 21st century backfired instead in the most ludicrous of ways.
Far from being a sage gathering of dignified and seasoned statesmen and women, it resembled nothing more than the Mad Hatter's Tea Party in "Alice in Wonderland" - offering a bizarre and genuinely disquieting subversion of all the solemn values it claimed to celebrate: Another cheap, gimcrack simulacrum, in fact.
A generation of spoiled brats and preening narcissists played at being statesmen and stateswomen: They howled like babies deprived of a sweet to suck on when US President Donald Trump as the only adult in the room told them they could not have security and stability unless they were willing to pay for it.
In reality, of course, NATO does not uphold and protect world peace at all: It is in the business of relentlessly eroding global security and setting the great nations of the Northern Hemisphere on a hell-for-leather collision course to full-scale, no-holds-barred thermonuclear war.
What else can come from regular major military exercises recently called Anaconda that are openly proclaimed to encircle, bully, intimidate and ultimately crush Russia? (Never a Wise Plan!)
Like an old, dying person no longer in control of his basic bodily functions, NATO now cannot refrain spreading violence and excrement on neighboring nations all around its periphery.
How can the toppling of a stable, democratically-elected government in Ukraine in 2014 and its replacement with a corrupt, brawling gangster clique upheld by open neo-Nazis be seen as improving prospects for peace in Europe?
How can the incessant NATO and US meddling in and virtual colonization of a small country like Georgia, traditionally in Russia's orbit and without even sufficient resources to be attractive for imperialist exploitation be seen as bringing stability rather than fear, distrust and war to Eurasia?
How successful were NATO's adventures in toppling or attempting to topple stable governments in Libya and Syria? What were the consequences of those ghastly fake macho adventures?
The only outcome was the spread of Islamist extremism and the massacre of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in nations that had previously succeeded in keeping such horrors far outside their borders.
The clear truth is that NATO, its leaders and its planners have become virulent and they have become mad.
The pathological behaviors and dementia of the Alliance and its leaders are consistent and clear. Far from protecting the West and deterring a world war, NATO is making it inevitable by piling on the pressure and creating horrific and dangerous new flashpoints of instability across Eurasia.
The 75-year-old Treaty of London signed back in 1839 propelled the British Empire into World War I and destroyed it. NATO at 70 poses an even greater danger to the American people.
To flee the Alliance is the best hope to survive the horrors that its leaders and policymakers seem determined to bring upon themselves and the rest of the human race.