This very interesting development has been more or less eclipsed by recent events connected to our EU referendum, but it is worth commenting on, not least because the theme coincides with the position I\u00a0have promoted publicly for the last seven years.<\/p>\n
The German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier chided NATO for war mongering because of its latest \u00a0exercise in Poland.\u00a0He asserts that needling Russia with military exercises on its border is counter productive, inflames tensions and\u00a0does nothing to secure regional security. He is quite right. When the Soviet Union collapsed its counter to NATO, the Warsaw Pact, was \u00a0dismantled. The West’s refusal to do the same to NATO and at the same time not to invite Russia to become a full member was a throwback to Versailles in 1919, and a far cry from the enlightened treatment of West Germany after 1945.<\/p>\n
History teaches many lessons but it is history.\u00a0We understood that the emerging Germany was not that of Hitler and needed a different approach to bring it into an alliance focused on peace not war. We did not, and still do not, see that\u00a0modern Russia, which now enjoys some degree of democracy for the first time in its history, is\u00a0not that of Stalin. This is in part because Russia likes strong leaders at all times and found themselves Putin, whereas the West prefers to shuffle a pack of political nonentities\u00a0to lead them\u00a0and only now and again come up with a Churchill, a Roosevelt, a Thatcher or a De\u00a0Gaulle. \u00a0Britain had a go with Blair but he is now very damaged goods, suggesting strong leaders are a bad idea. So\u00a0Putin is made out to be an ogre when he is no such thing (though neither is he an angel) and Western foreign and diplomatic policy is\u00a0blundering through its greatest period of failures in modern times.<\/p>\n
It is interesting that\u00a0Germany, yes Germany, has decided to blow the whistle. Watch this space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This very interesting development has been more or less eclipsed by recent events connected to our EU referendum, but it is worth commenting on, not least because the theme coincides with the position I\u00a0have promoted publicly for the last seven years. The German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier chided NATO for war mongering because of its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-malcolm-blair-robinson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10378"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10379,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10378\/revisions\/10379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}