PURITAN NEWS WEEKLY

www.puritans.net/news/

1/25/03

 

 

THE UNRAVELING OF NATO

 

 

 

By J. Parnell McCarter

Puritan News Service

 

 

In my book Let My People Go, as well as in articles at Puritan News Weekly, I have suggested that the nations will conspire with the Romish Beast to bring down the United States.   This conclusion is based upon my interpretation that Washington, DC is the mysterious Babylon of Revelation 17 that will be destroyed by the nations and the Romish Beast (Rev 17:16).   If this interpretation is correct, then we would expect to see the unraveling of the NATO alliance binding the US and the European nations, which is precisely what is developing.  In order to understand why, we need to first understand how NATO is organized.

The organization of NATO is constructed quite differently from the European Union and the United States.   In the former, if so much as one member state vetoes an action, then NATO as a whole cannot act.  However, the government of the United States does not depend upon ratification of a particular federal act by each state constituting the whole for an act to take effect, and the same is true of the European Union.  Indeed, correspondent Al Hembd has noted how the European Union is imposing its rulings upon the constituent nations.  NATO is constructed much weaker then than the European Union and the United States. Under stress, NATO is far more likely to fold than either the European Union or the United States.

NATO’s organization means it is virtually impotent and useless when its member states are in serious disagreement.  For all practical purposes the alliance  unravels under these circumstances.  The growing rift between the US and France/Germany is leading to this precise effect.  NATO is unraveling.  This is why it recently had to “postpone” action concerning Iraq. 

The Bush Administration is already starting to cope with the new reality of the unraveling of NATO.  For instance, International Herald Tribune http://www.iht.com/articles/84405.html reports:

“Bush, one of his senior foreign policy advisers said Thursday, had essentially reordered America's alliances even before he saw "the daily horror as the French and the Germans undercut the central goal" of the resolution that the United Nations passed in November.   Bush's defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, gave voice to that thinking Wednesday when he dismissed the mounting opposition in France and Germany, calling the two countries "old Europe," and all but declaring that, in the Bush White House, they no longer mattered.  Rumsfeld's comments, predictably, raised a storm Thursday in both Paris and Berlin, with a French cabinet minister responding by alluding to a vulgarity that one of Napoleon's generals used when the British sought his surrender at the Battle of Waterloo.”

The Bush Administration’s actions, and the French and German response, effectively amount to a scrapping of NATO.

This comes at a delicate time for U.S. foreign policy, because war in Iraq is virtually inevitable at this point.  Reuters reported that Russia's armed forces have obtained information that the United States and its allies have already decided to launch military action in Iraq from mid-February.   The news agency Interfax's specialist military news wire AVN, quoting an unnamed high-ranking source in the Russian general staff, said U.S.-led operations would be launched once an attacking force of 150,000 had been assembled in the Gulf.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,881215,00.html  has reported the following:

 

“President George Bush is determined to go to war with Saddam Hussein in the next few weeks, without UN backing if necessary, according to authoritative sources in Washington and London. The US president is "to turn up the heat" in his state of the union address on Tuesday… The impatience within the White House for action against Iraq came on a day in which the cracks in the international coalition against Iraq widened. China and Russia joined France and Germany in warning the US against precipitate action and calling for Washington to work within the UN. The German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, revealed the extent of European anger over the US position when he told Washington to "cool down". The Russian foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, said: "Russia deems that there is no evidence that would justify a war in Iraq."