[…] For at least three years, US, Canada and their main European allies, especially France, have supported extremist sectarian Sunni rebel troops: directly in Libya and their proxies in Syria. Salafists and Wahhabis were among them on the same front against Gaddafi and Assad and Western support to these rebels helped them like the old US-built FIM-92 Stinger missiles and bunkers helped Taliban militants against NATO twenty years after the Soviet-Afghan war.
This schizophrenic geopolitics has shown the limits of a doctrine that more and more clearly seems to put the containment of Russia, China and Iran before the security of Western citizens. Many doubts and questions have been raised in the past.
Was the specious war in Iraq a trial to bring pressure on Iran and Syria? Has the rhetoric on human rights in Bosnia, Chechnya and Kosovo been exploited to consolidate a new ”green connection” among extremist sectarian Sunni militant groups in the Eurasian subcontinent? Is something similar happening in the Chinese autonomous region of Xinjiang, where Beijing has been unfairly blamed for repressing and discriminating against local Muslim communities? […]
If NATO will really ”continue to change as the world changes,” as Stoltenberg argues, Western leaders should completely change their approach toward Russia and China, starting to consolidate defence cooperation with them and their allies in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Läs artikel