Summary
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warned that the alliance must adopt a “wartime mindset” to prepare for long-term confrontation with Russia.
Speaking in Brussels, he urged members to increase defense spending beyond the 2% GDP target, noting that only 23 of 32 members currently meet it.
Rutte emphasized boosting defense production, addressing cyber threats, and countering China’s military buildup and actions toward Taiwan.
His remarks come as Donald Trump threatens to withhold defense support from NATO members failing to meet spending commitments, raising concerns about alliance unity.
You mean it wasn’t already? The organization was created to counter the USSR and never really drifted from that, even when the USSR fell, funnily enough.
The organization got complacent with the countries not developing their armies and letting them wither away and lose effectiveness instead. The entire eastern flank of NATO screamed that Russia is still a threat, even with the USSR breaking up. Those countries were called “war hawks” and then 2008 happened, 2014 happened and now 2022 happened. Apparently it wasn’t enough to shake them up.
2008 is about 17 years after the collapse of the USSR. Within that time, Russia experienced an economic crisis with the push for a “free market” and actually had lower life expectancy than during the USSR. Unless you want to argue that Russia is just inherently a warmongering country, surely something could’ve been done to prevent this later aggression. Similar to trump, putin getting elected is a symptom of a broken system.
Oh sorry, they needed time to build up. Fuck em, and fuck their genocidal, warring regime.
The USSR fell and has now been replaced with someone with far more warlike intentions than anyone since Stalin.
We need to examine the conditions that allowed such a figure to get elected. It wasn’t an instantaneous transition to putin, it took about a decade of a miserable economy where people had to sell whatever they could (including vouchers for shares in previously state enterprises they were given, which ended up being bought up by oligarchs to consolidate power) just to eat. Life actually got worse than during the USSR. Along comes putin and luckily for him, the price of oil increases while he’s in power and things look like they’re improving. Is it any wonder that someone like that could grab power during such a turbulent time? It’s happened in the US with trump and things are a lot less dire here than they were in Russia post-USSR-collapse.
