NATO'S NON-PARTNER

The Argentine government seeks to join NATO by any means and under any category, but how much will membership cost?

 

By Sir Charlattam

Why should I be surprised that a government like the current one would beg Washington to include it in its global power structures? This is what an old Argentine friend of mine questioned me when we got talking after my visit to Buenos Aires a few days ago. As an aside, I thought the weather in London was bad but the rainy week I spent in Buenos Aires made it very similar. 

Returning to the subject with my friend, to some extent his answer doesn't surprise me, although he didn't know how to answer my question: “Why haven't you done anything to avoid it?” And that, of course, does not involve all the political blather about the homeland, sovereignty or the constitutionality of that decision. Argentines have a chronic problem with getting things done and that is where the flaw that holds them back lies. Obviously, my colleague does not have the power to change things and that is something that speaks more to the political class that comes out of his society. But he does know first hand what it is like to be used by your government to play their little games and once they have done so, throw them in the historical dustbin.

I told him so that he wouldn't feel bitter and as a way of making him see that we are in the same boat, that in Britain and especially in continental Europe politicians play the same cynical game and are as corrupt or more corrupt than those who hang around here. Look at the European Parliament, I said. We are experiencing this with the current war in Ukraine which is nothing more than a geopolitical arm wrestling match between the US and NATO against Russia, behind which all these politicians have woven fabulous deals.

I also made him understand that European society is fed up with their business and silent deals, such as the fact that a few days ago the senators of his country increased their allowances seven times what they earned. In my country the common people are fed up with Rishi Sunak and his cabinet of incompetents who every day sink the economy by the astronomical spending they do (on the orders -not suggestions- of Uncle Sam) to support the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev. And if that is not enough for you, I told him, we have a parasitic royal family, surrounded by gloomy palace intrigues and with a King who does not reign and who is only good for the gossip magazines.

The problem is that Milei's government worships these crats and is doing everything in its power to imitate them.

I explained to him that those in Milei's government who have managed to join NATO have expectations of participating in big business, but I also explained to him the great risks involved. But as it emerged from the conversation, the Argentines have already experienced in the past the consequences of jumping on the Atlanticist bandwagon without achieving anything good in return and my friend, who served in the “Alfil” operation in the Persian Gulf between November 1990 and March 1991, knows this very well.

In the early 1990s, when the disintegration of the USSR was already a fait accompli and we already had relaxed contacts with our colleagues in the KGB, the then Peronist government of Carlos Menem, which many believed would be nationalist in tone, ended up taking off the mask that had brought him to power and went to knock on the door of the White House to simply lay at the feet of an exultant George H. Bush who, after years of working in the darkness of power, had arrived at the presidency at a key moment in history.

At that time, in order to show how servile he was going to be, Menem betrayed his own country with the pacts he made with London over the Malvinas, the delivery to Washington of the “Condor” missile projects and all the annexes that went with it, and the pinnacle of that obsequiousness was to order the sending of a task force made up of two Navy vessels without knowing or having foreseen the possible incumbencies that could await his men. Even when we first met, I told my friend that the holds of the destroyers carried alternating warheads with nuclear warheads as a last resort.

Circumstances today are very different from that time. The US is no longer the hegemonic power and is losing not only its political and military power, which is being squandered in its efforts in Eurasia, but also the little political credibility that can be seen in its complicity with the state of Israel and its shameful abstentions in the United Nations on a humanitarian ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.

Milei and his cohorts do not seem to see these details, or rather, they pretend to act like good neo-conservatives and convinced Zionists. Nor do they seem to have evaluated what it means to ask to be involved with this war organisation and all the consequences of this. Even in the ambiguous terms in which NATO membership is requested, what does it mean to be a global partner of NATO? It's a bit like we'd like to join the party but the club owner stands at the door and says you can't go into the room, but you can listen to the music from the outside.

I remember that Menem had done all those things I mentioned hoping that (among other promises) Washington would open the door for him to be an “extra-NATO partner” to place the country in that idyllic and gaseous “first world” that only Menem and his gang of rascals imagined. I am quite sure that back then, the generals and their lawyers -if they ever found out about it- in Brussels, looked at each other's faces in astonishment wondering, “Do we have that kind of status here?”

I also remember a good friend who worked at the time in one of the old Foreign Office offices telling me that old “Maggie” and her boys in Andover didn't like the idea at all, and although some of them were rather scornful about the possibility -especially those in naval intelligence- the last thing we should expect was to see the Argentines as partners in NATO.

To make matters worse, I told my friend that if Brussels were to take this government's pleas into consideration, they would certainly be taken into account, not because of the sympathy and obsequiousness of Argentina's rulers, but because this is the key moment and Argentina is in a crucial strategic position to counter the influence not only of China but also of Russia and the BRICS in particular.

I also made it clear to my friend that if Argentina were to be accepted as a “partner”, it would be in consideration of the advantages that membership would supposedly give it, much less than the Poles, Romanians or Bulgarians who, despite being full NATO members, are the useful idiots of the plans and agendas decided in Washington and then forwarded by email to the organisation's Secretariat in Brussels. To get my point across, I asked him just one question. Who do you think will fight on the front line against the Russians and Chinese if a major war breaks out? I don't think Milei and his people will.