Hillary Clinton is concerned that defence cuts in the UK will jeopardise our ability to carry out our NATO obligations.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/14/hillary-clinton-uk-defence-cuts
Now NATO was founded to defend the North Atlantic region against advances by the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. The danger of armed invasion by Russia is now minimal, and it is all of 14 years since I had the pleasure of organising a deliciously extravagant, indeed decadent, British Embassy ball in the grand military building in Warsaw where the Pact was signed – an episode I have just been writing up for my next volume of memoirs, Romance Without Chopin.
If Russia wished to take over Europe now, they would just need to turn off the gas supply in winter. But the Russian elite have discovered much easier ways to lead a fantasy lifestyle.
So, with no threat to the North Atlantic, NATO is occupying Afghanistan and making contingency plans to invade Somalia and Yemen. If you take the view that organisations acquire self-interest and behave to maximise it, this makes sense as NATO will provoke more Islamic militancy by occupying Muslim lands, and NATO needs to posit an enemy to continue to exist.
The Secretary General of NATO is the really horrible Anders Fogh Rasmussen. As PM of Denmark he did a Tony Blair and knowingly lied to parliament over the content of intelligence reports on Iraqi WMD. He actively pursued the jailing of Major Frank Grevil for leaking that he had lied. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Grevil
The fact that a reptile like Rasmussen is the Secretary General is itself a sign that something is rotten about NATO.
The government claims we cannot even afford any substantial public funding for the university tuition of our young people. For Hillary Clinton to opine that we need to spend still more on obscene weapons of destruction to support US invasions abroad – and the inextricably linked UK and US arms manufacturers – is pretty sick. Fascinating as well to see New Labour join in and attack the government from the right again.