The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has a new Strategic Concept, one that brings back the climate of the Cold War, and exceeds it to take on missions outside the scope of its traditional missions, limited to defending Europe in facing the Warsaw Pact alliance. In other words, it relies on the United States' theory of preemptive wars, so as to “adapt to new threats”, as stated in the document being discussed at the Lisbon Summit today – a document that can be summed up by saying that NATO must “confront terrorism, secure energy sources and their supply routes, and counter maritime piracy, organized crime and cyber warfare”. NATO strategists have divided the world in light of the American view which took shape under George Bush and the Neoconservatives, and which Barack Obama continues to apply in other ways. Based on this division of the world, one notes that NATO's concerns focus on Eurasia and the Middle East. Those two regions are the sources of energy and terrorism, and controlling them requires the cooperation of a few countries that are friends of NATO and of the United States, such as the Arab Gulf states, Iraq, naturally, as well as Turkey, which is a fundamental member of NATO. The task of such a coalition would be on the one hand to ward off Iran, and on the other to return to surrounding Russia in Eurasia, after it has been surrounded at the European level. This explains the pressure exerted on Turkey to allow NATO to deploy its missile shield on its soil. The missiles are aimed primarily at Iran to prevent it from spreading its influence towards the Gulf and the Levant. They also aim at restoring Ankara to its former position, after it excessively leaned towards the East, nearly forming a coalition with Tehran and Moscow, and aspiring to playing an essential rule in the Middle East in collaboration with Syria. Regaining Turkey also means breaking the isolation that surrounds Israel, and providing it with the space to be at the core of this strategy without declaring it. Indeed, Israel is the main military base for NATO and the United States in the Middle East. It is true that Turkey has laid down conditions for allowing the deployment of the missile shield on its soil, among them that of not naming Iran, Russia or any other country in the NATO document. Nevertheless, this does not prevent the goal of the shield being to confront these countries and to protect Israel, especially as NATO in its new Strategic Concept has specified the zones of danger. NATO operations will not be limited to defense, as it has in fact adopted attack, or preemptive war, as a new method. Turkey has never faced such a test in the past. It is true that it refrained from allowing the United States to invade Iraq from its soil, and sided with Iran in many stances, the latest being voting at the Security Council against sanctions on Iran. However, this time its options are not many, especially after having crossed a great distance towards establishing itself as a regional power that has its own strategy in the Middle East and in Central Asia, far from the policies of NATO and the United States. Will it then abandon its new Ottomanism to follow Atatürk's dreams of being European? NATO strategists (some of them Cold War experts, such as Madeleine Albright) have presented at the Lisbon Summit a document that essentially allows for making use of the United Nations and of international and regional organization in order to implement NATO plans. Once again, NATO seeks after political and military control of the world, and the great confrontation will take place in the Arab World and Central Asia – a confrontation that will detonate in local and regional wars, which will witness changing regimes and perhaps also the borders of some countries.
