Guest Post by Scott Ritter
The unfulfilled goals and objectives from last year’s meeting in Madrid loom over the Atlantic military alliance. When the membership meets in Vilnius this week, normalizing failure might best describe the most that can be accomplished.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda, on June 26. (NATO)
The leaders of NATO’s 31 constituent member states have begun to assemble in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, for the alliance’s 33rd summit, an event that has come to symbolize the military organization’s increasingly difficult task of transforming political will into tangible reality.
Since the Wales Summit of 2014, when NATO made Russia a top priority in the aftermath of the Russian annexation of Crimea, and the Warsaw Summit of 2016, when NATO agreed to deploy “battlegroups” on the soil of four NATO members (Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Poland) in response to perceived Russian “aggression” in the region, Russia has dominated the NATO agenda and, by extension, its identity.
The Vilnius summit promises to be no different in this regard.
Continue reading “NATO Summit, a Theater of the Absurd”
