THE two day NATO summit held in Warsaw in the second week of July was billed as the most important one since the end of the Cold War. It was held in the wake of the “Brexit” vote and the looming threat it poses to the very concept of European unity. Britain has been America's foremost ally within the European Union (EU) and NATO. With the exit of the United Kingdom, the EU is theoretically better positioned to follow a more independent foreign policy. An important goal of the Warsaw summit was to project unity. Former British prime minster, David Cameron, was in Moscow to pledge his country's unflinching support to the military alliance in particular and to the concept of European unity. But the main purpose of the NATO summit was to send a political and military message to Russia. By massively expanding its military presence all along Russia's borders in Eastern Europe, NATO has signaled that it was prepared for the eventuality of a military confrontation.

President Barack Obama in his concluding remarks at the summit said that NATO “was moving forward with the most significant reinforcement of collective defense anytime since the end of the cold war”.  The NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, in his opening remarks at the summit said that NATO would also step up its military activities in Syria, Iraq and Libya. A new “intelligence infusion center” will be established by NATO in Tunisia to coordinate anti-terrorism activities in the region. The US and NATO are supporting the forces of Gen. Khalifa Hifter in the Libyan civil war. NATO has also announced that its military presence in Afghanistan would now be extended till the end of 2017. The decision came after President Obama's announcement that the United States would keep 8700 troops in Afghanistan, in effect indefinitely continuing with its military presence in Afghanistan. At the Warsaw summit, it was announced that NATO would contribute $1 billion to finance the NATO military mission in the country.

The decision to send thousands of more NATO troops to Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania was ratified at the summit. Stoltenberg praised NATO's decision to install missile bases across Eastern Europe and the expansion of its rapid response force to 40,000. The NATO troop strength was tripled last year and now it is much larger than it was during the height of the Cold War. Stoltenberg said that NATO was sending a clear message that any attack on “an ally will be treated as an attack on the whole alliance”. The NATO secretary general had claimed on the opening day of the summit that there was no attempt to re-start the Cold War. “The Cold War is history and should remain history” he had said. But his later pronouncements and the decisions taken during the Warsaw summit, have belied these claims.

Tensions between Washington and Moscow have risen sharply since the western sponsored regime change in Ukraine took place two years ago. “We are increasing our military presence in the Baltic countries and Poland, but there is no doubt that it is something we do as a response to what Russia did in Ukraine”, Stoltenberg said in Warsaw. The American president announced the creation of a new American military headquarters in Warsaw and the additional delivery of most advanced American weaponry to NATO and Poland. He also announced plans to bolster the number of American troops in Poland along the border with Russia.

To coincide with the summit, an announcement was made that NATO will take over command of a US built missile shield in Europe. Russia had vehemently opposed the missile shield, saying that it went against the spirit of disarmament agreements the two countries had signed. America and NATO claim that the defence shield is to protect Europe from so called “rogue states” like Iran that have long range missile capabilities and poses no threat to Russia's strategic nuclear deterrent. Moscow has been arguing that there never was an Iranian missile threat to Europe, even before the signing of the US-Iran nuclear agreement.

The message to Moscow is that the West will consider Russia's interference in any local conflict like the ones currently going on in countries like Ukraine and Georgia will prompt an immediate NATO response. The US secretary of state, John Kerry was in Ukraine just before the Warsaw summit, announcing another $23 million in aid to those affected by the war in Eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko was in Warsaw calling for the “further consolidation of the military partnership” with NATO. The NATO spokesperson in Warsaw said that Ukraine's application for membership of NATO is still under consideration.

Washington and the NATO military leadership are also propounding the canard that the Russian government has sinister plans of destabilising its Baltic and Scandinavian neighbours. The president of Finland, Saulii Ninisto and the prime minister of Sweden, Stefan Lofven, were specially invited to attend the NATO summit. Finland and Sweden are not members of the NATO military alliance. Washington is putting pressure on the two countries to join NATO by hyping up the so-called Russian military threat. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin has warned Finland against signing up with NATO. He said that Russian troops are currently stationed more than a thousand miles away from the Finnish borders. If Finland joins NATO, Russian troops, he warned, will be immediately moved to the border between the two countries.

The German foreign minister, Frank Walter-Steinmeir publicly expressing concerns of many West European EU members about NATO's Washington inspired moves against Moscow, had said that “saber rattling and war cries” along Russia's borders were ill advised moves. “Whoever believes that a symbolic tank parade on the alliance's eastern border will bring security is mistaken. We are well advised not to create pretexts to renew an old confrontation”, the German foreign minister and the leader of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SDP) had observed. 

The Warsaw summit, according to analysts, constitutes the final repudiation of the 1997 Russia-NATO Founding Act. The West had pledged at the time to desist from exploiting the collapse of the Soviet Union to further expand militarily into Eastern Europe and reignite an arms race.  Under the pact, NATO had pledged to “radically” reduce its forces and both sides had undertaken not to view each other “as adversaries”. Many East European leaders present at the summit had called for the formal scrapping of the Founding Act.

While releasing the US military's annual budget of $583 billion in February, the American defense secretary, Ashton Carter said that the Pentagon should be prepared for “a return to great power competition” including the possibility of all out war with “high end enemies” like Russia and China. Carter has placed Russia on top of the list of threats the United States faces. During the Cold War, the principal task of the US army was to prepare for an all-out war on the USSR. This scenario is being replicated all over again, but unfortunately it is not farcical from the Russian point of view. The US and Russia together have around 2000 nuclear warheads on hair trigger alert.

Moscow has not witnessed this kind of military build up across its borders since Adolf Hitler's “Operation Barborasa” in Second World War. Russia lost more than 27 million people in that war. Counter terrorism is no longer the main focus of Washington and its allies even as the Islamic State is running berserk all over the world with its suicide terror attacks. Though NATO and Russia did not confront each other militarily during the Cold War, things changed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. NATO's first major military intervention was in the Balkans. Its 70 day bombing campaign in 1999 led to the final dissolution of the Yugoslav Federation. NATO bombing was done without UN Security Council authorisation. It was a precedent for the 2002 invasion of Iraq by American and British forces. NATO has intervened in many other international conflicts after 1999.

Moscow has condemned the recent NATO actions as a symptom of “anti Russian hysteria”. The spokesman for the Kremlin said that it was absurd to talk about threats from Russia when refugees are dying in the center of Europe and hundreds of people dying in West Asia on a daily basis.  Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet premier, has accused NATO of making preparations of turning the renewed cold war into a “hot one” by stationing more troops in Eastern Europe.  “All the rhetoric from Warsaw just yells at a desire to declare war on Russia. They only talk about defense, but actually they are preparing for offensive action”, Gorbachev commented.

At around time NATO was making its militaristic announcements, the South Korean government announced that it was installing the advanced “THAAD” anti- missile defense systems supplied by the United States. South Korea already hosts American bases along with military personnel. Beijing has strongly protested against the installation of the new missile systems in its immediate neighbourhood, saying that it will complicate the regional situation and adversely impact on China's “strategic security interests”. China along with Russia are the two main targets of the new Cold War. In Europe, America's main allies are the former Communist East European countries and in the Asia Pacific region, America’s key allies are Japan and South Korea, with India poised to emerge as a key supporting player.