75

The year 1949 began with the inauguration of Harry Truman, in February of the same year Chaim Weizman became the first president of Israel. In 1949, the Council of Europe was founded, the foundation stone for the UN building on the East River was laid, the Democratic Republic of Germany was proclaimed, as well as the People's Republic of China under the leadership of Mao Zedong, and the Soviet Union tested the first atomic bomb. 1949 saw a lot of deadly earthquakes, storms, shipwrecks, plane crashes, train derailments, earthquakes, new countries were founded, George Orwell published his 1984, and Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Gravitation.

1949 was the founding year of NATO, the North Atlantic Alliance. After the Second World War, Eastern and Western Europe were separated by ideological and political divisions. With the beginning of the Cold War, twelve countries on both sides of the Atlantic founded NATO to counter the risk of the USSR trying to extend its control to other parts of the European continent. While the post-war Marshall Plan provided funds for the economic stabilization of Western Europe, the role of NATO, as a military as well as a political alliance, consisted in ensuring collective defense. Truman's words are: "The Marshall Plan and NATO are two sides of the same coin".

From the end of World War II until today, geopolitical circumstances have changed as the world revolved around its axis and around the sun, the Cold War ended, the Soviet Union collapsed, the West became convinced that the end of history had come and that capitalism would go hand in hand with liberal democracy to be the way for the rest of the world until the end of that history. The number of people on the globe grew, technology improved, local and regional wars were fought, the environment was destroyed, terrorism was resorted to in the fight for ideas and ideologies, seemingly the same, but always new or different. 75 years since the founding of the North Atlantic Alliance, we live in a world where Putin's Russia of the 21st century is at war with the West, not only on the Ukrainian front, but also in an ideological, global sense. China is the same West's strategic rival. Security risks also spread in certain regions of the world where geopolitical muscles are exercised, from the Arctic to Africa, the southern European neighborhood, the most powerful part of the world demographically and with resources, the Indo-Pacific is the focus of the US mainly because of Chinese actions. Security risks are also spreading in the communication-disinformation and cybernetic-technological spheres, the nuclear threat, and increasingly in the area of ​​space.

The summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the US capital took place four months before the US elections, when not only Donald Trump, but the entire American and global public questioned Joe Biden's cognitive abilities and health. Hosting such a summit in an election year is a good attempt, or at least a message, in order not to lay foundations that would be irreversible for the Alliance, whoever sits in the White House. There are 30 countries in NATO and it holds almost half of the world's GDP.

In the Washington declaration from the summit, the allies, after sleepless diplomatic nights of harmonizing the text, finally wrote that Ukraine's path towards NATO membership is irreversible. Although there is no date for membership, and it is difficult to talk about it while the country is under attacks from Russia and has no control over parts of its territory, NATO allies have committed to continuous military aid to Kiev of at least 40 billion euros per year. The re-evaluation of the promised aid will take place at the NATO summit in The Hague in 2025. At that time, the former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte will already be leading the Alliance as Secretary General, and the possibility that this kind of war with the assertive Putin's regime will drag on for another year is now, it seems, quite real. The Hungarian Prime Minister, whose country currently presides over the Council of the European Union, landed at NATO's table directly from Moscow. The very first point of the declaration from the summit says that NATO is bound by common values ​​- personal freedom, human rights, democracy and the rule of law. States, it is written in paragraph number one, obey international law, the principles of the UN Charter and are committed to a rules-based world order. While individual rulers in the member states of the Alliance are doing all of the above and while international law and the rules mentioned have been selectively violated or ignored throughout history, until then regimes like Putin's or Xi's will be able to behave as they do today, sometimes it seems , the hopeless state of the world, we look. Russia is drilling the West not only on the Ukrainian front, but with a constant nuclear threat and also from space, disinformation, cyber, hacker attacks, the use of chemical weapons, geostrategic encirclement in a neighborhood rich in natural and human resources, systemic action against the mechanisms of democracy, a system based on rules, law, anti-corruption mechanisms, trust in elections and institutions. NATO detects all this in the final declaration, announcing new initiatives from cooperation with the EU in the fight to preserve democracy and the fight against disinformation, through the establishment of a center against cyberattacks, to the strengthening of research in the field of quantum technology, threats strengthened by accelerated technological progress will not decrease. Although defense spending is growing and in some countries exceeds the agreed two percent of GDP, it is hard for me not to remember the NATO summit six years ago in Brussels, during the World Cup in Russia, when after the first bilateral meeting with Jens Stoltenberg, Trump thundered – we have to raise that to four percent! Angela Merkel rolled her eyes at that summit, whose successor Scholz is now announcing the installation of the most modern air defense system in Europe in cooperation with the Americans in 2026, just when the world's soccer players will travel to America. After the finals in Moscow in 2018, Putin flew to Helsinki for a summit with Trump, where the then US president acted like a good businessman, protecting Russia's backyard, Poland, with LNG, the Patriot system and the newly established Three Seas initiative. At the press conference, Putin threw him a soccer ball, wishing him all the best in hosting the next World Cup, which will be shared by the USA, Canada and Mexico in two years. The final was played in Moscow and four years after the annexation of Crimea and the occupation of parts of Donbas without major problems, Russia's manipulation of migratory processes, the protection of critical energy and any other strategic infrastructure, a possible attack on the territory of allies, would be especially emphasized in this declaration from Washington 2024 . China, on the other hand, is key in enabling Russian aggression against Ukraine with its "borderless" partnership with Moscow, and as such represents a systemic risk to Euro-Atlantic security, according to the allies. However, the reduction of strategic risk is not visible on the horizon of either Beijing or Moscow.

"Everyone is waiting for November," somewhat disappointedly said Ukrainian President Zelensky when he was invited to Washington. While everyone is waiting to see what will happen in the American elections, children died in a hospital in Kiev, and possible further sources of Russian destabilization are clearly indicated in areas from the Western Balkans, Moldova to the rest of the Black Sea region.

Although many say that NATO now represents the first serious defense plan since the Cold War and is rapidly working to tackle the accelerating security challenges, climate change being at the top of them, let's not forget the question of strategic orientation with regard to a possible change in Bijela home in the midst of such great global tension is the question of all questions. Although NATO may have been redundant or unnecessary at the time of Trump's mandate, as he himself said, and Europe was still lulled into the arrangement of eternal American protection woven into the foundations of the Alliance in 1949, times have changed. The old Biden, but also the old Trump, with huge divisions within America itself, do not give much reason for a "win-win" scenario. The only "win", which is now necessary for all who make up the world that still pretends to live by the rules of the rule of law and the protection of democracy, is the one in Ukraine. And I sincerely hope that in 2025 we will have a more coherent answer to that question, given the unsustainability of global tension. By 2049, a lot will certainly change, what Orwell wrote in 1949 in his 1984, we are already seeing. With his eventual return to the White House, will Trump show that he is a stable genius in international relations or just the final nail in the coffin of the West as we knew it?

(N1/Croatia)