On April 3 and 4, 2009, in Strasbourg, France and Kehl, Germany, neighboring cities separated by the Rhine, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), will put on a grand show to celebrate its 60th anniversary (it was founded on April 4, 1949, with the signing in Washington of the North Atlantic Treaty) whose main focus will be a summit of heads of state and government of the member countries.

To date, NATO defines its raison d’être as the defense of democracy, individual freedom, the rule of law, and resolving conflicts by peaceful means. In fact, NATO arose as a military instrument against the Soviet Union in the years immediately following the Second World War and its founding marks the beginning of the Cold War, according to analysts and specialists from the Latin American Circle for International Studies (LACIS).

An analysis of its achievements and activities is revealing. What has NATO done for the world, for the Atlantic Alliance, for Europe? It has bombed Yugoslavia without a prior declaration of war, prostrating the country and precipitating its definitive disintegration. It has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, employing the massive use of force, perpetrating massacres of innocent civilians, which continue to this day.

Today, NATO forces and especially Americans soldiers, whose contingents are the most numerous barely control the land they walk on. The Taliban have regrouped in Afghanistan and continually strike against NATO. They control a good part of the country. The Iraqi resistance has not subsided. The regimes imposed by the United States and NATO do not govern, in the best of cases, beyond Kabul or Baghdad, according to the LACIS specialists.

What achievements can the NATO leaders speak of? Of the expansion of a military alliance to Eastern Europe -where the waters of the Atlantic Ocean do not reach- and even beyond, to the Caucasus, in flagrant violation of the commitment assumed by George Herbert Walker Bush and his Secretary of State James Baker, when they promised Mikhail Gorbachev that the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact -the military alliance of the Eastern European socialist community— would not be taken advantage of in order to expand NATO toward the Russian border?

April 4, 1949 marked the real beginning of the Cold War. Six decades later, with a rapid expansion that threatens to reach the Caucasus, Central Asia, and even Latin America, NATO has exceeded its own limits and its mission and has, in practice, restarted the Cold War, the LACIS specialists feel.

What values are defended by NATO, which speaks of individual freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and the peaceful resolution of conflicts, when it supports Mikhail Saakashvili, a bloody and belligerent dictator installed in Georgia through electoral fraud that put an end to democracy in that country; when it does not respect the freedom of the people of Georgia or its neighboring countries; when it mocks the primacy of human rights and did not hesitate to attack Southern Ossetia, with the expectation of unleashing a war between Russia and NATO?

The United States and some Western European countries became tremendously upset over the resolute and firm Russian response to the Georgian aggression. When the Russians safeguarded the freedom and self-determination of the Ossetians, and in the process, of the Abkhazians; when, after giving a lesson to the Georgian aggressor, they recognized the independence of Southern Ossetia and Abkhazia, NATO sternly condemned Moscow.

And what about Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kosovo? the LACIS analysts ask. What is good for the United States and NATO is bad for the other countries. Even when there is no possible comparison: in Yugoslavia, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, the civil population was deliberately attacked, these countries infrastructure was destroyed, and their economy was wrecked. In Kosovo, ethnic Albanians were allowed to carry out a cruel and bloody ethnic cleansing against the Serbians.

The Russian troops halted the Georgian advance in South Ossetia and put an end to the genocide against the Ossetians. Subsequently, the Russian Federation recognized the independence of two nations, Ossetia and Abkhazia, which have nothing in common with the Georgians and that refuse to be part of that country. Kosovo, meanwhile, is the cradle of the Serbian nation.

The balance sheet of 60 years of NATO’s existence could not be more somber. Six decades after the start of the Cold War, NATO, spurred on by the United States, is re-launching the conflict. This is a true threat to the peace and stability of the world, the LACIS specialists conclude.