Columbia joins NATO as a ‘global partner’

Columbia is about to become the first Latin American nation to join NATO as its newest member.

The Columbian President Juan Manuel Santos told a press briefing in Bogota “We are getting into the big leagues. We will be measured, compared and evaluated with the best.”

Their membership is to be ratified in Brussels next week.

This move isn’t being received all that well by Columbia’s neighbor Venezuela, which has been at odds with the Organization’s members over its politico economic model and has been on the receiving end of numerous rounds of sanctions on various pretexts.

telesur reports:

Colombia will be the first “global partner” of NATO in Latin America, beginning next week, President Juan Manuel Santos announced Friday.

Venezuela has rejected the announcement by Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos that his country will be entering the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as a “global partner.”

“Venezuela denounces once more before the international community the intention of Colombian authorities to lend themselves to introduce, in Latin America and the Caribbean, a foreign military alliance with nuclear capacity, which in every way constitutes a serious threat for peace and regional stability,” a statement by the foreign ministry said.

Likewise, Venezuela reiterated that it supports the historical position of the region to distance itself from the politics and wars of NATO, and from “any other army or military organization that desires to apply force to the suffering of the people, to impose and guarantee the hegemony of a particular political and economic model.”

The statement asks that the Colombian government fulfill its obligations toward peace and peaceful solutions to regional controversies.

Colombia will be the fist “global partner” of NATO in Latin America, beginning next week, President Santos announced Friday.

NATO was founded during the Cold War and was primarily a means for Western nations – led by the United States – to suppress the Soviet Bloc militarily and economically.

It continues to play a major role in modern conflicts, and has engaged in major military interventions in sovereign countries, most recently the removal and murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

NATO was formed to act as a counter to the Soviet Union. While the USSR has been out of the picture for going on three decades, NATO has persisted, notwithstanding the significant changes on the geopolitical map that have manifested since that time.

The need for such an organization, in the decade and half following the dissolution of the USSR, before Putin’s trajectory had fully materialized, makes one wonder what purpose it served or what justified its prolonged existence, given that the threat that it was created to counter no longer existed?

In fact, the West had installed its own puppet regime in Moscow (Boris Yeltsin), meaning that the West’s perception that they needed any form of economic or political or military defense against Russia was entirely unnecessary and egregious, so that it would appear that the US led alliance had a beef with Russians themselves, rather than whatever political or economic model happened to be in play at the Kremlin. Now, NATO continues to grow, in violation of a vow never to do so, but as a counterweight to what, exactly?