'Fateful' Warsaw Summit Will Meddle With NATO-Russia Founding Act

The North Atlantic Alliance has been obsessed with Russia and its non-existent threat for months and the bloc's upcoming summit in Warsaw will only reinforce this trend. Unsurprisingly then, NATO will use the event to try, either openly or covertly, to void key clauses of the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, security analyst Alexei Fenenko asserted.

"The most important thing that will happen at NATO's summit in Warsaw is the political game over the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act," the analyst noted. Under this document the bloc reaffirmed that it does not intend to deploy large fighting forces and tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of its new member states.

Russia and the alliance "essentially made a deal" – the United States offers its allies and partners political guarantees, but makes no military moves. "Washington wants to revise this policy," the analyst noted.

Nineteen years later Washington's and NATO's priorities appear to lie elsewhere. Key hawks in the North Atlantic Alliance are using to Crimea's lawful reunification with Russia and the ongoing Ukrainian crisis that Moscow has no relation to as a pretext to invest heavily in the bloc's military capabilities, including its ever growing response force, weapons deployment and endless war-gaming on a scale unseen since the Cold War.

It is against this backdrop that approximately 2,000 people from 28 member states, 26 partner countries, as well as the EU, the UN and the World Bank will flock to the Polish capital of Warsaw on July 8-9 to take part in what NATO's Deputy Secretary-General Alexander Vershbow recently described as possibly "one of the most fateful [summits] in the history of the alliance."

#Warsaw #NATOsummit is shaping up to be one of the most consequential #NATO summits given current security environment #WGF16

— Alexander Vershbow (@NATOdsg) 3 июня 2016 г.

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Also consider this: the event will take place in Poland, one of the key advocates of a much tougher stance on Moscow. Ideally, Polish leadership wants to see a permanent NATO base on its territory. Not every alliance member is happy about it. Germany has steadily opposed creating permanent deployments in Eastern Europe.

"Poland is the key country that helps the US to pursue its interests in the region," the Vzglyad newspaper noted.

The Warsaw summit, according to Fenenko, could go one of two ways.

"The first scenario will see NATO trying to revise the Founding Act. Poland already did it in December 2015. The second option is that the bloc will not do it openly, but will instead adopt decisions that will de facto modify the act," he explained.

The North Atlantic Alliance is either trying to present Russia with a fait accompli or to force Moscow to reach compromise that will open the doors for NATO's deployments in Eastern Europe and the Baltic region, he added.