PRESS RELEASE

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Former Australian Diplomat: NATO Playing a Dangerous Game

July 13, 2016 (EIRNS)—In a short but sharply focused letter to the Guardian, former Australian diplomat Tony Kevin warns that NATO is playing a dangerous game in Poland and the Baltics. At the just concluded NATO summit,

"Western leaders emphasised in their public rhetoric a balanced message of ’deterrence and dialogue’ with Putin’s ’aggressive’ Russia. But the reality is that they have just given weighty political endorsement to 4,000 NATO—mostly US—forces now being stationed in the Baltic states and Poland..."

"We have not been in such a dangerous place since Europe 1913 or 1939," Kevin goes on.

"The west has truly sleepwalked into these new and unnecessary east-west dangers, supported by a false narrative of Russian aggression. The US, the UK and France are now hostage to their Polish and Baltic states’ NATO-allied governments—the maturity and judgment of whose leaders I have no great confidence in,"

he concludes.

"It is Obama’s, Cameron’s, Merkel’s and Hollande’s greatest foreign policy failure, to have allowed the world’s security to drift into this hair-trigger, tripwire situation."

Kevin, a career diplomat from 1968 until 1998, served as Australia’s ambassador to Poland in 1991 to 1994 and to Cambodia from 1994 until 1997.