Retired Italian General: NATO Should Stop Provocations against Russia

Gen. Leonardo Tricarico (ret.), former Chief of Staff of the Italian Air Force and Deputy Commander of the Multinational Force in the Kosovo war (1999), wrote an article for the Italian website Askanews, translated into English by Pravda.ru, in which he called on Italy to raise its voice within NATO in order to stop provocations against Moscow. (The rough translations here are EIR‘s.)

“If we did not know what and where real threats to the security and stability of the Euro-Atlantic area are, we would just smile: The United States behaved strangely in the last six-seven years,” Tricarico wrote.

On one side, the U.S. complains that NATO allies should share a larger burden of NATO costs; “But on the other side it increases in an unacceptable way the pressures on its allies to be instruments in a policy that smells rotten: Cold War scenarios being pushed over and over again, using a still-undisputed dominant position.”

In this context, “real provocations are being produced, which only, fortunately, have not unleashed a real escalation, but they nevertheless have serious consequences in the confused and yes, serious, international scenario.” Most importantly, NATO “pays little attention to terrorism. And yet, didn’t the U.S. join the NATO-Russia Council at Pratica di Mare ([in] 2002), which was established precisely for the purpose of fighting terrorism?”

Tricarico, who was also military advisor to Italian Prime Ministers D’Alema, Amato, and Berlusconi, asks what Italy’s position in all this is. Judging from the “silence in the face of the latest U.S. sorties,” Rome would support a line of “containing an increasingly threatening Putin. But is this really the Italian view?

“Or should we tell the U.S.A. once and for all that, if it wants to deploy their troops in a frightened and propitiatory Nordic country, it should do so with its money, without involving NATO? Is it not time to close the door to new initiatives, especially those ones which Putin perceives as a threat to his security?

“Is it not long overdue that NATO should start to seriously strengthen its ability to fight terrorism, to be used by the international community to contain terror insanity instead of trying to convince the world that Russia is the enemy?”

This time you do not need a European “policy” to change things. “It would be enough if, at the next NATO ministerial meeting, just one country should raise its voice to demand restoring balance to Europe, which, although not united, still does not need either external influences, nor to box Russia into a corner, against which to measure our forces, our evaluations, and our interests.”

General Tricarico asks the Italian government to take such a step “with the same strength it is fighting for just as important issues, such as the immigration crisis and investments into employment.”

General Tricarico is now the administrative secretary of the ICSA Foundation/Fondazione ICSA, Intelligence, Culture, and Strategic Analysis, a thinktank founded in 2009, and headed by Marco Minniti.