RIGA, June 15. /TASS/. NATO in its present form doesn't have any significance and it should be either disbanded or reformed, Andrejs Mamikins, a member of the European parliament representing Latvia told TASS on Thursday.
"The North-Atlantic Treaty Organization has outlived itsellf as a format," Mamikins said. "The alliance should be either disbanded or heavily reshuffled because its current existence is absolutely senseless."
"The huge expenses that turn into a heavy burden on the shoulders of the small and impoverished countries like Latvia are actually bringing zero results," he said.
As a military organization, NATO has not resolved a single crisis neither in Afghanistan nor in Iraq. "Along with it, NATO preferred to stay away from the crisis in Libya where a civil war is raging and the state has fallen apart," Mamikins said.
He warned that the bloc was standing on the threshhold of a major crisis and added that the future had two options in store for the organization. "It's either like in a play by Janis Rainis (Latvia's best-known poet, dramatist and politician of the eartly 20th century TASS), those who transform will survive, or else the pact will fall to pieces," Mamikins said.
He called into question the rationality of deploying NATO's multinational battalions in the three former Soviet Baltic republics Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Some milieus repeat as a mantra the assertion that NATO is a guarantor of their security but the recent opinion polls indicate that, in Estonia and Latvia as a minimum, almost a half of the population do not believe the situation will become any safer if Canadian, Polish of American military start roaming along the border with Russia.
NATO took a decision at its summit in Warsaw in July 2016 to deploy four multinational battalions in the eastern Baltic countries and Poland as of the beginning of 2017. The strength of the NATO grouping in Latvia is expected to reach well over 1,000 men and officers eventually.
It will comprise army units from the countries as diverse as Albania, Canada, Spain, Italy, Poland, and Slovenia.