Keating calls Nato head a ‘supreme fool’ over plan to open office in Asia
Paul Keating has waded once more into foreign policy, this time attacking Nato secretary general
Jens Stoltenberg as a “supreme fool” for his push to expand Nato’s reach into Asia. Nato has said it intends to open a liaison office in Tokyo.
In a statement on Sunday, Keating said French President
Emmanuel Macron was right to caution against straying from Nato’s “design and focus” saying the alliance had prevented Europe from achieving “peaceful unity” at the end of the cold war.
Keating said “Europeans have been fighting each other for the better part of three hundred years” and warned that “exporting that malicious poison to Asian would be akin to Asia welcoming a plague upon itself”.
Of all the people on the international stage the supreme fool among them is Jens Stoltenberg, the current Secretary-General of NATO. Stoltenberg by instinct and by policy, is simply an accident on its way to happen.
Keating also said China represented a fifth of the world’s population and that Stoltenberg “conducts himself as an American agent more than he performs as a leader and spokesperson for European security”.
Emmanuel Macron is doing the world a service putting a spike into Stoltenberg’s wheel – reminding all of us that Nato is a military organisation, not a civil one and an organisation focused on Europe and the Atlantic.