Iron Curtain of the 21st century
More foreign military bases in Europe than at the peak of the Cold War


by Zivadin Jovanovic
Belgrade Forum
December 19, 2009


The new Iron Curtain does not divide the world of democracy from the world of dictatorship; rather, it partitions the Eurasian plate with a transversal that extends from the North Pole to the Horn of Africa....In present-day democratic Europe, there are more foreign military bases than at the peak of the Cold War.

NATO aggression against Serbia (the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) ten years ago was a turning point in international relations in Europe and in the world.

That precedent effectively undermined the international legal order established after WWII.

Europe saw a rapid expansion of NATO and proliferation of foreign military bases, in particular in its eastern and southeastern regions.

Over the past ten years, the USA established a network of new military bases, stretching from the Baltic to Anatolia, Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East.

In Bulgaria and Romania only, there were four new bases in each. Is that not a 21st Century Iron Curtain, unprecedented at any time, that replaced and expanded its namesake predecessor from the times of the Cold War, re-delineating it on the borders of Russia, the Caucasus, the Caspian and the Persian Gulf? In was established extremely rapidly, almost in a historic ‘blink of an eye’.

The aggression of 1999 agisnt Yugoslavia (Serbia) and the American military base of Camp Bondsteel in the Serbian Province of Kosovo and Metohija were, at the same time, a test, a practical checking of a “feasibility studyâ€