MADRID, July 8 (Xinhua) -- The continued existence of NATO means there will be no peace in Europe, a Spanish expert has said.
"The EU was founded to avoid intra-European conflicts, and the countries that are members of the EU have achieved this, which is the right path, but we have not been able to get rid of the U.S. military intervention," Pere Ortega, honorary president of the Delas Centre, told Xinhua in a recent exclusive interview.
The submissive foreign policy of European countries is due to the armed military intervention of the United States and its NATO allies, noted the expert from the Barcelona-headquartered independent research center on issues related to disarmament and peace.
"After the end of the Cold War, NATO should have logically disappeared, but it didn't and is still looking for new enemies," Ortega said.
It has become the armed wing of the United States and the Western capitalist bloc, "and from the end of the Cold War it has been where it likes to intervene and bomb as it pleases," which has caused multiple wars and regional conflicts, he said.
Ortega said one of the main causes of the current Ukraine crisis is NATO's eastward expansion since the 1990s and the pressure it has been exerting on Russia.
"NATO promised (former Soviet Union leader Mikhail) Gorbachev that it would not expand towards Russia's borders, but this was an empty promise," he noted.
Expansionist policies as such run counter to the trends most countries are taking, Ortega said.
Instead of making the world a more dangerous place and moving towards confrontation, "we should be moving towards a partnership that guarantees common security, which is what the UN wants and which is the path we should take," he said. ■