gimes and their vassal groups as well as counterparts, with the term ‘international terrorism’.***In order to protect Europe and the West against the most long-lasting form of international terror, namely totalitarian communism, as well as in order to prevent the re-emergence of something like the national-socialist terror regime of Germany, the Western states formed a security alliance named the NATO. It should not be forgotten that the NATO’s explicit mission was and should be to protect the Western liberty against the tyranny and state terror practised by the Soviet Union, which was an almost pure example of what a major ‘terror regime’ is in a long run. In the spirit of Machiavelli’s romantic tone amidst all his cynicism, I dare to call this mission both virtuous and righteous.In the righteous times of Ronald Reagan, it was still very clear for all, against which ‘Evil Empire’ the NATO was meant to defend the Western liberty – the ‘Free World’. When, by the downfall of the Soviet terror regime, the West declared the Cold War to be over, the NATO faced an ideological problem: Although communist terror regimes continued to live on in China, North Korea and Cuba, but also in many Russian satellites, like in Serbia and in Belarus, the West felt it necessary to revise the original mission of the NATO. But since it lacked a clearly defined new target to defend the West against, the NATO began to lose its virtue: Would such a huge alliance as the NATO be needed only for interventions against relatively small terror regimes, such as the dictatorships of Iraq and Serbia?Even in the course of these obviously justified interventions against polities that the West had clearly found terror regimes, the NATO seemed to be quite foreign to its own initial fundamental values. Kuwait was liberated, but terror regimes were not at all removed in Iraq and Serbia. Croatia had to liberate i...
