MOSCOW, June 16. /TASS/. NATO is a relic of the Cold War era, so it would have been logical of it to wind up voluntarily along with the Warsaw Pact back in 1991, Deputy Secretary of the Russian Security Council Alexander Venediktov said in an interview with the Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily on Sunday.

"Jens Stoltenberg [NATO secretary general] is playing cunning when he says that the alliance’s strength is in its ability to change. The alliance was and still is a relic of the Cold War era. The most logical end of the NSTO history would have been its voluntary dissolution along with the winding up of the Warsaw Pact," he said.

According to Venediktov, new life was breathed into NATO in 2014 when the West launched its anti-Russian campaign and NATO’s news strategy announced by Stoltenberg fits well into this logic.

After the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the end of its confrontation with the United States, NATO had to find new goals to justify its existence. "But the alliance could boast nothing but shameful bombardments of Yugoslavia in 1999 or Libya in 2011. NATO leaders failed to find a worthy role for their bloc in the new world order," he said, adding that there were no reasons for NATO to go on existing when the Cold War was over.

On May 22, NATO’s Military Committee approved a new military strategy of the alliance. As NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg put it, the strategy was adopted to deal with new challenges, with the ‘Russian nuclear threat’ among them.