Friday 29th of March 2024

NATO is a fascist attack mongrel…...

NATO has completed its post-Cold War transformation from Europe's guard dog into America's attack dog

 

From an ostensible defensive alliance, NATO has grown into an aggressor designed to promote ‘rules’ dictated by the US

 

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, has just wrapped up its annual summit in Madrid, Spain. The one-time trans-Atlantic defensive alliance has, over the past three decades, transformed itself from the guardian of Western Europe into global cop, seeking to project militarily a so-called values- and rules-based posture.

 

BY Scott Ritter

 

NATO’s first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, famously noted that the mission of the bloc was “to keep the Russians out, the Germans down, and the Americans in.” In short, NATO served as a wall against the physical expansion of the Soviet Union from the perch it had established in eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War. Likewise, the creation of NATO prevented a treaty from being concluded between Germany and the Soviet Union that would enable the reunification of Germany. And lastly, the existence of NATO mandated that the US retain a significant full-time military presence in Europe, helping break America’s traditional tendency toward isolationism.

At the Madrid Summit, NATO radically redefined its mission to reflect a new mantra which could be encapsulated as “keep the Russians down, the Americans in, and the Chinese out.” It is an aggressive–even hostile–posture, premised on sustaining Western (i.e., American) supremacy. This mission is to be accomplished through the defense and promulgation of a so-called “rules-based international order” which exists only in the minds of its creators, which in this case is the United States and its allies in Europe. It also represents a radical break from past practice which sought to keep NATO defined by the four corners of its trans-Atlantic birthright by seeking to expand its security umbrella into the Pacific.

The guard dog had, it seems, been re-trained as an attack dog.

When an organization undergoes such a radical transformation in terms of its core mission and purpose, logic dictates that there exists a reason (or reasons) sufficient to justify the consequences attached to the action. There appear to be three such reasons. First and foremost is the fact that Russia refuses to accept NATO demands that it exist as a junior “partner” whose sovereignty must be subordinated to the collective will of post-Cold War Europe. Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, has made it clear that Russia considers itself to be a great power, and fully expects to be treated as such–especially when it comes to issues pertaining to the so-called “near abroad”–those former Soviet republics, such as Ukraine and Georgia, whose continued ties with Moscow are existential in nature.

NATO, on the other hand, while calling Russia a “partner,” was never serious about extending a viable hand of friendship, instead undertaking a thirty-year program of expansion which violated verbal promises made to Soviet leaders, leaving Russia weakened and not to be taken seriously by the self-proclaimed “victors” of the Cold War. When Russia pushed back, a process marked by Putin’s iconic speech to the 2007 Munich Security Conference, NATO undertook a more aggressive stance, promising Georgia and Ukraine eventual membership in the Alliance and, in 2014, supporting a violent coup against a government in Ukraine that kicked-off a series of events which culminated in the ongoing military operation being conducted by Russia in Ukraine.

Speaking at this week’s NATO Summit, the Secretary General of the organization, Jen Stoltenberg, ended all pretense that the bloc was an innocent bystander in the events leading up to Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, noting with pride that NATO had been preparing to fight Russia since 2014–that is, since the US-led coup. Indeed, NATO has, since 2015, been training the Ukrainian military to NATO standards.

Not to bolster the self-defense of Ukraine, but rather for the purpose of fighting ethnic Russians in the Donbass. NATO, it seems, was never interested in a peaceful resolution to the crisis, which flared up when Ukrainian nationalists began brutalizing the region’s Moscow-leaning majority.

Two NATO members, France and Germany, helped perpetuate a fraudulent peace process, the Minsk Accords, which former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko recently admitted was nothing more than a sham perpetrated for the purpose of buying time so that NATO could train and equip the Ukrainian military for the purpose of forcibly seizing control of both Donbass and Crimea.

 

All the 2007 Munich Summit really did was strip away any pretense that NATO was serious about peacefully coexisting with a powerful, sovereign Russian nation. A truly defensive alliance would have readily embraced such an outcome. NATO, it is now clear, is anything but.

NATO has been exposed as little more than a component of American global power projection, providing supplementary military and political backing for an American empire defined by the “rules-based international order” premised on sustained US military and economic supremacy. Keeping America on top, however, is proving to be a bridge too far, largely because the American empire itself is crumbling at its foundations, struggling economically to sustain the so-called “American Dream” and politically to keep alive the flawed promise of American democracy which underpins the very image the US seeks to promote abroad. The extent that the US can function with a modicum of credibility in the international arena today is determined purely by the level of “buy in” by the rest of the world to the golden idol that is the “rules-based international order.”

While the US has been able to strong-arm both NATO and its economic doppelganger, the G7, into actively promoting the “Rules based international order,” Russia and China have come together to create an alternative world view. 

That is international law, premised on the concepts enshrined in the United Nations Charter.

The G7 declared that the BRICS economic forum, comprised of nations who are more aligned with a “law-based” world order, and not a US-dominated “rules-based” one, represents the greatest threat to its relevance on the world stage. NATO, likewise, has declared that the Russian and Chinese challenge to the “rules-based international order” represents a major threat to NATO’s core values, prompting an expansion of NATO’s reach into the Pacific as a counter.

In short, NATO (together with the G7 group) is declaring war against the principles of international law that are encapsulated in the United Nations Charter. At its Madrid Summit, NATO has made it clear that it’s ready to shed blood to defend a legacy whose legitimacy exists only among the collective imaginations of its members. And not all of them, either. 

The goal of the rest of the world now needs to be to seek to minimize the damage done by this beast and find a way to dispose of it before it can do any more harm to the global community.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/russia/558168-nato-defensive-alliance-global-cop/

 

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NATO — the US useful idiots…..

 

The West is white

 

By Henry Reynolds

 

 

When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991 Gorbachev’s vision of a ‘common European homeland from the Atlantic to the Urals’ did not prevail. Rather than retract ,NATO expanded. Russia was too weak to halt the process but was useful as a potential adversary. Suggestions that it could actually join the alliance were peremptorily dismissed. NATO was far too useful for the Americans as the means to perpetuate their dominance of Western Europe. And without the Soviet Union the members of the alliance could be called on to join the global campaign against terror and go to war in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, places in many cases they knew little about.

The catastrophic war in Ukraine should not have come as a surprise. Tension between NATO and Russia had been intensifying for some time. From as far back as the era of Clinton and Yeltsin experienced observers had warned about the likely consequences of perpetuating the divisions of the cold war. But American policy makers are no doubt pleased with the solidarity of their client states with the added bonus of Sweden and Finland surprisingly seeking membership of the alliance. And having recruited a host of willing adjutants for Imperial ventures in the Middle East the next task is to turn NATO into a global player with the mission to both contain and confront China. There doesn’t appear to be any reluctance to join this new crusade. In early June the President of little Lithuania Ingrida Simonyte announced that she was willing to join the rest of the alliance ‘as it stares down China and Russia.’

But anti-Russian solidarity in Europe has not been matched in the rest of the world nor is there any enthusiasm to sign up to the coming confrontation with China. There are many reasons for this. As with the classic cold war there are bound to be many states which will determine to remain non-aligned. And the power and prestige of the West is greatly diminished. America can no longer present itself as an exemplar of a well ordered democracy. There is just too much that is going wrong. Domestic opinion is deeply fractured. Democracy itself is in trouble in the land of the free.

Wider forces are also at work. At the very moment when the west is fanning cold war embers there is a recrudescence of anti-colonialism in Europe’s erstwhile colonies with a focus on the legacy of slavery, the expropriation and destruction of indigenous societies and the accompanying intellectual heritage of racial superiority. In the rest of the world the West’s sense of entitlement is seen as just the latest iteration of habits of thought and behaviour which derive from the era when white men bestrode the world as self-selected lords of human kind.

The West’s hypocrisy is also under fire. The shock and outrage about Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine renews the memory of the disastrous wars unleashed on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria and the accompanying war crimes which have never been called to account. But the contemporaneous war in Yemen receives little attention and less condemnation even though those pillars of NATO the United States, Britain and France have all assisted Saudi Arabia. And the results speak for themselves. A U.N survey at the end of 2021 concluded that the war had resulted in 377,000 deaths including 10,200 children who had been killed or wounded. Famine conditions face 160,000 and 19 million people will go hungry. As recently as January this year a Saudi airstrike killed91 civilians and wounded another 226. Not that anyone in the west bothered to notice it.

The Washington Post reported on the 15th of June that President Biden is to visit Saudi Arabia in July for talks with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He explained that the Kingdom had been ‘a strategic partner of the United States for nearly eight decades’. No talk there of sanctions and condemnation. It illustrates how empty is the present Western rhetoric about a global struggle between democracy and autocracy. The world would be forgiven for assuming that the West is only outraged by war when the victims are white. This was certainly the conclusion of the Malaysian Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin when he addressed the recent Davos Conference. He lamented that “ the colour of your skin argument” still seemed relevant .’Now that violence and state terror effects someone like you—that is a white westerner suddenly, there is this moral outrage from Washington to Davos.’

The West’s hypocrisy about refugees and immigration has also been highlighted by the Ukraine war. The exemplary reception of the waves of over two million refugees fleeing from the war is so different from Poland’s hostility to Middle Eastern refugees still stuck in no man’s land between Poland and Belarus. They have been forgotten by the western media. Many are still there. The Polish army patrols the border and work proceeds on a 186 kilometre border fence. Latvia and Lithuania have adopted similar defensive policies. Poland can scarcely claim to have no responsibility in the matter. Their forces spent years in both Iraq and Afghanistan helping to produce the chaos from which people are trying to escape. But the electorate is adamant. In a recent survey 70% of respondents didn’t want non-white people living in their country.

Poland is not alone when it comes to migration from outside fortress Europe. After the migration crisis of 2015 European opinion has swung decisively against non-European migration. Right wing parties have ridden the wave into the centre of political life. Multiculturalism has been decisively rejected even in the erstwhile liberal Nordic countries. And in the background is the growing popularity of what has become known as the racial replacement theory. It is most influential in the United States. Surveys now show that a third of Americans and many more Republicans believe that there is a conspiracy to replace white or ‘heritage’ Americans with coloured foreigners.

The link between domestic developments such as these and the growing hostility to China scarcely needs emphasising. It is a result of replacement theory projected on a global scale. And that is of great concern to the rest of the world. A chorus of many voices insists that they want to work on both sides of the growing divide and don’t want to choose. Can this surprise us? In the C20th the whole world was drawn into two disastrous world wars. This was the legacy of Europe , North America and Japan. Why would anyone wish to see a C21st replay?

 

READ MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/the-west-is-white/

 

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SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43171

 

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