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despite countless foreign policy disasters, the 2024 NATO declaration continues to push the deadly neocon agenda....For the sake of America’s security and world peace, the U.S. should immediately abandon the neocon quest for hegemony in favour of diplomacy and peaceful co-existence. NATO and the deadly strategy of neoconservatism By Jeffrey D. Sachs
In 1992, U.S. foreign-policy exceptionalism went into overdrive. The U.S. has always viewed itself as an exceptional nation destined for leadership, and the demise of the Soviet Union in December 1991 convinced a group of committed ideologues—who came to be known as neoconservatives—that the U.S. should now rule the world as the unchallenged sole superpower. Despite countless foreign policy disasters at neocon hands, the 2024 NATO Declaration continues to push the neocon agenda, driving the world closer to nuclear war. The neoconservatives were originally led by Richard Cheney, the Defence Secretary in 1992. Every President since then—Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden—has pursued the neocon agenda of U.S. hegemony, leading theU.S. into perpetual wars of choice, including Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Ukraine, as well as relentless eastward expansion of NATO, despite a clear U.S. and German promise in 1990 to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move one inch eastward. The core neocon idea is that the U.S. should have military, financial, economic, and political dominance over any potential rival in any part of the world. It is targeted especially at rival powers such as China and Russia, and therefore brings the U.S. into direct confrontation with them. The American hubris is stunning: most of the world does not want to be led by the U.S., much less led by a U.S. state clearly driven by militarism, elitism and greed. The neocon plan for U.S. military dominance was spelled out in the Project for a New American Century. The plan includes relentless NATO expansion eastward, and the transformation of NATO from a defensive alliance against a now-defunct Soviet Union to an offensive alliance used to promote U.S. hegemony. The U.S. arms industry is the major financial and political backer of the neocons. The arms industry spearheaded the lobbying for NATO’s eastward enlargement starting in the 1990s. Joe Biden has been a staunch neocon from the start, first as Senator, then as Vice President, and now as President. To achieve hegemony, the neocon plans rely on CIA regime-change operations; U.S.-led wars of choice; U.S. overseas military bases (now numbering around 750 overseas bases in at least 80 countries); the militarisation of advanced technologies (biowarfare, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, etc.); and relentless use of information warfare. The quest for U.S. hegemony has pushed the world to open warfare in Ukraine between the world’s two leading nuclear powers, Russia and the United States. The war in Ukraine was provoked by the relentless determination of the U.S. to expand NATO to Ukraine despite Russia’s fervent opposition, as well as the U.S. participation in the violent Maidan coup (February 2014) that overthrew a neutral government, and the U.S. undermining of the Minsk II agreement that called for autonomy for the ethnically Russian regions of eastern Ukraine. The NATO Declaration calls NATO a defensive alliance, but the facts say otherwise. NATO repeatedly engages in offensive operations, including regime-change operations. NATO led the bombing of Serbia in order to break that nation in two parts, with NATO placing a major military base in the breakaway region of Kosovo. NATO has played a major role in many U.S. wars of choice. NATO bombing of Libya was used to overthrow the government of Moammar Qaddafi. The U.S. quest for hegemony, which was arrogant and unwise in 1992, is absolutely delusional today, since the U.S. clearly faces formidable rivals that are able to compete with the U.S. on the battlefield, in nuclear arms deployments, and in the production and deployment of advanced technologies. China’s GDP is now around 30% larger than the U.S. when measured at international prices, and China is the world’s low-cost producer and supplier of many critical green technologies, including EVs, 5G, photovoltaics, wind power, modular nuclear power, and others. China’s productivity is now so great that the U.S. complains of China’s “over-capacity.” Sadly, and alarmingly, the NATO declaration repeats the neoconservative delusions. The Declaration falsely declares that “Russia bears sole responsibility for its war of aggression against Ukraine,” despite the U.S. provocations that led to the outbreak of the war in 2014. The NATO Declaration reaffirms Article 10 of the NATO Washington Treaty, according to which NATO’s eastward expansion is none of Russia’s business. Yet the U.S. would never accept Russia or China establishing a military base on the US border (say in Mexico), as the U.S. first declared in the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 and has reaffirmed ever since. The NATO Declaration reaffirms NATO’s commitment to biodefense technologies, despite growing evidence that U.S. biodefense spending by NIH financed the laboratory creation of the virus that may have caused the Covid-19 pandemic. The NATO Declaration proclaims NATO’s intention to continue to deploy anti-ballistic Aegis missiles (as it has already done in Poland, Romania, and Turkey), despite the fact that the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and placement of Aegis missiles in Poland and Romania has profoundly destabilised the nuclear arms control architecture. The NATO Declaration expresses no interest whatsoever in a negotiated peace for Ukraine. The NATO Declaration doubles-down on Ukraine’s “irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership.” Yet Russia will never accept Ukraine’s NATO membership, so the “irreversible” commitment is an irreversible commitment to war. The Washington Post reports that in the lead-up to the NATO summit, Biden had serious qualms about pledging an “irreversible path” to Ukraine’s NATO membership, yet Biden’s advisors brushed aside these concerns. The neoconservatives have created countless disasters for the U.S. and the world, including several failed wars, a massive buildup of U.S. public debt driven by trillions of dollars of wasteful war-driven military outlays, and the increasingly dangerous confrontation of the U.S. with China, Russia, Iran, and others. The neocons have brought the Doomsday Clock to just 90 seconds to midnight (nuclear war), compared with 17 minutes in 1992. For the sake of America’s security and world peace, the U.S. should immediately abandon the neocon quest for hegemony in favor of diplomacy and peaceful co-existence. Alas, NATO has just done the opposite.
Republished from Common Dreams, July 13, 2024 https://johnmenadue.com/nato-and-the-deadly-strategy-of-neoconservatism/
NATO IS A FASCIST ORGANISATION WITH ONE AIM: CONQUER THE ENTIRE WORLD FOR AMERICAN EMPIRE DOMINATION. SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43171 SEE ALSO: unnecessary and intolerable transfusion to make NATO survive......a war pact for the world hegemon against peace....
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losses....
The Western public has little, if any, knowledge of the scale of losses in troops and equipment sustained by Ukraine since the beginning of the special military operation, international observers say.
The Western press is concealing information about the real state of affairs on the ground in Ukraine, including the mass destruction of NATO weapons provided to the Ukrainian military, and the loss of Ukrainian soldiers, Irish journalist and entrepreneur Chey Bowes wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on July 15.
"Here, yesterday, another €150 million [$163.4 million] of German taxpayers' money was vaporized in Dictator Zelensky's Ukraine," Bowes continued, attaching a video showing the elimination of the German-made IRIS-T anti-aircraft missile system (SAM).
"Russian Iskander missiles completely destroyed the entire complex consisting of an IRIS-T SAM launcher and its TRML-4D radar station - these are the high-tech systems Zelensky is so desperately begging the EUSA for," the journalist pointed out.
According to Bowes, the reason "the Western media doesn't want" the public to see this, is "to maintain your ignorance and, therefore, your complicity in the "Ukraine can win fantasy.'"
"After all, you're paying for it all," the journalist remarked.
https://sputnikglobe.com/20240715/mainstream-media-downplays-tremendous-losses-of-western-military-equipment-in-ukraine---journo-1119377302.html
We also tried to estimate the cost of military equipment that the Russian army has lost during the fighting against Ukraine since February 24, 2022. Of course, these calculations are very approximate, and do not claim to be particularly accurate. Nevertheless, they give an idea of the general order of losses — how many billions of dollars are left in the form of Russian scrap metal in the fields of Ukraine.
https://index.minfin.com.ua/en/russian-invading/casualties/
PRESENTLY, UKRAINE LOSES MORE THAN 1500 SOLDIERS PER DAY....
Ukraine’s top commander Aleksandr Syrsky is ready to lay down arms and capitulate to Russia, a lawmaker from Vladimir Zelensky’s party has claimed.
Syrsky was appointed Ukraine’s highest-ranking general in early February, replacing Valery Zaluzhny, who oversaw last year’s failed attempt to push back Russian forces. According to MP Mariana Bezuglaya from Zelensky’s ‘Servant of the People’ party, the two are secretly colluding to prevent a Ukrainian victory.
Bezuglaya, who is also deputy chair of the National Security, Defense and Intelligence Committee, laid out her case for a top-level military conspiracy in a lengthy post on Facebook on Saturday.
https://www.rt.com/russia/601096-syrsky-generals-mafia-bezuglaya/
Kiev should send 18-year-olds to fight Russia to increase the likelihood of victory, former US ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder has argued.
Earlier this year, Ukraine lowered the draft threshold from 27 to 25 years as part of a major overhaul of the military service system, aimed at boosting mobilization rates.
“This is a war being fought by 40-year-olds,” Daalder told Euronews on the sidelines of last week’s NATO summit in the US. “No other war in history has been fought by 40-year-olds.”
“You need to get 18-year-olds, and you need to get 20-year-olds, and you need to get 21-year-olds, which is what every army in the rest of the world relies on,” he added.
Both Russia and Ukraine have a system of mandatory conscription of young adult males, but 18-years-olds are not deployed to the frontline by either country. Moscow has said it fully relies on contracted volunteers rather than mobilized reservists in the conflict with its NATO-backed neighbor, with roughly 1,000 people recruited per day, according to senior Russian officials.
https://www.rt.com/news/601091-nato-envoy-ukraine-draft/
MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:
NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)
THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.
THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....
CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954
TRANSNISTRIA WILL BE PART OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION.
A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.
EASY.
THE WEST KNOWS IT.
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billionaires....
Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)
The central reality ever since Harry S. Truman started the Cold War on 25 July 1945 has been and is that the U.S. Government is determined to capture Russia in order to culminate and satisfy the craving that America’s billionaires (who control the U.S. Government via their ‘news’-media, think tanks, and other propaganda-agencies) have, to achieve the world’s first-ever all-encompassing and unchallengeable global empire (it’s called “U.S. hegemony”). Just months after Hitler died with that dream for Germany’s Government, Truman took up this banner for America’s Government. It’s too ugly a fact for the empire to allow the public to know. This fact explains not only the U.S. regime’s secretly protecting thousands of ‘former’ Nazis and hiring them for work against the Soviet Union (which had no similar program of hiring Nazis to work against the U.S.), but also the nearly a hundred post-WW2 coups and over 130 U.S. military invasions and occupations of countries throughout the world after WW2 — clearly the world’s most aggressive country ever, with the only possible exception having been Hitler’s Germany. But within the U.S. empire (the U.S. and its by now nearly 50 colonies), it is unknown because strictly prohibited to assert and even more strictly prohibited to document (think, for example, of the thousands of ‘classified’ documents from 1945 to 1955 — more than 65 years ago — that still remain hidden by the U.S. Government and its satellites, and of the uncounted thousands of others that have been released only recently and so heavily expurgated as to be virtually uninterpretable). Why does the U.S. Congress not pass a law forcing the U.S. Government to publish ALL documents in its possession that are more than 30 years old? Why don’t its ‘allies’ do it? And they all have the nerve to call themselves democracies! (And to call the nations they aim yet to conquer ‘autocracies’ or ‘dictatorships’!) Only fools can trust such pretentious hypocritical regimes, because these Governments lie about themselves vastly more than other Governments do — they have to do it in order to remain in power ‘democratically’ (meaning with elections), which is the way that new-style dictatorships function.
The first fact that they hide is that though elections are a NECESSARY part of any democracy, elections throughout the U.S. empire are only for PR purposes, to fool the deceived public to think that an election is a SUFFICIENT condition in order to BE a democracy. That ridiculous lie is universal throughout the U.S. empire — despite its ludicrousness. For example: Did you know that each of the two political Parties in America, the DNC and the RNC, is a closed self-appointing private club, which has no obligation to its voters — much less to the entire public — and so it can and sometimes does ignore vote-counts in its primary ’elections’, whenever it wants to? And it consists of representatives of the Party’s mega-donors, and is funded by billionaires and their agents including lobbyists. For example, these are the reasons why Bernie Sanders, whom no billionaire donated to, actually never had a chance to win the Democratic Party’s nomination, regardless of what the voters wanted. It’s all for show, and the show must go on.
The second fact they hide is the falsehood of the belief that a multi-Party Government is necessarily more democratic than a one-Party Government is. By hiding the falsehood of that allegation, they falsely allege that they themselves ARE a “democracy” because they have multiple Parties(representing different factions within the aristocracy). The ridiculousness of that falsehood is now painfully evident in the indisputable fact that in both the U.S. itself and its main colleague the UK, the two Parties that vie for power — Democrats versus Republicans, and Labour versus Conservative — have become indistinguishable from one-another on the key ideological matters: each of the four Parties is the very embodiment of neoliberalism in domestic policies and of neoconservatism in foreign policies. The liberal billionaires and the conservative billionaires are solidly both neoliberal and neoconservative. And ALL billionaires are both neoliberals and neoconservatives (which is why our Governments are). That’s a “democracy”? It is instead a voracious empire, which is ruled on behalf of its billionaires — not of the public.
A third fact that is hidden is the fact that any empire is intrinsically a dictatorship — internationally because each of its colonies is required to adhere to the commands of its imperial master; and nationally because even within the imperial nation (as well as in each of its colonies), the residents are actually only subjects never citizens, because NO empire represents, or can represent, its residents, it represents ONLY its aristocracy, its super-rich.
A fourth fact is that, in the post-WW2 world, when missiles exist that fly so fast that it can become possible for an imperial country — now actually the ONLY imperial country, America — to blitz-annihilate the central command of a targeted-for-takeover country (such as Russia) so fast that the target’s central command (such as The Kremlin) might even be annihilated within as short a time as only 5 minutes away from a nuclear-tipped missile’s being launched, thereby preventing any retaliation; international relations are now only a hair-trigger away from doomsday (because of America’s obsessively voraciously power-craving billionaires, who insist upon conquering not only Russia but China).
Here is how obsessive the U.S. regime is about this objective of controlling all other countries: on 27 October 2022, I headlined “NATO wants to place nuclear missiles on Finland’s Russian border — Finland says yes”, and reported that “a condition that NATO had placed on Finland to join NATO was to allow America’s nuclear missiles to be positioned on Finland’s Russian border, which is closer to Moscow than any other except Ukraine’s. Whereas Ukraine’s would be 5 minutes from blitz-nuking Moscow so as to preemptively decapitate Russia’s retaliatory capacity, Finland’s would be 7 minutes — only around 120 seconds longer for Russia to be able to launch its retaliatory strikes.” If Finland had said no to that condition from the U.S., then, as Newsweek’s intentionally hiding the real news in their news-report about this had phrased the matter, Finland “gave a ‘commitment’ to NATO in July [2022] that they wouldn’t seek ‘restrictions or national reservations’ [against whatever or wherever in Finland, the U.S. Government might choose to place a nuclear-tipped missile targeted at The Kremlin] if Helsinki’s application is accepted.” Decoding Newseeek’s intentionally hard-to-understand article about this: America — the master-nation over NATO — had demanded of Finland’s Government: either you allow us to place wherever we want in Finland, whatever nuclear weapons we want to place there, or else you won’t be allowed into NATO. Kotka Finland is only 507 miles away from The Kremlin — that’s around 7 minutes away. Only Ukraine (317 miles from The Kremlin) would be nearer; 507 miles would be the nearest-yet — and so the Washington Government demanded this condition. Since it now looks unlikely that America will be able to place such a missile in Shostka Ukraine, 317 miles away, Kotka Finland is now America’s fallback position, 507 miles away. This is real geostrategy, not the fake stuff (such as Annie Jacobsen’s potboiler Nuclear War: A Scenario, which provides an extremely unlikely scenario for WW3’s start, which presumes there’s no imperialistic intent on the part of America’s Government — it’s just nice people making mistakes — and so, her book is, to that extent, divorced from reality — this being the reality that is hidden throughout the U.S. empire).
The reason the U.S. regime and its colonies hide the reality from their public is that they don’t want the public to know the reality; they instead want to control the public by means of their own lies — and that is how they have been doing it. The public are very controllable this way.
A personal friend, a U.S. veteran, emailed me today saying,
Because of Ukraine funding which includes medical care for their wounded, American veterans are being denied health care.
Biden instituted a hiring freeze at VA facilities [see about that here] which has led to appointments for emergency critical care to be 6 months wait or longer which in some cases guarantees death.
I have personal experience in this area, as I am a disabled veteran and found this to be not only true but to get my VA doctor to take a phone call required me calling my member of congress and having her intercede.
When he called back he said to not even try to get care and to use my civilian insurance (which I and very few others am lucky enough to have) and go to a hospital emergency room.
Of course, “Emergency room care costs 12 to 18 times as much as a visit to a retail health clinic, eight to 12 times as much as a visit to a doctor’s office and six to seven times more than an urgent care visit.” So: America’s healthcare system is by far the world’s least efficient, because the Government is incredibly corrupt, which is the way things are in any aristocracy, and America is extremely so.
It’s just not being reported to the public, though the signs of it are. For example: on 7 November 2023, Axios headlined “U.S. health outcomes worse than OECD nations on most measures”, which was actually an understatement of the facts:
The U.S. performs worse than the average developed nation on 77% of health status indicators like life expectancy, obesity and opioid mortality rate, according to an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report.
Why it matters: U.S. health spending as a share of gross domestic product yet again far outpaces the other 37 OECD nations while the country continues to have poor outcomes, the OECD Health at a Glance 2023 report shows.
By the numbers: The U.S. ranks 33 out of 38 OECD countries for average life expectancy, after recording one of the largest decreases between 2019 and 2021.
Virtually the only thing that all U.S. billionaires demand from their Government is for it to spend vastly more on ‘defense’ than all other countries do (which means to cut necessary services to the public). And, on top of that, they want it to spend more on healthcare than any other country does. They’ve invested heavily in those sorts of things, and are more concerned about their profits than they are about the country they live in.
Of course, the public don’t have those same priorities; so, they need to be fooled as to what ‘their’ Government’s priorities actually are. And people such as G.W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, are professionals at doing that. And this is American ‘democracy’.
The Democrats blame the Republicans, and the Republicans blame the Democrats — and neither blames the billionaires, who actually run both.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
https://theduran.com/why-the-u-s-regime-and-its-colonies-hide-the-reality-from-their-public/
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