Tag: nato

Back in 1999 few people seemed to notice what had happened to NATO. Under the leadership of President Clinton and Tony Blair, it converted itself from a very successful defensive alliance into an organisation with the self-awarded power of pro active interventions around the world on behalf of an undefined “international community”.

Its first target was Serbia which had been in the sights of the USA since the early nineties.

It was with a feeling of doom-laden deja-vu that I recently heard on the news that Croatian and Albanian football fans at the Euro competition had been chanting “Kill the Serbs!” There is an old Austrian saying “Im Balkan stirbt niemand” – Nobody dies in the Balkans (not of natural causes, that is). In 1999 people certainly were dying in Kosovo in fighting between the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) and Yugoslav federal forces.

Statistics from before the war suggested that an Albanian in Kosovo was about as likely to meet a violent death as an ordinary inhabitant of Washington DC at the same period whereas a Serb was several times more likely to come to an untimely end. Nonetheless this was adduced by the Americans as evidence of genocide by the Serbs. They also helped the KLA provide fake evidence of a mass execution at Racak. Bodies from fighting in the area were assembled to look like victims of a firing squad. The Western media accepted the tale eagerly without question. New Labour applied all its considerable powers of media manipulation to the project.

The massacre that never was constituted sufficient evidence for America-led NATO to present the ultimatum of Rambouillet which demanded free access for NATO troops to all of Yugoslavia for an unspecified period and a commitment to the eventual independence of Kosovo – or else they would bomb – and so they did. It is interesting to compare statements of the different leaders of fragmented Yugoslavia – some of whom were supported by the West as suitable promoters of civilised European values. Just have a guess from their words which leaders received the benison of American and Western approval, as well as arms and technical support.

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Even at its very start, NATO was designed as an aggressive alliance, never a defensive one. It was designed by the U.S. Government purely for an aggressive purpose, and entirely on the basis of lies, which have been its propaganda ever since. NATO is a blatant violation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s anti-imperialist will and intentions for the post-WW2 world, and it is a fulfillment of the U.S.-imperialist will and intentions of (primarily) Harry Truman, but also of Winston Churchill — and this fact is hidden by ‘historians’ but will be fully documented by means of the links here to the evidence.

The will of the United States Government under President Roosevelt, who died on 12 April 1945 just before WW2 ended, was what he had started, on 9 August 1941 (even before joining WW2) to plan in order to replace the then existing imperialistic international world order that had produced both World Wars, and which replacement he called, even that early, the “United Nations.” He planned it so as for his U.N. to take control over international relations: international laws legislating them; international courts interpreting them; and international enforcement backing up with military force these international laws. This — FDR’s U.N. — was to be the exclusive Legislative, Judicial, and Executive, power over international relations, so as to prevent and avoid what had caused both World Wars, which was contending imperialisms. FDR, during 9 August 1941 to 12 April 1945, planned very carefully to prevent WW3, and his U.N. was intended to be the international body which would be designed for this purpose (which the U.N. that we have was not). This was to be a U.N. which would have NO laws pertaining to internal domestic affairs within nations, but ONLY to INTERNATIONAL laws between nations; so, it would be very different from the U.N. that became formed and shaped under Truman at the San Francisco Conference during 25 April 1945 through 26 June 1945.

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At the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington, DC, last week China was a big part of the agenda. The NATO summit’s final declaration mentioned the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) 14 times. It noted that “the PRC continues to pose systemic challenges to Euro-Atlantic security” and China’s “stated ambitions and coercive policies continue to challenge our interests, security and values.”

The leaders of NATO “partner” nations Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia attended the summit. They collectively met NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg to map out strategy for the Asia Pacific region. NATO announced four new joint projects with countries that are important to Washington’s bid to establish an anti-China military bloc. In response, Beijing accused NATO of “inciting bloc confrontation and hyping up regional tensions”.

Unsurprisingly, NATO frames its focus on China as defensive. “The PRC has become a decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine”, claimed the summit’s final communique. According to this storyline, Chinese relations with Russia threaten NATO. But this is exaggerated. China has taken a cautious approach to Russia’s war largely complying with (illegal) US sanctions and refusing to sell arms (though its companies sell some dual use products to Russian firms). Conversely, North Korea and Iran are selling Russia arms while NATO countries are donating large amounts of weapons to Ukraine.

Comparing Chinese ties to India’s highlights NATO’s exaggeration. India is buying more oil and weapons from Russia than China and when NATO began its meeting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in Moscow to meet President Vladimir Putin.

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It is now five years since Emmanuel Macron, in one of those blunt outbursts for which he is known, told The Economist, in a reference to the collective West, “What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO.” 

The French president thereupon shocked officials across the Continent. “That is not my point of view,” Angela Merkel responded augustly. “I don’t think that such sweeping judgments are necessary.” Heiko Maas, the German chancellor’s foreign minister, added imaginatively, “I do not believe NATO is brain dead.”

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization celebrated its 75th anniversary last week, 32 presidents and prime ministers assembling in the same Washington auditorium where earlier leaders, 12 of them then, signed its founding treaty on April 4, 1949.

Joe Biden presided over the anniversary proceedings, of course. And with this in mind, let us credit the French leader for his prescience in diagnosing the condition of NATO’s cerebral matter.

As Joe Lauria put it in a Consortium News commentary at the summit’s conclusion last Thursday, this is an organization whose members are collectively losing their minds. 

It is important to understand what Macron did and did not mean with this remark. He was not, as might be easily misinterpreted, declaring the North Atlantic Treaty Organization purposeless or obsolete: That was Donald Trump’s line, and Trump was then three years into his presidency.

Macron, indeed, was reacting to Trump’s complaints about the alliance as a budgetary sinkhole and his, Trump’s, consequent failure to point the other members in the imperium’s desired direction, as all American presidents had since NATO’s launch as the Atlantic world’s premier Cold War military institution. 

Specific to the occasion of his interview with The Economist, Macron was unhappy about the mess then unfolding in northern Syria. Some readers may recall it: Trump had ordered American troops withdrawn — albeit an order diplomats, Army officers, and spooks soon subverted — and Turkey, a NATO member, had immediately piled in to attack Kurdish militias based in the region. 

“You have no coordination whatsoever of strategic decision-making between the United States and its NATO allies. None,” Macron told The Economist. “You have an uncoordinated aggressive action by another NATO ally, Turkey, in an area where our interests are at stake. There has been no NATO planning, nor any coordination.’’

And then the French leader’s punchline: “We should reassess the reality of what NATO is in light of the commitment of the United States.’’

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Thirty-four years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed and the West became convinced that this signaled the “end of history”. Western liberalism, they assumed, was the pinnacle of historical development and would gradually be adopted by all countries. They also believed that NATO would be its spearhead.

This ideological doctrine naturally gave rise to an idea of endless expansion – since the West leads the way towards the ideal and has the necessary global organizations for this, then everyone should strive to join it. How could it be otherwise?

At the time, it indeed made sense for countries from the former Soviet bloc and the Third World to join Western-controlled economic organizations which promised a common market, loans, portfolio investments, trade rules, and so on.

From the beginning, many people realized that this looked a lot like economic colonization, but, like any colonizer, at first the US convinced its new colonies that they would get all the perks of a large civilization. This made sense, and many countries expressed the desire to join the Western world.

For East European states, the idea of joining the European Union made even more sense. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell once compared Western Europe to a “garden,” and in the early 1990s the bloc indeed resembled a thriving garden. There were certain challenges, but at the time, the Old World came close to the ideal of a flourishing and prosperous society. It looked like it had found a balance between the market economy and socialism, and naturally, many countries wanted to join this community and also prosper.

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As NATO wrapped up its Summit and Biden held a crucial press conference, the media frenzy continued to focus on Biden’s age and cognitive abilities. Is he too old and disoriented to lead the “free world”? Was he able to get through his press conference without stumbling too many times? Lost in the media coverage about the Summit, however, has been a serious discussion of NATO’s advanced age and NATO’s ability to lead the “free world.”

At 75, NATO has not aged well. Back in 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron was already sounding the alarm, accusing NATO of being “brain dead.” While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given NATO a new lease on life, NATO’s embrace of Ukraine actually makes the conflict – and the world – more dangerous.

Let’s remember why NATO was founded. As the contours of the Cold War were emerging after the devastation of WWII, 10 European nations, along with the U.S. and Canada, came together in 1949 to create an alliance that would deter Soviet expansion, stop the revival of nationalist militarism in Europe through a strong North American presence on the continent, and encourage European political integration. Or, as the alliance’s first Secretary General Lord Ismay quipped, its purpose was “to keep the Soviets out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

It is decades now since the Soviet Union has disintegrated and European nations have been well integrated. So why is NATO still hanging on? When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, along with its military alliance called the Warsaw Pact, NATO could have – and should have – declared victory and folded. Instead, it expanded from 16 members in 1991 to 32 members today.

Its eastward expansion not only violated the promises made by Secretary of State James Baker to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, but it was a grave mistake. U.S. diplomat George Keenan warned in 1997 “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era.” Indeed, while NATO expansion does not justify Russia’s 2022 illegal invasion of Ukraine, it did provoke Russia and inflame tensions. NATO members also played a key role in the Ukraine’s 2014 coup, the training and arming of Ukrainian forces in preparation for war with Russia, and the quashing of negotiations that could have ended the war in its first two months.

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