Tag: nato

The Foreign Policy Blob’s Desperate Attempt To Preserve NATO

There are multiple indications that members of the foreign policy establishment are increasingly worried that the American people are growing weary of Washington’s strategic overextension and the excessive costs in treasure and blood that role imposes.  Elites show their nervousness through desperate attempts to preserve the policy status quo.  One recent example was the effort in Congress to limit the president’s powers and options regarding NATO.

In December 2023, hawks finally achieved their goal when both the Senate and House approved a provision attached to the National Defense Authorization Act that would bar a president from withdrawing the U.S. from NATO without the approval of two-thirds of the Senate or separate legislation passed by both houses of Congress. Washington Post analyst Meagan Vasquez notes that “the bipartisan attempt to add checks and balances highlights the lengths Congress is willing to go to protect the U.S.-NATO relationship amid ongoing Russian aggression and after years of criticism of the military alliance during Trump’s presidential tenure.”

Yet even the Brookings Institution’s Michael E. O’Hanlon, a prominent establishment foreign policy figure, concedes that Congress is entering uncharted and controversial territory.  He points out “that there is precedent for presidents withdrawing unilaterally from treaties without consulting Congress. A chief executive conceivably could push back on efforts to restrict that [authority] particularly if the treaty addresses the United States’ defense posture abroad.  A “future president might challenge such an effort and invoke the president’s authorities as commander in chief under Article 2 of the Constitution.”

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Jill Biden’s press secretary Michael LaRosa was ‘forced out’ of White House after he ‘tried to take gay dates’ to his room on secure floor of hotel where president was staying during NATO summit in Madrid

The First Lady’s press secretary Michael LaRosa tried to take a date he’d just met up to his room on a secure floor while overseas in a hotel where the president was staying, insiders exclusively tell DailyMail.com.

Sources say LaRosa, 40, did it twice during the same trip while accompanying Jill Biden to the NATO Summit in Madrid, Spain, in June 2022, and that this was part of a pattern of behavior that led to his forced resignation the following month. 

A Secret Service source confirmed the incident and claimed that it happened twice on the same trip.

‘He was caught by Secret Service not once, but twice bringing dates to a secure floor, obviously putting the First Lady’s safety at risk because you’re not supposed to bring people in who are not fully vetted,’ one senior White House staffer told DailyMail.com.

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Congress Approves Bill to Prevent Any President From Leaving NATO

Packed into the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act that’s been approved by both the House and Senate is an amendment designed to prevent any future president from withdrawing the US from NATO.

The legislation was a bipartisan effort led by Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Tim Kaine (D-VA) and would prohibit the president from leaving NATO without Senate approval or an Act of Congress.

According to The Hill, Kaine said the legislation “reaffirms US support for this crucial alliance that is foundational for our national security. It also sends a strong message to authoritarians around the world that the free world remains united.”

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NATO Aspirant Sweden Signs Deal To Let US Military Use All Its Bases

Sweden is not even in NATO yet—amid the continuing holdup and objections from Turkey and Hungary—but that didn’t stop the US and Sweden this week from brokering a deal to let American troops have wide use of Swedish military bases for the first time.

The newly inked Defense Cooperation Agreement (DCA) this week signals Stockholm finally and fully abandoning its its centuries-old policy of neutrality, given the Pentagon has confirmed that US forces can now “operate in Sweden, including the legal status of US military personnel, access to deployment areas (and) prepositioning of military materiel.”

Defense Lloyd Austin and Swedish Defense Minister Pal Jonson held a signing ceremony on Tuesday, and hailed that the deal will “create better conditions for Sweden to be able to receive support from the United States in the event of a war or crisis.”

At a moment Sweden is still waiting anxiously for its accession into NATO to be announced, the US State Department has said the DCA with Sweden will “apply seamlessly before and after Sweden’s accession to the NATO Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA).”

All of this is a result of the Russia-Ukraine war, which led both Finland (who is NATO’s newest member) and neighboring Sweden to drop their non-alignment policies. As the AP reviews:

Sweden’s strategically important Baltic Sea island of Gotland sits a little more than 300 kilometers (186 miles) from the Russian Baltic Sea exclave of Kaliningrad.

The United States struck a similar deal with Sweden’s western neighbor, NATO member Norway, in 2021 and is currently negotiating such an agreement with NATO members Finland and Denmark, two other Nordic countries.

From the start of the war in Ukraine, the Swedish prime minister’s office has cited Russian aggression as making necessary a greater and broader readiness posture in case of a state of emergency, or even potential attack on the nation.

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NATO Chief: West Should Brace For More ‘Bad News’ From Ukraine

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in a fresh interview warned the Western alliance to brace for more “bad news” from Ukraine, according to Saturday remarks given to Germany’s national ARD television.

He was asked whether he thinks the situation will worsen for Ukrainian forces in the future, after the counteroffensive has been widely acknowledged as a failure. “We should also be prepared for bad news,” he responded. “Wars develop in phases. But we have to support Ukraine in both good and bad times.”

He said that in response to the current “critical situation” the West must boost ammunition production. “I will leave it to the Ukrainians and military commanders to make these difficult operational decisions,” Stoltenberg explained.

“One of the issues we should address is the fragmentation of the European defense industry,” he said. Countries have gone from being enthusiastic supporters and donors of Ukraine’s cause to more lately sounding the alarm over dwindling or tapped defense stockpiles, as ammo production also can’t keep up. 

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NATO Chief Openly Admits Russia Invaded Ukraine Because Of NATO Expansion

During a speech at the EU Parliament’s foreign affairs committee on Thursday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg clearly and repeatedly acknowledged that Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine because of fears of NATO expansionism.

His comments, initially flagged by journalist Thomas Fazi, read as follows:

The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.

The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.

So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.

Stoltenberg made these remarks as part of a general gloat about the fact that Putin invaded Ukraine to prevent NATO expansion and yet the invasion has resulted in Sweden and Finland applying to join the alliance, saying it “demonstrates that when President Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO, he’s getting the exact opposite.”

Stoltenberg’s remarks would probably have been classified as Russian propaganda by plutocrat-funded “disinformation experts” and imperial “fact checkers” if it had been said online by someone like you or me, but because it came from the head of NATO as part of a screed against the Russian president it’s been allowed to pass through without objection.

In reality Stoltenberg is just stating a well-established fact: contrary to the official western narrative, Putin invaded Ukraine not because he is evil and hates freedom but because no great power ever allows foreign military threats to amass on its borders  —  including the United States. That’s why so many western analysts and officials spent years warning that NATO’s actions were going to provoke a war, and yet when war broke out we were slammed with a tsunami of mass media propaganda repeating over and over and over again that this was an “unprovoked invasion”.

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US-Ukraine Brass Write off Counteroffensive After 57.000 Casualties, Focus on Force-Drafting New Conscripts for 2024

NATO military chief US Gen Christopher Cavoli and British Admiral Sir Tony Radakin traveled to the Polish-Ukrainian border ten days ago for a crisis meeting with the Ukrainian chief military commander Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, for what was privately billed as “a council of war”, The Guardian reported.

The meeting was “no ordinary discussion”, The Guardian writes. “Zaluzhnyi brought his entire command team with him on the roughly 300-mile journey from Kyiv. The aim of the five-hour meeting was to help reset Ukraine’s military strategy – top of the agenda was what to do about the halting progress of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, along with battle plans for the gruelling winter ahead plus longer-term strategy as the war inevitably grinds into 2024.”

British sources are “reluctant to say much about the outcome of the meeting at the border,” The Guardian security editor in Kyiv Dan Sabbagh writes. “But the indications from the west is that the strategy has changed as a result of the discussions. “I think you can see they are focusing on the Zaporizhzhia front,” said one insider, amid reports of fresh Ukrainian attacks aimed at the city of Tokmak, an initial step towards reaching the Sea of Azov, thereby cutting the land bridge to Crimea.”

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Adolf Heusinger- Hitler’s Chief Of Staff who Became NATO’s Chief Of Staff

General Adolf Heusinger was Adolf Hitler’s Chief of the General Staff of the Army during World War II. With the outbreak of the Second World War Heusinger accompanied the German HQ field staff and assisted in the planning of operations in Poland, Denmark, Norway, and France and the Low Countries (coastal region in western Europe, consisting especially of the Netherlands and Belgium). He was promoted to colonel on August 1, 1940 and became chief of the Operationsabteilung in October 1940, making him number three in the Army planning hierarchy . In 1944 Heusinger assumed office as Chief of the General Staff of the Army. In this capacity, he attended the meeting at Adolf Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair on July 20, 1944, and was standing next to Hitler when the bomb planted by Claus von Stauffenberg exploded.

After the war, this German war criminal, the man who helped Hitler plan and execute his invasion of neighboring countries, was not even put on trial, quite contrary he was allowed to take over the newly established West German army, the “Bundeswehr”. This was not a unique event, but a very common phenomenon in post WW2 Western Germany. Nazi war criminals and people who supported and helped Hitler to carry the holocaust and other crimes against Humanity were never put on trial for their crimes against the Jews, the Poles, the Russians and the people of Europe, but instead were installed in top positions in the western German government, army, industry and western German society at large. Many former Nazis served in the new German military, media and government, attaining high offices. They also rebuilt western Germany, with the generous help of billions of dollars of US taxpayers money under the “Marshal Plan”, and became an integral and founding part of the “new” German elites which ended up ruling the “new” Germany, which was basically the same old Germany, just rebranded.

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The Institutionalization of the New Cold War

The 31 countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are taking their victory laps over the latest expansion of the political-military alliance.  The boastful communique for last week’s NATO summit in Lithuania had more than 60 references to nuclear weapons, and promised modernization for NATO’s nuclear powers: the United States, Britain, and France.  There is increased likelihood for the pre-positioning of advanced military weaponry, particularly artillery and air defense systems.  The Baltic Sea will become Lake NATO.

When the NATO countries halt their celebration, it will be time to plan for the next Cold War, which will be far worse than the Cold War that dominated the 1950s and 1960s.  Cold War 2.0 will be more expensive than its predecessor, and far more difficult to bring to a close. The excessive military spending will complicate far more urgent tasks dealing with the climate crisis and the next pandemic, which will eventually occur.  Finally, arms control and disarmament, which was the primary process for pursuing an end to the earlier Cold War, will be more difficult to orchestrate.

The first Cold War was relatively easy for the United States to manage.  The twelve founding members of NATO were compatible in terms of policies and processes; and the perception of the threat was shared.  In Cold War 2.0, the United States will not be as dominant; the alliance will be divided between the western and eastern members of the alliance; and the perception of the threat will vary due to domestic politics and geographic proximity to Russia.  The current difficulties and debates over Ukraine membership; future relations with Russia; and appropriate levels of defense spending are already creating tensions within the alliance.

U.S. supporters of NATO expansion have provided a series of fatuous arguments to defend their position.  The New York Times has trumpeted that “Ukraine has become a testing ground for state-of-the art weapons and information systems, and new ways to use them, that…could shape warfare for generations to come.”  The military-industrial complex couldn’t have written this justification more succinctly.  Right-wing ideologues, such as the Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen, boast that “lessons learned on the Ukrainian battlefield could be used to help Taiwan,” which ignores the differences between an amphibious assault in Taiwan vs. the war of attrition in Ukraine.

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Putin Issues Stark Warning To Poland And NATO

Putin held a video conference on Thursday with members of Russia’s Security Council. I hope folks in the West pay attention to what he said, so I’m presenting the entirety of his remarks following a presentation by the Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service.

Based on public source information and Russia-collected intelligence, Russia believes that Poland plans to seize Ukrainian territory west of the Dnieper River as Ukraine’s much-ballyhooed counter-offensive collapses.

Let me give you Putin’s bottom line up front:

Regarding the policy of the Ukrainian regime, it is none of our business. If they want to relinquish or sell off something in order to pay their bosses, as traitors usually do, that’s their business. We will not interfere.

But Belarus is part of the Union State, and launching an aggression against Belarus would mean launching an aggression against the Russian Federation. We will respond to that with all the resources available to us.

Vladimir Putin is not a weak, spineless creature like Barack Obama or Joe Biden. He does not make idle threats and does not succumb to emotion.

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