OMNI
NATO ANTHOLOGY #1
May 20, 2022
Compiled by Dick
Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology
Omnicenter.org/donate/
Contents
of NATO ANTHOLOGY #1
Maps
of NATO Expansion (add Sweden and Finland)
Harry
Targ. History of NATO
Rick Rozoff. “NATO’s War against
Yugoslavia” 1999.
Rozoff. NATO “Bombing of Chinese
Embassy” 1999.
Kerstin
Tuomala. NATO-US War Game in Finland
2017.
Ukraine
Maidan Coup 2014.
Patrick
Lawrence. “The New Iron Curtain.”
Along Russia’s Southern Border.
Jeremy Kuzmarov.
Kazakhstan.
Geraldina
Colotti. “NATO Tentacles from Europe to
Latin America.”
NATO
Military Drills in Estonia Near Russian Border, Russia Warns Response 2022.
US “40 Billion More for Ukraine War” 2022.
Ending NATO
Bruce Gagnon. “NATO ‘Master Plan’ Aimed
at Russia.”
Dennis
Kucinich. “NATO Talks a Sham” 2012.
War
Resisters League in Chicago, May 2012.
Peter
Kornbluh. US and Russia.
MAPS
OF NATO EXPANSION
TEXTS
SUMMARY HISTORY OF NATO
Editor.
Mronline.org (4-29-22).
[Source: greatgameindia.com]
“Peace Movement needs
to demand dismantling of NATO.” Posted Apr 29,
2022 by Harry Targ
Originally published: CovertAction Magazine on April 28, 2022 (more
by CovertAction Magazine)
Globalization, Imperialism,
Movements,
StrategyAmericas,
Europe,
Global,
United StatesNewswireNorth Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Peace
Movement
NATO went from fighting socialism to enforcing global empire
It looks a lot like a
return to the past. Founded in 1949 to defend against the “Soviet threat,” the
NATO alliance is facing a return to mechanized warfare, a huge increase in
defense spending, and potentially a new Iron Curtain falling across Europe.
After struggling to find a new post-Cold War role, countering terrorism
following the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001 and a
humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, NATO is back encroaching on its
original nemesis.1
U.S. Plans for the Establishment of Global Hegemony: 1945-47
During
World War II an “unnatural alliance” was created between the United States,
Great Britain, and the former Soviet Union. What brought the three countries
together—the emerging imperial giant (the United States), the declining
capitalist power (Great Britain), and the first socialist state (the Soviet
Union)—was the shared need to defeat fascism in Europe. Rhetorically, the high
point of collaboration was reflected in the agreements made at the Yalta
Conference, in February 1945, three months before the German armies were
defeated.
At Yalta,
the great powers made decisions to facilitate democratization of former Nazi
regimes in Eastern Europe, a “temporary” division of Germany for occupation
purposes, and a schedule of future Soviet participation in the ongoing war
against Japan. Leaders of the three states returned to their respective
countries celebrating the “spirit of Yalta,” what would be a post-war world
order in which they would work through the new United Nations system to
modulate conflict in the world.
Big Three leaders pose for photo outside historic Yalta
conference. [Photo: history.com]
Within two years, after
conflicts over Iran with the Soviet Union, the Greek Civil War, the replacement
of wartime President Franklin Roosevelt with Harry Truman, and growing
challenges to corporate rule in the United States by militant labor, Truman declared in March 1947 that the
United States and its allies were going to be engaged in a long-term struggle
against the forces of “International Communism.” The post-war vision of
cooperation was reframed as a struggle of the “free world” against “tyranny.”
It was really a struggle between two kinds of political/economic orders: one
socialist, another capitalist.
The Economic Foundations of a New World Order
In
addition to Truman’s ideological crusade, his administration launched an
economic program to rebuild parts of Europe, particularly what would become
West Germany, as capitalist bastions against the ongoing popularity of
Communist parties throughout the region. Along with the significant program of
reconstructing capitalism in Europe and linking it by trade, investment,
finance and debt to the United States, the U.S. with its new allies constructed
a military alliance that would be ready to fight the Cold War against
International Communism.
[Source: apprend.io]
For Joyce and
Gabriel Kolko (The Limits of Power, 1972) and other revisionists, the expansion of
socialism constituted a global threat to capital accumulation. With the end of
the Second World War, there were widespread fears that the decline in wartime
demand for U.S. products would bring economic stagnation and a return to the
depression of the 1930s.
The
Marshall Plan, lauded as a humanitarian program for the rebuilding of war-torn
Europe, was at its base a program to increase demand and secure markets for
U.S. products. With the specter of an international communist threat, military
spending, another source of demand, would likewise help retain customers,
including the U.S. government itself. The idea of empire, which William
Appleman Williams
so stressed (The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 1959), was underscored
by the materiality of capitalist dynamics.
The
Marshall Plan inspired European integration of states that were major
recipients of Marshall Plan funds. The first significant economic organization,
The European Coal and Steel Community, became operational in 1952. Its
membership included France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and
Luxembourg. It encouraged the production and trade of core resources such as
coal, steel and iron. In 1957, the purview of the ECSC was expanded with the
creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic
Energy Community (Euratom).
Other, overlapping European
institutions were created during the 1950s and beyond involving the original
six and additional countries. In May 1960 seven European nations, not in the
EEC, formed the European Free Trade Association to foster trade and economic
integration. (In 1973, three countries including Great Britain joined the EEC).
Finally in
1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Maastricht Treaty established
the European Union (EU) which, by 2019, had 27 member countries (nine from the
former Soviet bloc) with a GDP of 16.4 trillion euros (the EU currency),
constituting 15% of world trade. In addition, European nations are embedded in
a network of regional and international organizations that deal with trade,
finance, indebtedness, security and human rights. (See the diagram below.)
The
reigning scholarly study of these efforts in the 1960s and beyond, integration
theory, postulated that the greater the cross-national interactions of European
countries the lesser the likelihood of war among them. Studies were carried out
designed to discover how and why integration seemed to be working in Europe but
less so in troubled locations, such as on the African continent.
But from another vantage
point “regional integration” inspired by and connected to the United States political
economy can be seen as a near complete fruition of the vision of U.S. and
capitalist hegemony initiated in those crucial early years after World War ll.
The 21st century policy program of the United States and most of
Europe has been to establish on a global basis a capitalist economic model.
[Source: thecoldwarexperience.weebly.com]
Ideologically, the
presupposition is that this model is historically exceptional and therefore
must resist threats to its survival and growth. The so-called communist threat
of the 1940s is the “authoritarian” threat of the current century. And to the
extent that capitalist hegemony is not achievable by consent, it might need to
be instituted by force.
While
world history is more complicated than this narrative suggests, there is enough
plausibility to it to justify fears, particularly when the military
instrument—NATO—expanded eastward. From this point of view, NATO itself may not
be the only threat to countries in Europe and Asia. But the use of it as a part
of global expansion of economic and political institutions, coupled with the
ideological expression of American exceptionalism, could create fear and
aggression.
NATO As the Military Arm of a Drive for a Hegemonic Global
Political Economy
Representatives
of Western European countries met in Brussels in 1948 to establish a program of
common defense and one year later with the addition of the United States and
Canada, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed. The new NATO
charter, inspired largely by a prior Western Hemisphere alliance, the Rio Pact
(1947), proclaimed that “an armed attack against one or more of them…shall be
considered an attack against them all” which would lead to an appropriate
response.
[Source: twitter.com]
The Charter called for
cooperation and military preparedness among the 12 signatories. After the
Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb and the Korean War started, NATO
pushed ahead with the development of a common military command structure with
General Eisenhower as the first “Supreme Allied Commander.”
After the
founding of NATO and its establishment as a military arm of the West, the
Truman administration adopted the policy recommendations in National Security
Council Document 68 (NSC 68) in 1950 which declared that military spending for
the indefinite future would be the number one priority of every presidential
administration.
As Western
European economies reconstructed, Marshall Plan aid programs were shut down and
military assistance to Europe was launched. Greece and Turkey joined NATO in
1952 and, fueling the flames of the Cold War, West Germany was admitted to NATO
in 1955. (This stimulated the Soviet Union to construct its own alliance
system, the Warsaw Pact, with countries from Eastern Europe.)
Image from first NATO summit. [Source: nato.int]
During the Cold War, NATO
continued as the only unified Western military command structure against the
“Soviet threat.” While forces and funds only represented a portion of the U.S.
global military presence, the alliance constituted a “trip wire” signifying to
the Soviets that any attack on targets in Western Europe would set off World
War III. Thus, NATO provided the deterrent threat of “massive retaliation” in
the face of a first-strike attack.
With the
collapse of the former Warsaw Pact regimes between 1989 and 1991, the tearing
down of the symbolic Berlin Wall in 1989 and, finally, the collapse of the
Soviet Union itself in 1991, the outspoken purpose for maintaining a NATO
alliance presumably had passed. However, this was not to be.
In the
next 20 years after the Soviet collapse, membership in the alliance doubled.
New members included most of the former Warsaw Pact countries. The functions
and activities of NATO were redefined. NATO programs included air surveillance
during the crises accompanying the Gulf War and the disintegration of the
former Yugoslavia.
[Source: youtube.com]
In 1995, NATO sent 60,000
troops to Bosnia and in 1999 it carried out brutal bombing campaigns in Serbia
with 38,000 sorties. NATO forces became part of the U.S.-led military coalition
that launched the war on Afghanistan in 2001. In 2011 a massive NATO air war on
Libya played a critical role in the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime.
An
official history of NATO described the changes in its mission: “In 1991 as in
1949, NATO was to be the foundation stone for a larger, pan-European security
architecture.” The post-Cold War mission of NATO combines “military might,
diplomacy, and post-conflict stabilization.”
The NATO history boldly
concludes that the alliance was founded on defense in the 1950s and détente
with the Soviet Union in the 1960s. With the collapse of Communism in the
1990s, it became a “tool for the stabilization of Eastern Europe and Central
Asia through incorporation of new Partners and Allies.” The 21st century vision of
NATO has expanded further: “extending peace through the strategic projection of
security.” This new mission, the history said, was forced upon NATO because of
the failure of nation-states and extremism.
NATO and Ukraine Today
Conference in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, March 2019, exposes NATO’s
bombing of Yugoslav children. [Photo: workers.org]
Reviewing this brief
history of NATO, observers can reasonably draw different conclusions about
NATO’s role in the world than from those who celebrate its world role. First,
NATO’s mission to defend Europe from aggression against “International
Communism” was completed with the “fall of Communism.” Second, the alliance was
regional, that is pertaining to Europe and North America, and now it is global.
Third, NATO was about security and defense. Now it is about global
transformation.
Fourth, with the U.S. as
NATO’s biggest supporter in terms of troops, supplies and budget (22-25%), NATO
is an instrument of United States foreign policy. Fifth, as a creation of
Europe and North America, it has become an enforcer of the interests of member
countries against, what Vijay Prashad calls, the “darker nations” of Asia,
Africa and the Middle East. Sixth, NATO has become the 21st century military
instrumentality of global imperialism. And, finally, there is growing evidence
that larger and larger portions of the world’s people have begun to stand up
against NATO.
In the
context of this complex history, Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on
February 24, 2022, following eight years of war in Eastern Ukraine. After four
weeks thousands of Ukrainians have been killed and more than four million have
fled their cities and towns. The President of Ukraine, spokespersons from some
NATO countries, and some U.S. politicians have called for a “no-fly zone” over
Ukraine which would escalate the war to a near-nuclear war situation. In
addition, NATO countries, and particularly the United States, have dramatically
increased military expenditures. Impactful economic sanctions have been leveled
against Russia, and economic instabilities are beginning to affect Europe and
the United States. In addition, vital work around combating climate change has
been stalled and important pieces of legislation to fulfil social needs have
been eliminated from legislative consideration.
What Needs to Be Done?
To quote a
tired but true slogan, “war is not the answer.” The Russian invasion of Ukraine
threatens the lives and property of Ukrainians, the lives of Russian soldiers
and protesters, raises fears of an escalation of war throughout Europe, and
raises the danger of nuclear war.
[Photo: blogger.googleusercontent.com]
“We” need to support
“back-channel negotiations” in process as occurred during the Cuban
missile crisis, demands that Russia stop the violence and withdraw its military
forces from Ukraine, diplomacy at the United Nations, and summit meetings of
diplomats from Russia, Ukraine and Europe. And conversations on the agenda
should include forbidding Ukraine from joining NATO, establishing regional
autonomy for Ukraine citizens who want it, pulling back NATO bases from Eastern
European states, and/or abolishing NATO itself because the reason for its creation
in the first place, defending against the Soviet Union, no longer exists.
The “we”
at this moment could be a resurgent international peace movement, taking
inspiration from peace activists in Russia and around the world. As horrible as
this moment is, it is potentially a “teachable moment,” a moment when peace
becomes part of the global progressive agenda again and people all around the
world can begin to examine existing international institutions such as NATO.
And while
we react with shock and condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine,
whatever the complicated and understandable motivations, we need to be familiar
with the historic context of the very dangerous warfare that we are living
through now.
As James
Goldgeier wrote more than 20 years ago on a Brookings Institution web page:
The dean of America’s
Russia experts, George F. Kennan, had called the expansion of NATO into Central
Europe ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War
era.’ Kennan, the architect of America’s post-World War II strategy of
containment of the Soviet Union, believed, as did most other Russia experts in
the United States, that expanding NATO would damage beyond repair U.S. efforts
to transform Russia from enemy to partner.”2
Notes:
1.
↩Sabine Siebold and Robin
Emmott, “Russia may not stop with Ukraine—NATO looks to its weakest link,” Reuters, March
21, 2022
2.
↩James Goldgeier, Brookings
Institution, “The U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO: How, When, Why, and What
Next?“ June 1, 1999.
RATCHETING UP THE NEW
COLD WAR
LOOKING
BACK TO BOMBINGS OF SERBIA 1999-2000
“NATO’s war against Yugoslavia: the ghost that still haunts
Europe.” Originally published: Anti-bellum by Rick
Rozoff (May 18, 2021 ) - Posted May 22, 2021.
WarEurope, Global, YugoslaviaNewswireNorth
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
https://mronline.org/2021/05/22/natos-war-against-yugoslavia-the-ghost-that-still-haunts-europe/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=natos-war-against-yugoslavia-the-ghost-that-still-haunts-europe&utm_source=MR+Email+List&utm_campaign=6fe06a82b2-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_MRONLINE_DAILY&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4f879628ac-6fe06a82b2-295821469&mc_cid=6fe06a82b2&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e
Twenty-two
years ago today the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was subjected to the 55th
straight day of bombardment from the then 19-member North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, with 23 days more to go. Many families in Belgrade, Novi Sad and
Niš daily fled to bomb shelters during the aerial onslaught. The permanent
trauma inflicted on millions of civilians, especially children, is perhaps
impossible to calculate. And it has been denied or ignored by Europe and the
world. As forgotten as the cluster bomb fragments and depleted uranium left
behind by NATO’s “humanitarian intervention.”
The air
war was justified by U.S. President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony
Blair and NATO Secretary General Javier Solana as a noble crusade to stop, to
employ an expression not uncommon at the time, the “worst genocide since
Hitler” in the Serbian province of Kosovo. The operation, Operation Allied
Force for NATO, Operation Noble Anvil for the U.S., began with a barrage of
Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from ships and submarines in the Adriatic Sea.
In all over 1,000 NATO military aircraft flew 30,000 combat sorties over a
nation of slightly more than 10 million people, two million of those in Kosovo;
a military bloc whose combined population at the time was some 850 million and
which included three of the world’s nuclear powers.
During the war, arguably
the most lopsided since the U.S.’s
invasion of Grenada in 1983, American and other Western officials
maintained a steady drumbeat of increasingly hyperbolic, and criminally
unconscionable, claims of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo killed by Yugoslav forces.
On May 16 Defense Secretary William
Cohen appeared on Face the Nation and said: “We’ve now seen
about 100,000 military-aged men missing….They may have been murdered.” Almost
immediately afterward another American official raised that number to 200,000.
The scare
tactics worked, as NATO’s top military commander, General Wesley Clark, was
able to continue daily bombing missions over the small nation months after all
targets of military value had been hit and hit repeatedly. A passenger train, a
religious procession, a refugee column,
Radio Television of Serbia headquarters. a vacuum cleaner
factory, bridges, marketplaces, apartment courtyards, the Swiss embassy in
Belgrade and the Chinese embassy as well, with three journalists killed and 27
other Chinese injured. Cluster bombs, graphite bombs and depleted uranium
ordnance were used widely. No one, not a single individual, has been held
accountable for those war crimes. Nor for what should be a war
crime and one of the most grave at that: intentionally fabricating and
exaggerating atrocity stories to agitate for and escalate a war. Few Western
politicians and journalists would have escaped that charge over their roles in
1999.
When the
Yugoslav government of President Slobodan Milosevic was compelled to accede to
NATO diktat on June 10, over 200,000 ethnic Serbs, Roma and
other minorities left Kosovo with Yugoslav troops, and NATO and its so-called
Kosovo Liberation Army cutthroats–for whom and with whom it waged the
war–marched into Kosovo. After the latter arrived even more, perhaps a hundred
thousand or more, Serbs, Roma, Turks, Jews, Egyptians, Ashkali and members of
other ethnic minority communities, along with no few Albanians, fled the
province. Numerous Serbs, Roma and Albanian “collaborators” were murdered in
what the Western press invariably described as revenge killings. (During the
air war Britain’s Daily Telegraph reported 100,000 ethnic
Albanians fled Kosovo to other parts of Serbia.)
The
permanent displacement of hundreds of thousands of non-ethnic Albanians from
Kosovo and the expulsion of over a quarter of a million Serbs from Croatia in
the early 1990s are the two largest
cases of irreversible ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II. Decades
later no one has been held accountable for those crimes either. MORE
https://mronline.org/2021/05/22/natos-war-against-yugoslavia-the-ghost-that-still-haunts-europe/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=natos-war-against-yugoslavia-the-ghost-that-still-haunts-europe&utm_source=MR+Email+List&utm_campaign=6fe06a82b2-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_MRONLINE_DAILY&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4f879628ac-6fe06a82b2-295821469&mc_cid=6fe06a82b2&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e
“China, Serbia mark anniversary of NATO’s deadly
bombing of Chinese embassy.” Rick Rozoff. Mronline.org (5-11-22).
Diplomats from the Chinese Embassy in Serbia
and Serbian government officials held a commemorative event in Belgrade, the
capital of Serbia, on Saturday to mark the 23rd anniversary of the NATO bombing
of the Chinese Embassy in the former Yugoslavia in 1999.
LOOKING
BACK FROM Finland’s and Sweden’s 2022 intention to apply for membership in NATO
PROTESTING
NATO EXPANSION INTO FINLAND
“Protesting Against NATO in Lapland”
by
Kerstin Tuomala. Space Alert! (August 2017).
http://www.space4peace.org/newsletter/Space%20Alert%2035.pdf
About 30
persons showed up at the demonstration on May 22 at the airport in Tovaniemi,
Finland on the first day of the ACE 2017 U.S.-NATO war game. The main bases for
the military exercises were Rovaniemi, Finland, Luleå, Sweden and Bodö, Norway.
They are NATO exercises, our countries are only hosts, which in reality means
servants. Because the time they fly is in the spring when the reindeers calve,
it is extremely bad since the herd can get panic from the noise and many calves
are at risk for this reason. The peace group from Joensuu came by bus and they
had with them 16 persons with good spirit and slogans, a good microphone, and
impressive banners and we from the north had banners too. The person from most
far away, besides Dave Webb (GN board chair) from England and Agneta Norberg
(GN board member) and My Leffler from Sweden, came from Helsinki and the most
northern about 170 kms from Rovaniemi a place by the northwestern border, named
Kolari, over which the ACE was flying. People talked against our governments
spending money on military instead of welfare and security in everyday life,
and we sang peace songs and some danced accompanied/disturbed by the noise of
the lifting fighter planes. I was interviewed for the Swedish radio and was so
distracted by the noise that I said what I thought (instead of thinking what I
said.) The weather was windy and cold and we moved to the city center of
Rovaniemi to get some coffee and tea and to have another planned demonstration
there. More local people showed up and they talked very well about the same
concerns of how our welfare is cut down in favor of militarism. They also
thanked us for arranging this opportunity to demonstrate. In fact we had
planned to be there only for half an hour, but we were longer so that everyone
who wanted could speak. We demonstrated on a square where people pass on their
ways, we got good publicity, the banners were impressive…
MORE http://www.space4peace.org/newsletter/Space%20Alert%2035.pdf
UKRAINE
MAIDAN
COUP 2014
The Editors. Monthly Review. May 2022 (Volume 74, Number 1). (May 7, 2022). buy this issue
To get a firm grasp on the current situation
in Ukraine, we must understand the
central role that the United States and NATO have played in the conflict from
the start, beginning in 2014
with the U.S.-engineered Maidan coup. | more…
By
Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News. Popular Resistance.org (5-18-22). We have read a great deal about a new Cold
War since the U.S. cultivated the coup of February 2014 in Ukraine and the
nation was tragically divided against itself. Some of us have ruminated
in print, in this publication and elsewhere, on this emergent reality. With the
back-to-back announcements that Finland and Sweden intend to apply for
membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, “Cold War II” is no
longer merely a handy locution for columnists and those who pontificate on
barstools. The accession of these Nordic nations to Washington’s principal
instrument of power projection is... -more-
THE NEW IRON CURTAIN By Patrick
Lawrence, Consortium News. May 17, 2022
The Ukraine Crisis Proves To Be Europe’s Crucible.
And Europe proves a profound
disappointment.
We have read a great deal about a
new Cold War since the U.S. cultivated the coup of February 2014 in Ukraine and
the nation was tragically divided against itself. Some of us have
ruminated in print, in this publication and elsewhere, on this emergent reality.
With the back-to-back
announcements that Finland and Sweden intend to apply for membership in the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization, “Cold War II” is no longer merely a handy
locution for columnists and those who pontificate on barstools.
The accession of these Nordic
nations to Washington’s principal instrument of power projection is assured and
will be complete in very short order. This will solidify the wall Washington
and its European clients insist on erecting to divide the world yet more perversely
and destructively than it was for the four decades and some of Cold War I.
It would be hard to overstate the
significance of this turn of events — for Finns, Swedes and Russians,
certainly, — but also for all Europeans and, at the horizon, for everyone on
this planet, alive or yet to be born.
Remember the famous lines from
Kipling?
Oh, East is East, and West is
West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand
presently at God’s great Judgment Seat…
Kipling published The
Ballad of East and West in 1889, the British Empire’s high noon, and
in it mourned the great divide between the imperial powers and their subjects.
His deepest regret was for all the lost humanity obscured by the enduring but
artificial line humans etched into the Earth long ago to distinguish the West
from the rest.
Judgment Day appearing other than
imminent, we will be in for many seasons of regret as Washington constructs the
infrastructure that will define Cold War II. The Finns’ and Swedes’ accessions
to NATO suggest an edifice more permanent than either the Iron Curtain or, on
the other side of the world post–1949, its bamboo variant. There will be few
doors and windows in this wall — this by Washington’s design. It will be hard
to see either in or out.
Cold War
II
And here’s the thing about this
profoundly misguided project. The populations of the Western post-democracies
will pay a far higher price for letting their leaders build the thick stone
wall of Cold War II than those it is supposed to consign to the wilderness.
Westerners will pay this price in blindness, in ignorance, and in isolation from
the global majority.
If your proposition is to isolate
others — and the great majority of humanity wants no part of isolated others
and a world of walls — you’ve probably got it backwards: He who would ostracize
others will find himself ostracized.
It has turned out to be a
hop-skip, I have to say, from “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!” to erecting
another as quickly as the stones can be set in place. Now we know what
President Joe Biden means by “Build Back Better.”
Ever since the Russian intervention
in Ukraine on Feb. 24, we have watched as many perfectly innocent people —
musical conductors, athletes, professors, artists, writers — have lost their
jobs or been otherwise censured for refusing to denounce the Russian incursion
publicly, or in some cases simply for being Russian. It reminds me of a passage
in the New Testament, Matthew 15:11: Roughly paraphrased, he who would defile
another defiles only himself.
Sanctions
The sanctions Washington and its
“allies and partners” have imposed on Russia and Russians now number more than
6,000. The results so far strongly suggest they are not working — a conclusion
the policy cliques seem to be gradually acknowledging.
Last week Britain announced it
was sanctioning Vladimir Putin’s ex-wife; a former gymnast reputed to be the
Russian president’s girlfriend and three of his cousins. Western authorities
are now down to chasing the yachts of wealthy Russians around the
Mediterranean.
Can you beat this stuff for sheer
indignity?
What we’ve seen so far, appalling
as it has been, will evaporate when the time comes. Western concert halls
will again permit renderings of Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich, War and
Peace will be restored to university curricula.
The Finnish and Swedish decisions
to join NATO are of another order. They have come but will not go. We now
witness an historically significant, here-to-stay restructuring of the global
order, such as it is, in real time.
A good map illustrates well
enough the magnitude of what is about to happen. Washington has sought to bring
NATO up to Russia’s borders since the Soviet Union’s demise, but heretofore it
has recruited only the three Baltic statelets among frontline nations —
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
It failed to turn Georgia in
2008, it failed to push through yet another of its color revolutions in Belarus
last year, and, as things stand, Ukrainian membership appears a lost cause.
The map will also tell you much
about why Russia determined to intervene in Ukraine three months ago (and why
your columnist still considers this a regrettable but necessary undertaking).
As the map indicates, finally, Finnish membership will consolidate NATO’s
presence on Russia’s northwestern flank. With Sweden’s accession, the Baltic
Sea will become something like a NATO lake.
That’s the strategic picture, but
the strategic picture is merely the framework of the world we are fated to live
in for — as the best guesses now have it — decades to come, generations. Anyone
who lived through Cold War I will share with me a profound disquietude, a
sadness bordering on depression.
Among the very worst of Cold War
I’s consequences was the narrowing of the American consciousness such that most
citizens of our republic were rendered incapable of managing any kind of
complexity. Everything was binary, Manichean, “the good guys and the bad guys,”
as many a commentator — not just Tom Friedman — still thinks is fine to put on
any given matter.
Americans haven’t managed to grow
beyond the state of ignorance that Cold War I required before they are once again
pushed back into it. Ukraine: the good guys. Russia: the bad guys. Making this
case worse, the Europeans are now signing onto this simplistic view of the
world, at the very moment they could have tempered America’s cornpone
simplifications with needed nuance and sophistication.
A certain kind of nation is dying
as we speak, and to me this is among the greatest of the losses we now witness.
Finland has been neutral until now not only by treaty. It has been one of those
few nations that straddle East and West by dint of geography, culture, social
traditions and the like. You can see this, for instance, in its architecture
and the value it places on community — touches of the Asiatic.
Helsinki stood for the efficacy
of diplomacy. The twain could meet there, as they did for the Helsinki Accords
in 1975 and as they did when Ronald Reagan and Michail Gorbachev had their
momentous encounter 15 years later.
Ukraine stood to be another such
nation, divided as it is between the Galician west, tilted toward Europe, and
the Russophone east, highly conscious of its “Russianness” by way of language,
history, culture, familial ties and so on. This is why the essentially federal
system outlined in the two Minsk accords, September 2014 and February 2015, was
wise and humane — a plan that could have elevated Ukraine to something more
than a failed state, an absolute mess, which is what we must count it now.
We cannot count Sweden neutral,
even if The New York Times insists on repeating this error
daily. But it was NATO–agnostic, let’s say, and this counted. Stockholm told
the world, We are of the West, but we do not partake of Washington’s
imperial adventures, and we decline to subjugate ourselves to its
militarization of trans–Atlantic relations.
It is all gone now. The Finns
have surprised me. I thought they understood their singular place between East
and West better than they apparently do. The Swedes have been drifting
rightward from their social-democratic principles for years, but NATO
membership will still signal abandonment of a worthy position.
As to the rest of Europe, the
Ukraine crisis has made this a case of dashed hopes. We can forget about the
Continent as an independent pole of power, an expectation I and others nursed
over many years. The present generation of leadership has no experience acting
other than within the shelter of the American security umbrella.
Here I have to eat a healthy
serving of crow. I listened when Emmanuel Macron told the Group of 7 summit at
Biarritz three years ago that Europe’s destiny was bound up with Russia’s, when
the French president later dismissed NATO as “brain dead,” when he made the
case repeatedly for the need to integrate the Russian Federation into a sort of
Greater Europe at the western end of the Eurasian landmass.
I have Macron down now as the AOC
of Europe: Lots of posturing, garish professions of principled positions, in
Macron’s case his insistence over and over that Europe must cultivate its
“strategic autonomy,” but no seriousness. What a shyster, what an opportunist
poseur. And how foolish was I.
Europe’s
Crucible
The Ukraine crisis proves to be
Europe’s crucible and Europe proves a profound disappointment. We all would
have gained, not Europeans alone, had the Continent’s leaders found the
gumption to stand and act on their own and for their citizens’ interests.
Policy cliques in Washington and
the other Western capitals appear to have settled on our moment to circle the
wagons. This is the broader context within which we ought to view the Finnish
and Swedish moves toward NATO. There is no more space for outliers, no more
time for fancy-pants straddling between East and West.
In my read, this is at bottom a
response to the single most compelling reality of our century, the emergence of
parity between the West and non–West. We hear daily of how urgent it is to
shovel weapons into Ukraine as quickly as possible. And it is urgent: This is a
lunge in pursuit of the West’s longstanding superiority — a desperate defense
of something that cannot be defended.
One great difference between Cold
War I and II is that the non–West is stronger now than it was. The nations that
comprise it are technologically capable, they have their own markets, their own
investment capital; a dense web of interdependent ties elaborates as we speak.
These nations, as is already
plain from the very short list of subscribers to the Washington-directed
sanctions regime, will not be drawn into Cold War II as a long list of
developing nations was during Cold War I — Cuba, Iran and Guatemala above all,
and from there onto Vietnam, Angola, the other Central Americans, the American
satellites in East Asia — Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia.
With parity comes autonomy, to
put this point another way.
The West wants to divide the
world once again, and it is building high, thick walls to get this done. If we
can’t continue to subjugate them, the policy cliques appear to reason, let’s at
least isolate them. It will be interesting — bitterly amusing, even — to see
who turns out to be isolated as the West insists once again the twain must not
meet.
National Endowment for Democracy
Provided $1.2 Million to Kazakhstan to Help Spark Color Revolution Against
Pro-Russian and Pro-China Regime By Jeremy Kuzmarov.
Media Has
Covered Crisis in Kazakhstan in Biased Way
On January 2nd,
protests erupted in the city of Zhanaozen in western Kazakhstan that have since
spread across the country. Over 160 people have been killed, including at least
18 police officers, with hundreds more wounded.
The New
York Times and other mainstream media outlets depicted the violence as
a result of the doubling of fuel prices and unhappiness
with political authoritarianism and corruption.
Protesters take part in a rally over a hike in energy prices in
Almaty, Kazakhstan, on January 5, 2022. [Source: abcnews.go.com]
Kazakhstan’s president
Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, has been widely condemned for carrying out large-scale
human rights abuses, with Russian backing. Secretary of State Antony Blinken
referred to Russia as an occupying power.
Russia has indeed sent troops into Kazakhstan in
support of Tokayev. On January 5th,
Tokayev invoked article four of the Collective Security Treaty Organization
(CSTO), a Russia-led alliance of former Soviet states that includes Belarus,
Tajikistan, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan, which agreed to provide Kazakhstan with
military assistance and defense.
[Source: silkroadbriefing.com]
In most media coverage,
including even in alternative media, Tokyaev is depicted as the bad guy, with
Russian President Vladimir Putin. However, Tokayev’s statement about criminals
and murderers leading the protests is actually true.
[Source: wikipedia.org]
The Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation (CBC) reported that two police officers in Almaty were found beheaded and
that government buildings were stormed and set ablaze.
RT News reported that protesters were driving away military
vehicles, disarming soldiers, burning cars and had set on fire the mayor’s
office in Almaty, the country’s largest city.
Lest one think RT News is
biased since it is pro-Russian, The New York Times also featured a photograph of a burning police car
on January 7.[1]
Pepe Escobar wrote in Strategic
Culture about the protesters provoking “total anarchy, robbery, looting, hundreds of vehicles
destroyed, attacks with assault rifles, ATMs and even the Duty Free at Almaty
airport [being] completely plundered.” This assessment
dovetailed with that of Galym Ageleulov, a human rights activist in Almaty who
participated in the protests. He described the crowd as “an unruly mob of…thugs…clearly organized by crime group
marauders.”
Photo of burning police car in Almaty published by The New
York imes. [Source: nytimes.com]
Regime Change
The media almost universally
failed to report that political organizations in Kazakhstan in 2020
received $3.8 million from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation,
which promotes regime change against pro-Russian leaders in Eastern Europe and
Central Asia under the guise of advancing democracy and human rights, and more than $1.2 million from the National Endowment for
Democracy (NED). (data for 2021 is not yet publicly available)
[Source: ned.org]
The NED was founded in the
1980s by the Reagan administration to carry out functions previously adopted by
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).[2] It has been involved in
supporting “color revolutions,” or regime-change operations, throughout Eastern
Europe and Central Asia directed against pro-Russian leaders like Eduard
Shevardnadze of Georgia in the 2003 “Rose Revolution” and Viktor Yanukovych who
was ousted in Ukraine in February 2014.
· 
Rose Revolution in Georgia in
2003. [Source: wikipedia.org]
· 
Color Revolution in Ukraine.
[Source: atlanticcouncil.org]
In 2018-2019, the NED spent almost three million dollars in Belarus, which was
targeted in a color revolution directed against Socialist Alexander Lukashenko,
a close Russian ally who sustained considerable popular support because of the
strength of his country’s social programs.
Protests in Minsk in August 2020 with the aim of bringing down
Alexander Lukashenko’s socialist government. The protesters fly Belarus’s
pre-revolutionary flag. [Source: covertactionmagazine.com]
Much of the NED funding was
directed toward training youth activists in political organizing,
strengthening NGOs and financing independent anti-Lukashenko media,
which played a pivotal role in trying to stir up opposition and protests
against him. The NED has also set out to publicize human rights abuses as a means
of undermining Lukashenko’s legitimacy.
The same approach has been
deployed in Kazakhstan. In 2020, the NED budgeted $61,450 for defending human rights, $69,920 for what it calls promoting and defending civil
society, and $300,550 for independent news and commentary.
All of these initiatives sound
positive, but their primary intention is to stir anti-regime opposition and
propaganda.
When violent protests begin to
escalate, the opposition media kick into high gear, depicting the president as
a tyrant committing human rights crimes, and international media—including the
alternative media—follow suit.
Regime change usually follows,
though in the case of Kazakhstan, Russian and CSTO support, combined with the
lack of organization and vision of the protest movement, makes those prospects
here unlikely.[3]
Corrupt
Foreign-Backed Leader
The leader of the Kazakh
protest movement, Mukhtar Ablyazov, is a former energy minister and wealthy
banker, who fled from Kazakhstan to Britain in 2009 after being charged with
corruption and embezzling as much as $6 billion when he was head of
Kazakhstan’s largest bank.
A Great Freedom Fighter!
Mukhtar Ablyazov raising fist in France, having received asylum there in 2020
after being forced to leave Britain under the threat of imprisonment for tax
evasion. [Source: en.odfoundation.eu]
Owning a network of over 800
fake companies, many of them off-shore[4], Ablyazov was accused of
murdering his business rival, Yerzhan Tatishev, on a hunting trip. A colleague
told a court in Almaty that Ablyazov, who heads the right-wing Democratic
Choice party of Kazakhstan, “proposed…the physical elimination of Yerzhan. This would
happen during a hunting trip and look like an accidental death. And so it
happened.”[5]
Tarzan Tatishev [Source: asiantimes.com]
Dubbed by the British press
as the “world’s richest
fraudster,” Ablyazov
lived sumptuously in a nine-bedroom mansion in London’s “Billionaire’s Row” and
a 100-acre estate in Windsor Great Park, while renting a 15,000 square foot
mansion on Bishop’s Avenue in London. He owned three private planes and more than one thousand
apartments, and 106 cars.
Ablyazov’s mansion on London’s
billionaire’s row. [Source: independent.co.uk]
In 2012, a
British judge ordered him imprisoned for lying in court about his financial
assets, which prompted him to seek asylum in France.[6] Lord Justice Maurice Kay
observed that: “It is difficult to imagine a party to commercial
litigation who has acted with more cynicism, opportunism and deviousness
towards court orders than Mr Ablyazov.”
Ablyazov arrives at court hearing in France in 2014.
[Source: occrp.org]
Ablyazov has set up
headquarters for the new color revolution in Kyiv, home of a U.S.-backed
government infiltrated by neo-fascists that is priming for war with Russia, and
has called for Western military intervention.
His lawyer, Stephan Roh, was the attorney for Joseph Mifsud, the
notorious Maltese-British agent who tried to entrap Trump campaign worker
George Papadopoulos in 2016, with help from Italian Democratic Party
networks and the Italian government under Matteo Renzi.
Geopolitical
Stakes
Besides failing to discuss
Ablyazov’s background, almost all media coverage of Kazakhstan has
failed to probe the important geopolitical stakes underlying the protests.
Russia is depicted as the bad
guy because it is supposedly helping a ghastly regime. But
as bad as Tokayev may be, the alternative appears to be worse.
The media further ignores the
fact that Putin and Russia are obligated to act under the CSTO to defend
Kazakhstan and that the U.S. has been supporting the “color revolution in
Kazakhstan as part of a renewed Cold War offensive. Its goal is to pry a key
Russian strategic ally into the U.S. and Western political orbit, where it
could be admitted into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Russia has strong interest in
Kazakhstan, including a launch site for space missions that it rents, a major
missile testing site where a next generation missile defense system is being
developed, and a reliance on Kazakh gas as a backstop for insufficient Russian
production.
A Russian
Soyuz-FG rocket with five satellites launches from the Baikonur launch site in
Kazakhstan on July 22, 2012. [Space.com]
Kazakhstan is also one of the
world’s leading uranium producers and an important oil supplier to China, which
has emerged as a key strategic ally of Moscow.
The color revolution as of this
writing appears to have failed. The reason is because Kazakhstan has benefited greatly from the Eurasian Economic Union which
has integrated its economy with Russia and Belarus.[7]
Session of the Eurasian
Economic Council. [Source: wikipedia.org]
As a huge potential hub for
accessing Central Asia, Kazakhstan under Tokayev’s leadership is also poised to
receive considerable support under China’s One Belt-One Road initiative, which
will likely result in a huge buildup of Kazakhstan’s railway and
infrastructure, and tremendous economic benefit.[8]
[Source: carnegieendowment.org]
The U.S., it appears, would
prefer to go back to the days of Nursultan Nazarbayev, who ruled Kazakhstan
from 1990 until 2019. His mafia-style tactics were apparent when the
decapitated carcass of a dog was left outside the office of a newspaper that
reported he had stashed more than a billion dollars in state oil money in Swiss
bank accounts, with a warning that “there won’t be a next time.”[9]
Nursultan Nazarbayev
[Source: nbcnews.com]
The money had come from the
sale of a 20% stake in the Tengiz oil fields to Chevron, and from $78 million
in bribes given by an American oil industry consultant, James H. Giffen, the de
facto U.S. ambassador who also worked for Nazarbayev and helped secure
Chevron’s concession.[10]
· 
Tengiz oil field.
[Source: upstreamonline.com]
· 
James H. Giffen [Source: nytimes.com]
In 2005, former U.S. President
Bill Clinton famously enjoyed a decadent midnight feast with Nazarbayev while
helping to secure a uranium mining concession in Kazakhstan for Clinton
Foundation donor James Giustra.[11]
Bill Clinton, center, with
Frank Giustra on his left and Sir Tom Hunter on his right. [Source: nytimes.com]
Today, the Great Game
continues, but the world is changing, and China and Russia are becoming more
powerful.
1. Newsweek reported
that the protesters had broken into the presidential residence, while
the World Socialist Web Site reported that they were smashing
bank windows.
2. Former
Archivist of the United States and NED founder Allen Weinstein stated openly:
“A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” ↑
3. Though the initial protests were led by workers, the left
wing parties have been decimated by years of repression. The
country’s main political opposition party, the right-wing “Democratic Choice of
Kazakhstan,” as such has begun to play a role in the demonstrations. A high
level intelligence source told journalist Pepe Escobar that the protests were
being “sponsored by MI6 to create a new Maidan right
before the Russia/U.S.-NATO talks in Geneva and Brussels…to prevent any kind of
agreement.” Another intelligence source told him that it was a diversionary tactic to bog Russia down while war
is triggered in Ukraine. ↑
4. Some of these companies were listed as being owned by
dead alcoholics as part of a pattern of tax evasion and financial fraud.
Ablyazov is reputed to have ties to organized crime. See Charles van der
Leeuw, Fugitive Long-fingered Gentry from the Plains (Capisan,
2009).
5. The
consequence of Tatishev’s death was that Mukhtar Ablyazov forced Tatishev’s widow to transfer him
the shares that Tatishev held in BTA Bank. The transfer made Ablyazov the owner of BTA and one of the most
powerful men in Kazakhstan. The man convicted of accidentally killing him, Muratkhan
Tokhmadiyev, said he had in fact been hired to do so by Mukhtar Ablyazov. ↑
6. Ablyazov
was facing three concurrent twenty-two month sentences for judgments
against him that totaled $4.9 billion. Within a year of his tenure
as head of the state-owned Kazakhstan Electricity Grid
Operating Company (KEGOC), revenues were down by 12 percent and expenditure up
by 53 percent, a pattern repeated in 1999 when he was named CEO of Air
Kazakhstan, swiftly asset-stripping the company into bankruptcy.
The Royal Bank of Scotland was among numerous British
institutions to suffer at the hands of Ablyazov—it had to be bailed out by
British taxpayers after suffering losses of more than $1.8 billion. ↑
7. President
Tokayev also has made major concession to the protesters that will help to
dissipate them. He has promised state regulation of gas, gasoline, and socially
important goods; a moratorium on raising utility bills; subsidized rents for
housing for the poor; and the creation of a public fund to support health care
and children. ↑Tokyaev also
satisfied protesters by removing ex-President Nursultan Nazarbayev, whom
he served as a foreign minister under, from a key security post.
8. The
One-Belt-One Road was initially launched in Kazakhstan by Xi Jinping at
Nazarbayev University in September 2013. ↑
9. Peter
Baker, “As Kazakh scandal unfolds, Soviet-style reprisals begin,” Chicago
Tribune, June 11, 2002, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2002-06-11-0206110214-story.html.
The dog’s severed head was later put on the editor’s doorstep. Nazarbayev still
wields influence in Kazakhstan, though has just been removed from a key
security post. Some of the protesters had demanded his return, while others
chanted that “the old man should go away.”↑
10. Robert
Baer, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War
on Terrorism (New York: Penguin, 2002), 496, 497; Michael Dobbs, David
Ottaway and Sharon LaFraniere, “American at Center of Kazakh Oil Probe,” The
Washington Post, September 25, 2000; Ken Silverstein, The Secret
World of Oil (London: Verso, 2014), 21, 22. Giffen also gave
Nazarbayev and his wife gifts, including his-her snowmobiles, and hundreds of
thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry. Giffen never denied paying the bribes
but said his actions were fully known by the U.S. government. He had made
millions in concessions on Kazakhstan oil deals, enabling him to buy an 11-acre
estate adjacent to the celebrated Winged Foot Golf Course in New York’s
Westchester County. In late 2010, the Justice Department dropped bribery
charges in exchange for a misdemeanor tax plea, and the Judge, William Pauley,
imposed no jail time, saying Giffen was a Cold War hero and “one of the only
Americans with sustained access to high levels of government in the region.
These relationships built up over a lifetime were lost the day of his arrest.”
Oil fixer Friedhelm Eronat stated that “oil fields are a battleground. If Jim
(Giffen] had not been involved, other [non-American] firms would have gotten
the contracts, and the loser would have been the U.S. government.” ↑
11. Jo
Becker and Don Van Natta Jr., “After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to
Clinton,” The New York Times, January 31, 2008.
“NATO’s
tentacles from Europe to Latin America.”
Originally
published: Internationalist
360 on January 21, 2022 by
Geraldina Colotti (more by Internationalist 360)
(Posted Jan 24, 2022)
Globalization, Imperialism, Strategy, WarEurope, Latin America, United StatesNewswireNorth Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO)
International analysts are
often, and understandably, asked whether there will be a change in U.S. foreign
policy depending on whether a Republican or Democratic president rules the
White House. Since, for a Marxist, it is always a good idea to flee from
Manichaeism and look at the concrete situation in its historically determined
class relations, to point out that, at the international level, the essence of
U.S. foreign policy presents no discontinuities, it is not an ideological
position-taking.
“Everything
changes so that nothing changes” is a scheme that fits well with U.S. strategy
in the world. Whether wrapped in open-field Trumpist rhetoric or a more
persuasive Biden-style “multilateralism,” the foundational idea of armed
supremacy remains the basis of the American political model in foreign policy.
A paradigm that feeds and feeds the interests of the military industrial complex,
sustained, relaunched and updated by its ideological engines, schools of
thought and media.
On this
basis, the U.S. believes itself to be the gendarme of the world, legitimized in
an arms race to protect itself from eternal danger, both within and in its own
areas of influence, which are therefore replete with military bases with stars
and stripes. An apparatus that needs, from time to time, to be put to the test,
to demonstrate to allies-subjects that it is worth paying to guarantee peace
through the vicarious prestige of that armed supremacy.
On this
basis, when the Soviet Union disappeared and thus the comparison with an
economic model and a model of thought which placed peace with social justice at
the center and which could thus also inspire the pacifist demonstrations
against the aggression in Vietnam, the American war adventures, moved by
internal political motives, have consolidated the consensus of the elites
around the concept of American “democracy” as the vaccine of the world:
Leveraging on the double key of military and economic supremacy, but if
necessary also on a supposed moral and cultural superiority capable of
coagulating consonant interests globally.
This is a
concept increasingly questioned by the growth of a multicentric and multipolar
world, crossed by a globalization that intertwines interests between divergent
poles, as can be seen in Latin America where China has strong trade relations
even with extreme right-wing governments such as Brazil. On the other hand, it
can be recalled how the technical-scientific cooperation pact with Argentina,
which resulted in the establishment of a radar station in Patagonia, signed in
2014 by then President Cristina Kirchner and then ratified by businessman
Mauricio Macri, Trump’s successor in the presidency and friend, dates back to
1980, when the anti-communist military dictatorship ruled.
In any
case, if a year after the assault on the Capitol, the structural failures of
American bourgeois democracy have revealed the crisis of American hegemony also
in terms of its attractiveness, the United States remains the first world
power, well supported by an alliance, that of NATO, with new plans for
expansion.
We are
seeing this with the new conflict in Ukraine and with the failure of the
meetings that took place in Brussels between Russia and NATO. The Atlantic
Alliance, which is preparing the June summit in Madrid, Spain, has rejected all
Moscow’s proposals to contain the eastward expansion of American supremacy,
which would be dangerously enlarged by the accession of Ukraine, the last
nation to request it. In thirty years, NATO’s membership has grown from 16 to
30 countries, many of which belonged to the former Warsaw Pact.
The allies
of these 30 countries are now deployed along the Russian borders, but Putin is
once again accused by the thundering Western propaganda. The media, however,
are careful to disseminate the contents of the dialogue platform and the draft
treaty, proposed in December by Moscow and rejected by Washington. All the
points advanced by Russian diplomacy focused on the peaceful settlement of
disputes, on the commitment of the two sides not to undertake actions harmful
to security, on ensuring compliance with the principles of the UN Charter of
all military organizations and alliances to which Russia and the United States
adhere, and not to use the territories of other states to organize or launch an
armed attack against either side.
Russia also
called on the United States not to establish military bases on the territory of
other states of the former Soviet Union that are not yet NATO members and to
prevent further accession of former Soviet states to NATO. That being the case,
Russian diplomacy said, “if there is not at least some room for flexibility on
serious issues,” Moscow “sees no reason” for further meetings with the United
States and its allies.
The
Atlantic Alliance said it remains available for further meetings because “the
risk of an armed conflict in Europe is very real and must be prevented,” and in
the meantime has moved all European pawns to support the thesis that Putin
would like to invade Ukraine and would use gas, through the state-owned
Gazprom, as a political weapon in ongoing disputes with Western countries.
“The risk
of a war in the Osce area is greater than in the last thirty years,” said the
current chairman of the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe,
Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau, at the opening of the OSCE Council, which
the made up of 57 countries, including the United States, Ukraine and Russia.
“There will be no negotiations on Ukraine under military pressure from Russia,”
EU diplomacy chief Josep Borrell said, referring to Russian troops present in
Crimea.
Meanwhile,
a group of 25 Democratic senators, led by Bob Menendez, have introduced a bill
on “Defense of Ukraine’s sovereignty” in case of attack by Russia. The bill
includes sanctions against Putin, the prime minister, military officers and
banking executives. Sanctions against a head of state–the Kremlin spokesman
commented–are a measure equivalent to a severance of relations, “they would
exceed a limit”.
U.S. Senator Menendez, who chairs the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is
known for leading campaigns against Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. In 2019 he
pushed for then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to apply sanctions against Cuba,
Venezuela, Nicaragua for their relations with Russia. In December 2021, he had
Biden sign the Renacer Act, to toughen sanctions on Nicaragua, “guilty” of
organizing the November 7, 2021 presidential elections, again won by the Daniel
Ortega-Rosario Murillo presidential ticket.
The senator
also worked for the unilateral coercive measures to be adopted by the European
partners of the United States and Canada and to be accompanied by other
sanctions of an economic nature, aimed at reviewing the loans granted to the
Nicaraguan government by international organizations and reconsidering
Nicaragua’s participation in the free trade agreement that links several
Central American countries to the United States, the first world power and
first market for Nicaraguan exports.
The
elections in Nicaragua and the participation of Latin American countries in the
inauguration of President Ortega were also the subject of friction within
Celac, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States that includes 33
American countries (32 since the withdrawal of Bolsonaro’s Brazil), except for
the United States and Canada. On January 7, the summit of the organization
focused on the resumption of continental integration, despite the differences
of criteria that move the right-wing governments subordinated to the U.S., was
held in Buenos Aires and assigned the pro tempore presidency to Argentina.
Nicaragua’s
initial opposition to the Argentine candidacy has disappeared thanks to the
mediation of Cuba and Venezuela. The Sandinista government had protested
because, on November 8, the Argentine had issued a communiqué calling for a
boycott of the “fraudulent elections” in Managua and, on November 13, had then
approved a draft resolution in the Organization of American States (OAS),
sought by the United States and 8 other countries. Then, however, the
government of Alberto Fernandez decided to send back to Managua its ambassador,
who was also present at Ortega’s inauguration, and the conflict ended.
The Celac
summit, which again raised its voice against illegal unilateral coercive
measures imposed by imperialism, also denounced how some of the countries
present, Colombia in the first place, were there on behalf of third parties,
that is, on behalf of the United States. Colombia, which abounds in U.S.
military bases, joined NATO in 2018 as a “global partner”, effectively breaking
the declaration issued in Havana in 2014 by the continental body, with which
Celac declared itself a “zone of peace”. A purpose also reiterated at the
Buenos Aires summit.
By joining
the Atlantic Alliance, the Colombian government (before with Manuel Santos and
now with Iván Duque) has paved the way for any NATO maneuver both from its
coasts in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, as well as from the borders with
Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador and Panama. At the Buenos Aires summit, Colombia’s
representative defended the role of the OAS and criticized the “dictatorships”
of Ortega and Maduro. “We believe that multilateralism offers the best
options,” she said, referring to U.S. policies. Then, in shameful silence on
the massacres perpetuated in the shadow of the Colombian narco-government, she
reiterated the importance of respecting human rights in the region and maintaining
good relations with the United States and Canada.
Venezuela,
through Foreign Minister Felix Plasencia, reiterated the proposal to create a
general secretariat of Celac “to give even more impetus to the exchange between
all the countries of the region”, and supported Argentina’s claim against the
International Monetary Fund to get rid of the debt contracted by the previous
Macri government. The summit proposed 15 points to work on in the coming
months. These include the post-pandemic economy, space cooperation, educational
integration, institutional strengthening and the fight against corruption.
“Let’s wipe
the slate clean and open a new file, and let’s move forward dear Nicaraguan
brothers, building peace to fight poverty, building peace so that there are
roads,” Daniel Ortega told Managua upon assuming his fifth term as president,
after being elected with 75% of the vote. One more step towards strengthening
the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America (Alba-Tcp) and
Petrocaribe, within the framework of the alliances that make up a multicentric
and multipolar world.
Translation by Resumen Latinoamericano
NATO begins
military drills near Russian border.
Originally
published: Al Mayadeen on May 17, 2022 by Agencies (more by Al Mayadeen) (Posted May 18, 2022)
Strategy,
WarAmericas,
Europe,
Finland,
Sweden,
Ukraine,
United StatesNewswire'Hedgehog
2022', Estonia, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
On Monday,
large-scale NATO military training began in Estonia. According to the military
alliance, the ‘Hedgehog 2022’ exercise is one of the largest in the Baltic
nation’s history. The drills will involve 15,000 troops from 14 countries,
including members of the military blocs as well as their partners.
Soldiers from Finland,
Sweden, Georgia, and Ukraine will take part in the exercise,
according to the Finnish public radio Yle. According to the
broadcaster, the drills will encompass all branches of the armed forces and will
entail air, sea, and land exercises, as well as cyber warfare training.
According
to a NATO statement, the drills would also include the participation of the
U.S. Navy Wasp-class landing ship ‘Kearsarge.’ Both the military bloc and the
deputy commander of the Estonian Defense Forces, Major General Veiko-Vello
Palm, have denied that the maneuvers near the Russian border had anything to do
with Moscow’s continuing military operation in Ukraine.
The drills began barely a
day after Finland and Sweden officially announced their intentions to join NATO, and were
planned long before the war in Ukraine erupted, according to Western sources.
However, the drills in Estonia are only one component of NATO’s
large-scale military activities near the Russian border. Lithuania, another
Baltic state, is hosting the ‘Iron Wolf’ exercise, which includes 3,000 NATO
troops and 1,000 pieces of military equipment, including German Leopard 2
tanks.
NATO exercises in Poland
According
to a NATO statement issued on Friday, two of NATO’s largest exercises–’Defender
Europe’ and ‘Swift Response’–are taking place in Poland and eight other
countries, involving 18,000 troops from 20 nations.
“Exercises
like these show that NATO stands strong and ready to protect our nations and
defend against any threat,” the military bloc’s spokesperson, Oana Lungescu,
said, adding that the drills “help to remove any room for miscalculation or
misunderstanding about our resolve to protect and defend every inch of allied
territory.”
The NATO Response Force is now participating in the
‘Wettiner Heide’ drills in Germany with a force of 7,500 people. The ‘Neptune
series’ naval drills featuring the USS ‘Harry S. Truman’ carrier strike group,
which will be placed under NATO command, are scheduled to take place in the
Mediterranean Sea.
However,
according to NATO, this will be only the second time since the Cold War’s
conclusion that a U.S. carrier group has been brought under the military bloc’s
direction.
In June,
the Baltic States and Poland will host what NATO describes as “Europe’s largest
integrated air and missile defense exercise,” which would involve 23 nations.
NATO naval drills
Finland
held NATO naval drills in late April. It is now also hosting a joint land
exercise in which forces from the United States, the United Kingdom, Estonia,
and Latvia are taking part.
Massive military drills are
taking place amid rising tensions between Russia, NATO, and some of the
military alliance’s allies. Finland, which shares a lengthy border with Russia,
and Sweden agreed to reexamine their long-standing policy of non-alignment in
the aftermath of the war on Ukraine.
The announcement provoked a
surge of condemnation from Moscow, which warned that if Finland and Sweden joined
NATO, it would have to respond. Moscow also thinks that NATO expansion is a
direct danger to national security.
Monthly Review does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed
in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to share a variety of left
perspectives that we think our readers will find interesting or useful. —Eds.
'Hedgehog
2022'EstoniaNorth Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
US
Appropriates $40 Million More
House Passes $40 Billion More in Ukraine Aid, With Few
...
https://www.nytimes.com ›
U.S. › Politics
May 10, 2022 — The House on Tuesday night passed
a $40 billion military and humanitarian aid package
for Ukraine in an overwhelming 368 to 57 vote, ...
The
Senate Approves $40 Billion in New Aid to Ukraine
https://www.nytimes.com ›
U.S. › Politics
1 day ago — WASHINGTON —
The Senate overwhelmingly approved on Thursday a $40 billion emergency
military and humanitarian aid package for Ukraine, ...
ENDING
NATO
NATO
'Master Plan' aimed at Russia
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LOOKING
BACK: 2012
Dennis
Kucinich. “ NATO Talks a Sham.”
Reader Supported News, May 22, 2012.
Intro:
"The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is not a benevolent organization.
NATO is not about the
READ
MORE http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/268-35/11554-nato-talks-a-sham
WRL
RESISTANCE TO NATO IN CHICAGO MAY 2012
FROM WAR RESISTERS
LEAGUE
"...and
when your only tool is a hammer you tend to see every problem as a nail. The
At this summit,
the U.S. plans to hammer home a long-term commitment for both NATO and non-NATO
countries to the funding of the corrupt Afghan Army ($4 billion per year) and
the maintainance of an international troop presence there until the drawdown
begins in 2014. According to the "strategic partnership agreement"
signed between the
On May 18-19,
join members of WRL and War Resisters
International at the Counter-summit for Peace and Economic Justice. In
Plenary
speakers include: Sarita Gupta- Jobs with Justice, Suraia Sahar- founding
member of Afghans for Peace, Tom Hayden- Peace and
28 Workshops:
A New Economy
Is Possible: Jobs & Economic Justice vs. Militarism
US/NATO Nuclear
Weapons in
Getting it
Right on
Resisting
Militarization of Youth
Know your
rights (in
PLUS 21 more
workshops to choose from!
Register now
online.
On May 20 march
with
WRL News
Members of Ofog
(see photo above: "War Starts Here"), a Sweden-based section of War
Resisters International, are in the
COMPARING
RUSSIA AND UKRAINE TO THE USA AND CUBA
“Cuba: 60
Years of a Brutal, Vindictive, and Pointless
Embargo.” Where
Obama was willing to try “engagement,” Biden administration policy remains
mired in Cold War clichés. The Nation has always believed
there is a better way. By Peter KornbluhTwitter. JANUARY
26, 2022.
In
mid-December, some 114 members of Congress sent a forceful letter to President Joe Biden calling for
“immediate humanitarian actions” to lift the economic sanctions “that prevent
food, medicine, and other humanitarian assistance from reaching the Cuban
people.” With Cuba struggling to emerge from a dire, Covid-generated economic
crisis, the congressional representatives are pushing the White House to end
the restrictions imposed by the Trump administration on remittances and travel
and restore the Obama-era policy of engagement with the island nation.
“Engagement,” the members concluded, “is more likely to enable the political,
economic, and social openings that Cubans may desire, and to ease the hardships
that Cubans face today.”
Full engagement with
Cuba, of course, would require lifting the US embargo—a demand the congressional
letter conspicuously fails to make. As the embargo approaches its 60th
anniversary, terminating it would require not only White House action but a
vote in Congress that the Democratic leadership has neither the political
capacity nor the moral courage to prioritize. Indeed, the humanitarian measures
that these members of Congress are asking of President Biden are intended to
soften an economic crisis that, for decades, the embargo has explicitly
attempted to create.
Imposed by the proclamation of John F. Kennedy
on February 3, 1962, and codified into law during the Clinton administration,
the “embargo on all trade with Cuba” has evolved through many manifestations of
punitive economic sanctions and commercial restrictions over the past 60 years.
“The embargo is outdated and should be lifted,” Barack Obama declared during his dramatic but
short-lived effort to normalize US-Cuba relations. Instead, this “mold-encrusted
relic” of the Cold War, as The Nation once described it, remains in place—the framework of a
protracted, and failed, US endeavor to promote regime change, as well as an
enduring symbol of the perpetual hostility of US policy toward the Cuban
revolution.
During the past six
decades, The Nation has consistently opposed the US embargo
against Cuba. The magazine has published editorial after editorial, story after
story, with titles like “Endless Embargo,” “Tightening the Chokehold on Cuba,”
“An Embargo That Serves No Purpose,” and “The Stupid Embargo.” The arguments
for ending el bloqueo, as the Cubans refer to
it, and adopting a sane, humanitarian, and normal US posture toward Cuba remain
as relevant today as when they were published.
MORE FROM PETER KORNBLUH
THE SECRETS OF
THE SO-CALLED “HAVANA SYNDROME” November 17, 2021
CUBA MOVES INTO
THE POST-CASTRO ERAApril
16, 2021
BIDEN MUST
REVERSE POMPEO’S ‘TERRORIST’ MOVE AGAINST CUBA January 22, 2021
Take down this wall: Chang-Emelia
Fernandez, a Cuban American, holds a Cuban flag as she protests against the
1996 Helms-Burton Act. (Rhona Wise / AFP via Getty
Images)
FIRST FOUR US-NATO-UKRAINE-RUSSIA ANTHOLOGIES
Contents Russia (and
Ukraine) Newsletter #1, 2014 http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2014/03/russia-ukraine-newsletter-1.html
Four
Questioning Mainstream Media Pro-War Media
Patrick
Smith, US/New York Times Spin
Stephen
Cohen, Anti-Russia Is Old Anti-Soviet
Parry,
Group Think
Alternative
Analysis
(Plenty
of protest against the pro-war Obama administration and media, but all together
reflecting a comparatively small readership.
If you agree with the analyses of these alternative views that try to
view
The Nation Editorial
Alterman,
Cold War Hysteria Revived
How
Russia/Ukraine Look in
Charles
Pierce, Dick Cheney’s View
Luke
Ray
McGovern, Putin Says No to Regime Change on Its Border
Bruce
Gagnon, Danger of War Following US-led Coup for Gas and Oil
Pilger,
Other Coups, Same Superpower
Robert
Freeman,
Mark
Swaney
More
Via
Historians Against War (HAW)
Via
Common Dreams
Via
FAIR TV
Contact
Contents Russia/Ukraine
#2 http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2014/04/russiaukraine-newsletter-2.html
Alternative Perspectives
Who Is Threatening Whom?
Dick, Google
Search: US Bases Surrounding
Steve
Weissman: US Participated in Coup That
Toppled Yanukovytch
Stephen Cohen,
Cold War Again?
Two Essays from
Bruce Gagnon
Bruce Gagnon,
Boxing in the Bear (with Francis Boyle and Chandra Muzaffar)
Gagnon,
Preparing for War with
Franklin
Spinney, What Is the Real Price of Starting a New Cold War?
US Corporate Old Cold War Media
Ira
Chernus: Showdown with
Contents Russia/Ukraine
Newsletter #3
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2014/05/russiaukraine-newsletter-3.html
Contents
Davies,
Historical Background of US Coups
William
Blum, New Cold War, Same Old
Bellant,
Far Right Forces in
Amy
Goodman,
Peter
Hart, Distorting Putin
Dick, Fulbright’s Exchange
Program for Official Enemies
Veterans for
Peace Opposes US Troops to
Michael Gordon,
US Ratcheting Up the Threats, Deploying
Troops in
Cockburn,
Crisis into Catastrophe?
Hooper,
Solution Appalling?
McMullen,
Russian Greed?
Mayer, Decline
of US Empire?
Moss, Whose
Advice to Trust?
Lieven, The Way
Out?
Forum of 3
Essays on US and
Norman Solomon: Obama,
Blaming Putin
Chandra Muzaffar, US Behind Ouster of Democratically Elected President
Standards
Parry, Obama Only One Able to Prevent War
NATO
Kucinich
on NATO
McGovern
on NATO
MEDIA
Two Essays by
Robert Parry on Anti-Russian US Corporate Media
Obama Admin. and US Mainstream Media Sing
the Old Imperial
Song
Neocon and Media Support of US
Propaganda Campaign
Two Essays by Peter Hart in EXTRA! also on US Corporate Media
With Official Enemies, Too Much Is Not
Enough
Drill for More Oil and Gas Here, and
Sell to
Gordon, NYT
Parry, Bias of NYT
RUSSIA
NEWSLETTER #4 (AND UKRAINE).
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2014/07/russiaukraine-newsletter-4.html
Contents Russia/Ukraine Newsletter
#4 HISTORICAL CONNECTIONS
Polner,
Manipulated Crisis
Moss,
Another Cold War?
Watkins,
Comparing Annexations
Johnstone,
Understanding Putin
Blum,
US Media War Against Putin and Russia
US or Russian Exceptionalism?
NATO’S
Eastward Expansion
THE
CRISIS 2013-
Pilger,
the Larger Coup in
Gagnon,
US and NATO Intervention
Parry,
Kerry’s State Department’s Fiasco
Dahlburg,
Poroshnko\Ukraine Signs Up with EU
Moeri,
Be Critical of Imperialisms
Zunes,
Non-violence
Four
Articles Via HAW
Fuerst,
Germany
US
MAINSTREAM MEDIA
Contact
Arkansas Senators
Contents
of Nos. 1-3
END NATO NEWSLETTER #1, 5-20-22
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