What Planet Is NATO Living On?
Despite its recent failures in Afghanistan and Libya, NATO is turning its
military madness toward two more formidable, nuclear-armed enemies: Russia
and China.
Mint Press News
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies
February 23rd, 2021
By Medea Benjamin and
Nicolas Davies
The February meeting of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) Defense
Ministers, the first since President Biden took power, revealed an
antiquated, 75-year-old alliance that, despite its military failures in
Afghanistan and Libya, is now turning its military madness toward two more
formidable, nuclear-armed enemies: Russia and China.
This theme was emphasized by U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a
Washington Post op-ed in advance of the NATO meeting, insisting that
"aggressive and coercive behaviors from emboldened strategic competitors
such as China and Russia reinforce our belief in collective security."
Using Russia and China to justify more Western military build-up is a key
element in the alliance's new "Strategic Concept," called NATO 2030: United
For a New Era, which is intended to define its role in the world for the
next ten years.
NATO was founded in 1949 by the United States and 11 other Western nations
to confront the Soviet Union and the rise of communism in Europe. Since the
end of the Cold War, it has grown to 30 countries, expanding to incorporate
most of Eastern Europe, and it now has a long and persistent history of
illegal war-making, bombing civilians and other war crimes.
In 1999, NATO launched a war without UN approval to separate Kosovo from
Serbia. Its illegal airstrikes during the Kosovo War killed hundreds of
civilians, and its close ally, Kosovo President Hashim Thaci, is now on
trial for shocking war crimes committed under cover of the NATO bombing
campaign.
Far from the North Atlantic, NATO has fought alongside the United States in
Afghanistan since 2001, and attacked Libya in 2011, leaving behind a failed
state and triggering a massive refugee crisis.
The first phase of NATO's new Strategic Concept review is called the NATO
2030 Reflection Group report. That sounds encouraging, since NATO obviously
and urgently needs to reflect on its bloody history. Why does an
organization nominally dedicated to deterring war and preserving peace keep
starting wars, killing thousands of people and leaving countries around the
world mired in violence, chaos and poverty?
But unfortunately, this kind of introspection is not what NATO means by
"reflection." The Reflection Group instead applauds NATO as "history's most
successful military alliance," and seems to have taken a leaf from the Obama
playbook by only "looking forward," as it charges into a new decade of
military confrontation with its blinders firmly in place.
NATO's role in the "new" Cold War is really a reversion to its old role in
the original Cold War. This is instructive, as it unearths the ugly reasons
why the United States decided to create NATO in the first place, and exposes
them for a new generation of Americans and Europeans to examine in the
context of today's world.
Any U.S. war with the Soviet Union or Russia was always going to put
Europeans directly on the front lines as both combatants and mass-casualty
victims. The primary function of NATO is to ensure that the people of Europe
continue to play these assigned roles in America's war plans.
As Michael Klare explains in a NATO Watch report on NATO 2030, every step
the U.S. is taking with NATO is "intended to integrate it into U.S. plans to
fight and defeat China and Russia in all-out warfare."
The U.S. Army's plan for an invasion of Russia, which is euphemistically
called "The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations," begins with missile and
artillery bombardments of Russian command centers and defensive forces,
followed by an invasion by armored forces to occupy key areas and sites
until Russia surrenders.
Unsurprisingly, Russia's defense strategy in the face of such an existential
threat would not be to surrender, but to retaliate against the United States
and its allies with nuclear weapons.
U.S. war plans for an assault on China are similar, involving missiles fired
from ships and bases in the Pacific. China has not been as public about its
defense plans, but if its existence and independence were threatened, it too
would probably use nuclear weapons, as indeed the United States would if the
positions were reversed. But they're not-since no other country has the
offensive war machine it would need to invade the United States.
Michael Klare concludes that NATO 2030 "commits all alliance members to a
costly, all-consuming military competition with Russia and China that will
expose them to an ever-increasing risk of nuclear war."
So how do the European people feel about their role in America's war plans?
The European Council on Foreign Relations recently conducted an in-depth
poll of 15,000 people in ten NATO countries and Sweden, and published the
results in a report titled "The Crisis of American Power: How Europeans See
Biden's America."
The report reveals that a large majority of Europeans want no part in a U.S.
war with Russia or China and want to remain neutral. Only 22% would support
taking the U.S. side in a war with China, 23% in a war with Russia. So
European public opinion is squarely at odds with NATO's role in America's
war plans.
On transatlantic relations in general, majorities in most European countries
see the U.S. political system as broken and their own countries' politics as
in healthier shape. Fifty-nine percent of Europeans believe that China will
be more powerful than the United States within a decade, and most see
Germany as a more important partner and international leader than the United
States.
Only 17% of Europeans want closer economic ties with the United States,
while even fewer, 10% of French and Germans, think their countries need
America's help with their national defense.
Biden's election has not changed Europeans' views very much from a previous
survey in 2019, because they see Trumpism as a symptom of more deeply rooted
and long-standing problems in American society. As the writers conclude, "A
majority of Europeans doubt that Biden can put Humpty Dumpty back together
again."
There is also pushback among Europeans to NATO's demand that members should
spend 2 percent of their gross domestic products on defense, an arbitrary
goal that only 10 of the 30 members have met. Ironically, some states will
reach the NATO target without raising their military spending because COVID
has shrunk their GDPs, but NATO members struggling economically are unlikely
to prioritize military spending.
The schism between NATO's hostility and Europe's economic interests runs
deeper than just military spending. While the United States and NATO see
Russia and China primarily as threats, European businesses view them as key
partners. In 2020, China supplanted the U.S. as the European Union's number
one trading partner and at the close of 2020, the EU concluded a
comprehensive investment agreement with China, despite U.S. concerns.
European countries also have their own economic relations with Russia.
Germany remains committed to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a 746-mile natural
gas artery that runs from northern Russia to Germany-even as the Biden
administration calls it a "bad deal" and claims that it makes Europe
vulnerable to Russian "treachery."
NATO seems oblivious to the changing dynamics of today's world, as if it's
living on a different planet. Its one-sided Reflection Group report cites
Russia's violation of international law in Crimea as a principal cause of
deteriorating relations with the West, and insists that Russia must "return
to full compliance with international law." But it ignores the U.S. and
NATO's far more numerous violations of international law and leading role in
the tensions fueling the renewed Cold War:
illegal invasions of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq;
the broken agreement over NATO expansion into Eastern Europe;
U.S. withdrawals from important arms control treaties;
more than 300,000 bombs and missiles dropped on other countries by the
United States and its allies since 2001;
U.S. proxy wars in Libya and Syria, which plunged both countries into chaos,
revived Al Qaeda and spawned the Islamic State;
U.S. management of the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which led to economic collapse,
Russian annexation of Crimea and civil war in Eastern Ukraine; and
the stark reality of the United States' record as a serial aggressor whose
offensive war machine dwarfs Russia's defense spending by 11 to 1 and
China's by 2.8 to 1, even without counting other NATO countries' military
spending.
NATO's failure to seriously examine its own role in what it euphemistically
calls "uncertain times" should therefore be more alarming to Americans and
Europeans than its one-sided criticisms of Russia and China, whose
contributions to the uncertainty of our times pale by comparison.
The short-sighted preservation and expansion of NATO for a whole generation
after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R and the end of the Cold War has
tragically set the stage for the renewal of those hostilities - or maybe
even made their revival inevitable.
NATO's Reflection Group justifies and promotes the United States' and NATO's
renewed Cold War by filling its report with dangerously one-sided threat
analysis. A more honest and balanced review of the dangers facing the world
and NATO's role in them would lead to a much simpler plan for NATO's future:
that it should be dissolved and dismantled as quickly as possible.
