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.”
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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.