Editorial

July 04, 2022: Information Clearing House -- "SCF" ---- Finally, the United States-led military alliance called NATO has made its global cold war ambitions explicit. At last, the warmongering organization has come clean out of the deceptive closet it has been hiding in for many years. And, therefore, henceforth, may it be damned by all good-thinking people of the world.

In a summit held in Madrid this week, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization released a new Strategic Concept that declared Russia to be a “direct threat” and China as a “challenge” to “our values and interests”. What exactly are those values and interests? Warmongering and domination!

The last time NATO published a strategic document was in 2010. Back then Russia was described as a “partner” and China wasn’t even mentioned.

Over the past decade, the U.S.-dominated military bloc has increasingly adopted a hostile policy towards both Russia and China. The search for a new cold war has been relentless, implacable, and largely implicit. Now, however, the U.S.-led axis is openly declaring its hostility.

The 30-member NATO has formally invited two new European states to join its ranks, Finland and Sweden. The two Nordic countries are ending decades of nominal neutrality in what can only be seen as a calculated provocative move against Russia’s national security. The new members will double the NATO land border with Russia and increase the already burgeoning presence of the nuclear-armed alliance in the Arctic region. Moscow has warned against such an expansion of NATO as a wanton destabilizing of strategic balance. The fact that the bloc is going ahead with the expansion speaks of the reckless disregard for efforts of finding mutual security and maintaining international peace.

The NATO summit this week also made it clear that the U.S.-led military axis is adopting a war footing against China. Why else would an Atlantic organization invite the attendance for the first time of four Pacific nations that have increasingly echoed American anti-China rhetoric? Leaders from Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea were in Madrid to form the so-called “Asia-Pacific Four” (AP4). As with the U.S.-led Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, and the AUKUS pact, the Pacific is being turned into a NATO fighting zone aimed at China, in much the same way the Atlantic is dominated by NATO hostility towards Russia. Ultimately, it is the United States and its imperial interests that are being served and giving direction. This is what is really meant by the vague and seemingly benign incantation of “our values and interests”.

This culmination in 2022 is all consistent with the historic role of NATO. It was formed in Washington in 1949 as an offensive instrument for U.S. aggression against the Soviet Union. The zero-sum ideology of American imperialism is necessarily predicated on hegemony and domination. Other nations are either vassals or enemies. A multipolar world of mutual partnership is anathema. Indeed, the very concept of the United Nations is anathema. The world must be demarcated into “allies and foes” in order for U.S. militarist-driven capitalism to survive.

When the earlier cold war with the Soviet Union ended in 1991 from the political and economic collapse of the Soviet Union, the initial euphoria of supposed American victory quickly dissipated. Author and commentator John Rachel surveys how giddy talk of an end to militarism and excessive military spending and the anticipation of a massive, transformative “peace dividend” was all too cruelly shunted aside. Why? Because the American rulers and their NATO vassals realized that without militarism and war the game was up for their corporate capitalist racketeering.

There then emerged the Wolfowitz Doctrine and “full-spectrum dominance” whereby the United States and its European minions literally declared war on the planet to corner natural resources and keep perceived competitor powers under control. A resurgent Russia and ascendant China would not be tolerated as impediments to American hegemonic ambitions.

In the past 30 years since the end of the first cold war, there has been nothing short of an orgy of U.S. and NATO warmongering in which weaker nations one after another have been destroyed by American-led militarism. International law and human rights have been gutted and ransacked by a Washington-led blitzkrieg on the planet.

Principled people like Julian Assange who exposed such criminality have been persecuted and tortured. Free speech and genuine independent critical thinking have been harassed and murdered.

With incredible hypocrisy, arrogance, and delusion, U.S. President Joe Biden and other NATO accomplices exalt principles of democracy, rules-based order and international law. When the truth is, the United States and its NATO lackeys are the enemies of world peace. Martin Luther King made a similar observation nearly 60 years ago. He was subsequently assassinated by the U.S. national security state. Washington and its Western or Pacific accomplices are the biggest threat to everything they supposedly, cynically, cherish.

The United States and its gang of imperialist flunkeys in NATO have been craving for a new cold war for the past three decades. When the Russian Federation under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin challenged the unilateralism of the U.S. rogue nation and its satraps with his landmark Munich speech in 2007 that marked him down as an enemy. Russia’s military intervention in 2015 to aid Syria under attack from the U.S. and NATO in a covert war for regime change put paid to the orgy of American-led imperialist gangsterism. That spoiler further marked Russia down as an enemy that had to be dealt with.

The Washington and NATO coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014 was another watershed event. It was a de facto expansion of NATO all the way to Russia’s borders with a Nazi spearhead. Could it be any more provocative? But Moscow drew the red line. Despite repeated appeals for diplomatic resolution over Ukraine and NATO expansion, Russia was forced to take “technical military measures” by neutralizing the threat posed by the Kiev regime.

China too has boldly demonstrated it is not willing to subordinate its independence to Washington’s imperial writ. This is why Washington is capriciously abandoning its half-century-old One China Policy with the ulterior purpose of antagonizing Beijing. The provocation towards Russia in the form of NATO-armed Ukraine is the same coin as the provocation towards China with a U.S.-armed Taiwan and an increasing NATO-affiliated encirclement in the Asia-Pacific.

Patently, and without resorting to hyperbole at all, one can say that the NATO summit this week was tantamount to a war-planning conference. The U.S.-led axis has created a new global cold war.

That in itself is damnable. In a world beset by pandemic, disease, ecological degradation, poverty, hunger and unemployment, the capitalist powers are funneling billions into war machines and whipping up a fever for confrontation based on fear-mongering, phobia and demonization. Their mentality is demonic. U.S.-led imperialism has created much of the world’s present crises, including a new cold war.

Nevertheless, the world has changed dramatically from when NATO was founded 73 years ago or even from when the last cold war ended some three decades ago. There is indeed a terrible danger of catastrophic hot war. However, there is also a welcome danger for NATO digging its own grave from its criminal activities and deplorable contradictions. Russia and China, by holding firm, may be enough to push the U.S. axis into the grave it deserves.