By Eric Zuesse

May 19, 2016 "Information Clearing House" - On May 18th, two top people at NATO, one being its current Secretary General — the very top person — laid out in preliminary form the case for war against Russia, which presumably will be presented in more detail at the NATO Summit to be held in Poland on 8-9 July this year.

As if that weren’t bad enough, there’s the matter reported by Bryan Cloughly at Strategic Culture, headlining on May 19th, “Surging Towards yet Another War”, where he pointed out that “The United States has no territorial rights of any sort, in the South China Sea which is 7,000 miles (11,000 kilometres) from its west coast. There is nothing in international law that justifies its unilateral military ‘challenge’ to China’s presence” there, in that area which is contested between five countries: China, Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Brunei. The American government, which has no authority to speak for the entire world regarding international law — of which the U.S. itself has been perhaps the most frequent violator during the past 16 years — isn’t “policeman of the world,” certainly not judge and jury and executioner (well, maybe executioner) of the world, but instead it’s merely an aspiring global thug: “The Pentagon declared on 10 May that China’s ‘excessive maritime claims are inconsistent with international law as reflected in the Law of the Sea Convention in that they purport to restrict the navigation rights that the United States and all states are entitled to exercise’.” Cloughly points out that the U.S. “refuses to ratify the Law of the Sea Convention — while ordering every other country to abide by it.”

America’s — and NATO’s — biggest danger to the world, however, is its (their) aggressions against Russia, by:

1: Violating the promise that the agents of U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush made in 1990 to the USSR’s, and then Russia’s, President, Mikhail Gorbachev — and on the basis of which the USSR was dissolved and the Warsaw Pact terminated — that NATO would not be expanded “one inch to the east” (i.e., toward Russia), a promise that was violated by Bill Clinton (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland), George W. Bush (Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia), and Barack Obama (Albania and Croatia — with current aspirants being Bosnia, Georgia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Ukraine). Gorbachev would have had to have been crazy to have ended the Cold War under those conditions if he had known about it — known that GHW Bush and his successor Presidents are a bunch of lying thugs. But because he trusted the word of Bush and his agents (such as James Baker, Francois Miterrand, and Helmut Kohl), Russia is now in this extremely vulnerable position, and Gorbachev himself thus has the lowest approval-rating of all Russia’s rulers since the czars: below even that of Stalin (28%) and Yeltsin (17%). Another poll, of only 20th-Century leaders of Russia (i.e., excluding Putin and Medvedev, both of whom scored atop that other poll), rated Brezhnev the best, and Gorbachev the worst. (That poll included Czar Nicholas II, who, along with Lenin and Khrushchev, rated near 50% approval. The only leader who was almost as low-rated as Gorbachev’s 20% was Yeltsin, at 22%.) Though Gorbachev was a sucker, America’s recent Presidents have been even worse than that — and the entire world is now threatened by what they did (and, under Obama, are doing, perhaps culminating).

2: Overthrowing the secular leader of Libya, who held that nation together and gave it the highest living-standard in Africa — overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi because he was friendly toward Russia — turned that country into a failed state and another festering hotbed for jihadists.

3: Scheming ever since 1949 to overthrow Syria’s secular leaders so as to enable Saudi oil to be pipelined through it into Europe so as to choke off Russia’s largest oil and gas market and hand it to the fundamentalist Saud family who own Saudi Arabia, and the fundamentalist Thani family who own Qatar — both of which families (and especially the Sauds) are top financial backers of jihadists (everywhere but in their own countries), which are America’s best foot-soldiers against the leaders of nations who are friendly to Russia (and in Chechnia were trying to get Putin overthrown). Obama even prioritizes ousting Assad over defeating Syria’s jihadists, as a consequence of which Syria has by far the world’s highest misery-index in Gallup’s polling of 140 nations, and a comprehensive article on the subject noted that “at least 18,000 Syrians have had organs removed during the war thus far” and, “All this tragic human horror only occurs because of an overly aggressive, imperialistic US-Israeli foreign policy creating a path of chaos and destruction across the Middle East and North Africa secretly supporting Islamic terrorists to fight US-Israeli proxy wars to illegally overthrow sovereign national governments like Assad’s.” Unfortunately, that commentator ignored the key fact: that the reason Obama wants Assad overthrown is that Assad supports and is supported by Russia. (Israel’s government might have different motivation on that matter, but likewise supports the jihadists — and is importantly profiting from the organ-trade.)

4: Overthrowing the democratically elected President of Ukraine in 2014 and replacing his democratic government by a barbaric fascist regime which perpetrated a massive ethnic-cleansing operation against its former Donbass region, which had voted 90% for that President. Then slapping economic sanctions against, and now even threatening invasion of, Russia, for Russia’s having protected Crimeans (who had voted 75% for that overthrown President) from their being similarly invaded, and from Obama’s intended take-over of Russia’s key naval base there at Sebastopol. (Oh, and did I mention, crashing Ukraine’s economy, and stripping it — but there’s too much misery in Ukraine now to even begin to itemize.)

5: Creating the refugee crisis in Europe, which doesn’t only produce hell for the millions of refugees from America’s coups and invasions, but which also weakens Europe — an American ‘ally,’ but an ‘ally’ which America’s Presidents don’t want to be able to overtake the U.S. so as to become the world’s top dog.

6: Now increasingly trying to do the same thing in Asia, especially to keep China down.

This is a far cry from the America of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who would be twisting in his grave to know what his successors have been doing after the anti-communist war was won in 1991. It’s become a shameful America, which is shameless. And the American people aren’t to blame for it; the American aristocracy, which rule here, are. The American people have been conquered, too. America’s aristocracy are as guilty as sin. They’re top dog, but this dog is rabid, and it now threatens the entire world. It’s not just George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and the Kochs, and George Soros, but it’s the whole hypocritical lot of them, the entire American aristocracy, the people who don’t merely run this lunatic asylum, they’re the schemers who’ve made it go mad and are trying to sic it against the rest of the world.

So, perhaps we’ll see what happens after July 8th and 9th. Will they call off their war? Or — as expected — escalate it to the next level?

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.