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'Truly Troubling': Claiming Western Invasion Imminent, Lukashenko Says Belarus Seeks Nukes
In addition to tactical nuclear weapons Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week he plans to station in Belarus, Lukashenko said Friday he would seek intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Mar 31, 2023
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Friday claimed without evidence that his government needs to "safeguard" the Eastern European country from a looming Western invasion, saying he is seeking to station intercontinental nuclear missiles there to defend Belarus against the United States and other countries in the West.
In an hourslong speech to Parliament on the state of the nation, Lukashenko, who has been in office since 1994 and whose 2020 reelection was disputed by hundreds of thousands of Belarusians, said the West is planning to take over both Belarus and its neighboring Poland.
"Take my word for it, I have never deceived you," said Lukashenko. "They are preparing to invade Belarus, to destroy our country."
For this reason, he said, he may use so-called "tactical" nuclear weapons that Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week the Kremlin would deploy in Belarus, if Putin agrees to their use. In addition, Lukashenko said he would seek intercontinental ballistic missiles, capable of destroying whole cities from thousands of miles away, on Belarusian soil.
"Putin and I will decide and introduce here, if necessary, strategic weapons, and they must understand this, the scoundrels abroad, who today are trying to blow us up from inside and outside," Lukashenko told lawmakers and his constituents. "We will stop at nothing to protect our countries, our state, and their peoples. "We will protect our sovereignty and independence by any means necessary, including through the nuclear arsenal."
"Don't say we will just be looking after them, and these are not our weapons," he added. "These are our weapons and they will contribute to ensuring sovereignty and independence."
Putin said Saturday that the short-range nuclear weapons he plans to station in Belarus will remain under Russian control.
Belarus relinquished its nuclear arsenal after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Lukashenko noted in his speech that Belarus gave up the weapons under pressure from former Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
Russia's announcement last week that it would deploy weapons in Belarus would mark the country's first stationing of nuclear weapons outside its border in more than three decades.
U.S. President Joe Biden said Tuesday that the pending deployment is "worrisome."
"Belarus hosting Russian nuclear weapons would mean an irresponsible escalation and threat to European security," said European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell this week. "Belarus can still stop it, it is their choice. The E.U. stands ready to respond with further sanctions."
Lukashenko and Putin have strengthened their cooperation since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with Belarus providing a staging ground for Russian troops.
The Belarusian leader's comments came amid ongoing attacks in Ukraine, with multiple rocket strikes in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, the site of a nuclear power plant, on Friday. Lukashenko included in his speech a call for an immediate ceasefire "without preconditions," warning Ukraine that "it is impossible to defeat a nuclear power" and that Russia will use "the most terrible weapon" if it is threatened.
Thijs Reuten, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, denounced Lukashenko as Putin's "lapdog" and condemned his attempt to "blame the West."
\u201cAfter Putin\u2019s empty nuclear blackmail we get his lapdog Lukashenka blaming the West.\n\nUkrainians \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udde6 don\u2019t give in. Neither should we. \n\nTruly troubling: Each of these steps brings Belarus closer to full-blown occupation. The Belarusian people deserve so much better. \u26aa\ud83d\udd34\u26aa\u201d— Thijs Reuten \ud83c\uddea\ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udf39 (@Thijs Reuten \ud83c\uddea\ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udf39) 1680273101
"Truly troubling: Each of these steps brings Belarus closer to full-blown occupation," said Reuten. "The Belarusian people deserve so much better."
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Pushing for Regime Change in Russia Implies an Embrace of Endless War in Ukraine
It goes without saying that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is wrong, violates the UN Charter, and cannot be justified under international law. Yet still we must ask: where is the path towards ending this conflict and the horrors being faced by Ukrainians?
Mar 12, 2023
Is it Russian imperialism or great-power politics that explains Putin’s invasion of Ukraine? And how likely is it that we could see regime change in Moscow? Moreover, do ideological labels matter in today’s political climate? C. J. Polychroniou tackles these questions in an interview with the French-Greek journalist Alexandra Boutri. He contends that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a major war crime but that the ongoing war is rooted in NATO’s eastward expansion and associated with the game of great-power politics. As for those who compare Putin to Hitler and call for regime change in Russia, Polychroniou argues that such claims and demands are both absurd and dangerous.
Alexandra Boutri: Let me start by asking you to share with me your views about an international relations topic that has dominated headlines for the past year, namely, the Russia-Ukraine war. Does it have its roots on Russian imperialistic aggression, which is the general view among most mainstream pundits, including many on the Left, or is it something more complicated than that?
C. J. Polychroniou: I think the best way to address your question is by putting this unnecessary tragedy, which, incidentally, could very well drag on for years to come, in historical context and thus realizing how easily it could have been avoided. Indeed, Putin’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, may have taken everyone by surprise but the seeds of this war had been sown long before. Now, Ukrainians tend to emphasize Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 as the origin of the conflict between the two countries. This is not an accurate description because the great-power rivalry between the United States and Russia is left out of the equation.
But let’s start with Crimea. For whatever reason, Crimea was gifted from Soviet Russia to Soviet Ukraine in 1954. Interestingly enough, the overwhelming majority of the population of Crimea in the 1950s was ethnic Russian and there was still an ethnic Russian majority of over 60 percent in 2014. It should also be pointed out that the Crimean Peninsula has always been a strategically vital location on the Black Sea. Indeed, Crimea’s position in the Black Sea holds such strategic importance that Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hawkish national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, made strong hints in a 1997 book titled The Grand Chessboard that the Crimean Peninsula could become a major source of instability in the territories of the former Soviet Union. Putting aside for now the legality of the Russian operation to annex Crimea, what is often ignored in the Ukrainian and western narrative is that it took place in the aftermath of NATO’s enlargement following the collapse of the Soviet Union. And it wasn’t just Putin who was wary of NATO’s eastward expansion. Gorbachev was also suspicious of the perpetuation of NATO following the end of the Cold War while Boris Yeltsin, in a letter sent to President Clinton in 1993, had strongly opposed NATO’s expansion to the east.
It seems appropriate here to recall that Putin did not mince words when it came to giving his opinion about the eastward expansion of NATO at the Security Conference in Munich on February 2007:
I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: "the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee." Where are these guarantees?
Each round of NATO expansion since the fall of the Berlin Wall (NATO grew from 16 countries at the peak of the Cold War to 30 today, several of which were part of the Warsaw Pact) was followed by loud complaints from Russia that such moves posed a threat to Russia’s national security. Moreover, the prospect of Georgia and Ukraine becoming members of the trans-Atlantic military alliance constituted a red line for Moscow. Yet pledges were made by NATO leaders at the Budapest Summit in April 2008 that Georgia and Ukraine would eventually become NATO member states. In fact, relations between NATO and Ukraine go back to the early 1990s and, after 2014, the level of military cooperation between the two intensified in critical areas.
From the perspective of the Kremlin, what NATO (i.e., the US) was up to amounted to an “encirclement” of Russia. Indeed, it shouldn’t be difficult to understand why Russian leaders felt this way, and there is no doubt that US officials knew all along that they were crossing Russia’s red lines on NATO expansion.
In this context, Russia’s invasion of the territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia in 2008, Crimea’s annexation in 2014, and the disastrous invasion of Ukraine in 2022 are all part of the game of great-power politics and have little to do with Putin’s alleged push for a new Russian empire.
Alexandra Boutri: So, according to the analysis you just provided, the idea that Putin might want to invade countries in Europe is utter hogwash. But what about the suggestion that Putin is a tyrant, this generation’s Adolf Hitler, and therefore his regime must be overthrown?
C. J. Polychroniou: The idea that Putin has plans to invade countries in Europe is so absurd and ridiculous as to be laughable. Indeed, the only serious question here is why so many refuse to acknowledge that NATO and the US bear responsibility for Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and are now failing to pursue a diplomatic path in order to put an end to this great tragedy, which is going to get much worse in the months to come as Ukraine keeps receiving more and more weapons from the west and Russia is preparing for a bigger fight. The losses on both sides are already staggering and Ukraine’s economy and infrastructure are on the verge of collapse. This is a completely senseless war that could have easily been avoided if U.S. and NATO had paid proper attention to Russia’s red lines. In fact, many top-level diplomats and academic experts had predicted that NATO’s provocative actions would lead to war.
Having said that, it goes without saying of course that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wrong, violates the UN Charter and cannot be justified under international law. Moreover, Russia could easily be charged with war crimes for the Ukraine invasion. Yet isn’t it interesting that the Kremlin’s legal justification for the invasion is based on the “pre-emptive principle” first argued by the US when it invaded Iraq in 2003? Of equal interest is to see how the western community has reacted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in comparison to the way it reacted to the US invasion of Iraq. Most Americans still have no idea of the level of destruction that the invasion unleashed. The prestigious medical journal The Lancet estimated in a 2006 study that more than 600,000 Iraqis were killed during the first 40 months of war and occupation in Iraq. But the western community is king of the double standard.
To address your question about Putin, he is no doubt a ruthless autocrat. Manipulation and repression are integral components of his regime. They have been so from the day he was sworn in as president of Russia, more than 20 years ago. Now he is also a war criminal, but we must be careful with crazy comparisons with Hitler. If Putin is the new Hitler because of his decision to invade Ukraine, why shouldn’t the same be said about George W. Bush when he invaded Iraq? However, such analogies are not only ludicrous but extremely offensive because they cheapen the memory of millions of innocent people killed by the Nazis. Hitler’s monstrous regime carried out various major genocides and countless of mass murders. This may run counter to how major segments of the media are portraying Putin these days, but he is a rational and strategic actor, though he badly miscalculated his military strength when he decided to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine as well as Ukrainian resistance. Furthermore, he has always been very popular with the Russian people and is even more popular today. In September 2022, his popularity level stood at 77 percent. After the invasion of Ukraine, the approval rating increased. In February 2023, Putin’s approval rating at home jumped up to 82 percent.So, when pundits and experts alike in the US and elsewhere speak of regime change in Russia, one really wonders what they may have in mind. Is regime change going to come from the inside, through a coup or revolution, or from the outside, through a foreign invasion? The security forces, which are the core and backbone of Putin’s regime, answer directly to Putin and they will surely protect him from any possible coup. On the other hand, his popularity is so great that simply precludes the possibility that he can be overthrown by his own people. A foreign invasion of Russia to overthrow Putin’s regime is sheer madness and totally out of the question, so all this talk about regime change in Moscow amounts to nothing more than dangerous political posturing. Why so? Because regime change seekers suspect, and they are probably right, that the most likely scenario for Putin to be removed from power is through the weakening of Russia. This means either Putin losing the war in Ukraine or witnessing the collapse of his own economy. In either case, achieving the goal of Putin’s removal from power mandates an indefinite continuation of the war regardless of what happens to Ukraine itself. But even so, what guarantee is there that Putin won’t be replaced by someone even more ruthless? A weakened and humiliated Russia will most likely lead to the emergence of an even more ruthless leader. After all, it was the economic collapse and humiliation of the 1990s that made Putin such a popular figure with the Russian people.
Alexandra Boutri: The far-right seems to have sided with Putin in Russia’s war against Ukraine, while many of the left are defending Ukraine and even going so far as to support a stronger NATO. Do political labels matter in today’s world? Indeed, is the left-right political spectrum still valid today?
C. J. Polychroniou: The situation with far-right groups and individuals supporting Putin in Russia’s war against Ukraine is a bit complicated. Some on the far-right in both the US and Europe seem to have sided with Putin simply because they see him as a white supremacist and the “savior” of western culture. But my own impression is that this is the case far more so with America’s far-right than it is with Europe’s far-right. Indeed, there has been a marked shift in the rhetoric of many extreme right-wingers in Europe since the war started. For instance, both Marine Le Pen in France and Matteo Salvini in Italy, both of them long-time admirers of Vladimir Putin, have condemned “Russian aggression.” They may have done so purely out of political opportunism, but there you have it. Anyway, ideological consistency is not the forte of the far-right. However, the same can be said nowadays about certain segments of the Left. Indeed, who would have thought 10 or even 5 years ago that the Left might one day be defending the enlargement of NATO? But we live in a time of interminable crises and perhaps political identity plight comes with the territory.
Today, more than any other time in recent history, the traditional political terms “left” and “right” have become a bit redundant, though I am not suggesting by any stretch of the imagination of doing away with the distinction. But consider this: Some of today’s conservative governments in Europe are pursuing policies, such as trying to tame the market and using the state to support vulnerable populations, that are hardly representative of neoliberalism or even traditional conservatism. Greece and Poland come to mind, both countries governed by right-wing political parties. By the same token, so-called “left” parties have moved ever so closer to the right, pursuing even neoliberal policies when they are in power, to the point that blue collar workers have switched allegiances. And the Green parties of today bear no resemblance whatsoever to the Green Movement of the seventies. The German Green party, for instance, is now advocating for stronger U.S. militarism.
Today, more than any other time in recent history, the traditional political terms “left” and “right” have become a bit redundant, though I am not suggesting by any stretch of the imagination of doing away with the distinction. But consider this: Some of today’s conservative governments in Europe are pursuing policies, such as trying to tame the market and using the state to support vulnerable populations, that are hardly representative of neoliberalism or even traditional conservatism. Greece and Poland come to mind, both countries governed by right-wing political parties. By the same token, so-called “left” parties have moved ever so closer to the right, pursuing even neoliberal policies when they are in power, to the point that blue collar workers have switched allegiances. And the Green parties of today bear no resemblance whatsoever to the Green Movement of the seventies. The German Green party, for instance, is now advocating for stronger U.S. militarism.
In the United States, of course, the situation is in some ways quite different. The Republican Party has moved so far to the right that it has developed a serious extremism problem while the Democratic Party has drifted towards its progressive faction. However, both “left” and “right” in the US are involved in a growing “culture war” and both practice cancel culture. The mania over political correctness and identity politics, which are the last things that the Left should be embracing given its historical commitment to free speech and universality, is terrible business. It is in fact helping today to give shape and form to the reactionary politics and policies of Ron DeSantis, the rising star of America’s hard- right.
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NATO's Expansion and New Strategic Concept Broaden the Prospect of Armageddon
A bleak future lies ahead.
Jul 04, 2022
The 2022 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) summit, which was held in Madrid, Spain, from June 28-30, has produced a new strategic concept for an alliance which only a few years ago was declared "brain-dead" by French President Emmanuel Macron that will define its future for the next ten years.
Indeed, thanks to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the world's largest military alliance has made a comeback, and with a vengeance. Russia has once again become its main target. The new strategic concept names it as the "most significant and direct threat to the security of allies and to the peace and stability of the Euro-Atlantic area."
Countries with a long history of neutrality, such as Finland and Sweden, will soon be joining NATO after Turkey dropped its opposition. NATO will add 1300 kilometers more of border with Russia. Since 2016, NATO also has an "enhanced forward presence" in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland.
The western encirclement of Russia, which loomed large both before and after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and has continued with the same zeal even after communism had collapsed, is now virtually complete.
This is a development with staggering implications for international peace and security. NATO was of course a source of instability and a threat to international peace and security throughout the Cold War as it was a central instrument to the US imperial project. With its eastward expansion following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, NATO's role in restoring America's unipolar world hegemony sowed the seeds of mistrust between Russia and the western powers and set the stage for the renewal of a protracted conflict, reminiscent of the Cold War.
The U.S.-led and western-centric alliance bears a great deal of responsibility for the ongoing tragedy in Ukraine. Many top foreign relations experts had predicted that NATO's eastward expansion was a move that would eventually provoke a hostile Russian reaction. Russia had been warning the west about NATO expansion for decades.
In September 1993 Boris Yeltsin send a letter to Bill Clinton in which he warned that an enlargement of NATO might be interpreted by Russia as a national security threat.
"We believe that the eastward expansion of NATO is a mistake and a serious one at that," Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first post-Soviet president, told reporters at a 1997 news conference with US President Bill Clinton in Helsinki, where the two signed a statement on arms control.
At the Madrid summit, NATO leaders agreed to a new strategic concept for the alliance that will make the world even more dangerous than it is now. But before we delve into what NATO's new strategy means for world order, let's briefly recall the history of the U.S.-led military alliance.
NATO was created in 1949 by the United States and 11 other western nations with the stated objective of acting as a deterrent to an invasion of western Europe by the Soviet Union.
Of course, there was no Soviet military threat. Stalin had no intention of invading western Europe. He was a ruthless tyrant in charge of a police state that he had built, almost single-handedly, but his approach to foreign policy was not driven by ideology but rather by the dictates of Realpolitik. He was an ultra-realist, having no desire for a military confrontation with the Americans and the British on the continent.
"I can deal with Stalin. He is honest--but smart as hell," Harry Truman wrote in his diary entry dated July 17, 1945, the first day of the Potsdam Conference in Germany.
Indeed, Stalin's geostrategic approach was not geared towards the export of a revolutionary ideology. "The export of a revolution is nonsense," he pointed out in a 1936 interview given to Roy Howard, president of the Scripps-Howard Newspapers. Stalin's primary concern was the security of the Soviet Union. His interest in having Eastern Europe under his thumb was for the purpose of creating a buffer zone between the West and the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union lost as many as 27 million lives during the Second World War, half of her industry, and thousands of villages, towns, and cities were destroyed. That's the price that it paid for saving the world from Nazi Germany. To be sure, it would be good to remind western readers that "four-fifths of the fighting in Europe took place on the Eastern front, and that's where Germans suffered virtually all of its casualties," as Rodric Braithwaite, former British Ambassador to the Soviet Union/Russian Federation accurately stated during the course of a lecture that he delivered on June 13, 2005, at Kennan Institute.
For all the above reasons, the mere suggestion that Stalin might have any intention of embarking on wild military adventures to conquer Paris or London should have been rejected as utterly ridiculous by any rational policymaker at the time, but obviously that wasn't the case. Take, for instance, the attitude of an anticommunist reactionary like Winston Churchill. His pathological hatred toward the Soviet Union was so intense that even with Operation Barbarossa well under way, and the Soviet Union on the verge of collapse, it was communist Russia, not Nazi Germany, that he considered as the barbaric antithesis of western civilization. "It would be a measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid the culture and independence of the ancient states of Europe" he wrote to Anthony Eden in late 1942.
As stated earlier, NATO's explicit purpose was to "deter Soviet aggression." But the creation of NATO had another goal, though it was never mentioned either by NATO leaders or foreign policy experts and commentators. The goal was to cement western Europe's position in the capitalist world economy with the U.S. at the helm. A year earlier, the Marshall Plan had been introduced, whose purpose was to prevent the spread of communism in western Europe, stabilize the international economic order, and provide markets for U.S. goods. By integrating European countries into NATO, the U.S. was seeking to safeguard its investments in the European economies. In other words, NATO was also seen as a bulwark against radical political change inside different European countries. It was a way to ensure that their future is tied to the capitalist world order.
NATO began to expand only a few years after its creation. Two countries with proclivity for authoritarianism but avowedly anti-communist political establishments, namely Greece and Turkey, joined NATO in 1952. Of course, both countries had already felt the presence of the U.S. in their domestic political affairs long before they were formally accepted into the transatlantic alliance. When the British informed the United States on February 24, 1947, that Great Britain "....feels itself unable, in view of the economic situation in Great Britain, any longer to bear the major share of the burden of rendering assistance in the form of money and military assistance which Greece and Turkey should have if they are to preserve their territorial integrity and political independence," a piece of news that undoubtedly made senior level officials at the State Department jump with excitement, Truman appeared before a joint session of Congress less than a month later to request $400 million of economic and military assistance to both the Greek and Turkish governments.
At that time, Greece was in the midst of the second stage of a civil war (1946-49) and the communists were on the verge of proclaiming a provisional government in the northern mountains. Local conditions and geopolitics would eventually play a role in the defeat of the communists, but U.S. assistance to the Greek army was as instrumental in the crushing of the second communist insurgency as was British support to the Greek government for the defeat of the communists in the first stage of the civil war (December 1944-January 1945).
"It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures," proclaimed Harry S. Truman on March 12, 1947. By "free peoples," of course, Truman meant the forces fighting against communism. It didn't make a difference if, as in the case of Greece, those forces happened to be fascists. Great Britain had also sided with Nazi collaborators and the most reactionary elements inside Greece in its noble attempt to deprive those political groups that had fought against the Axis powers during the Second World War from having any role in the future governance of the country.
In the case of Turkey, the Truman Doctrine served as a tool of influence in the making of Turkish foreign policy and by linking the country with western states. Only a handful of critics inside the U.S. were concerned over the fact that Turkey was governed by military regimes with no respect for human rights and freedom and that it had actually signed a treaty of friendship with Hitler in the summer of 1941.
Unlike Switzerland, whose neutrality toward warring nations originates with the Congress of Vienna in1815 and was confirmed by the League of Nations in 1920, Turkey remained neutral during the Second World War for purely pragmatic reasons. It did not severe its relations with Nazi Germany until early August 1944, when it was quite evident by then that Germany was going to lose the war and that the Soviet Union was a rising power. And when it finally declared war on Germany in late February 1945, it did so under pressure and in exchange for a seat in the future United Nations. At the Yalta Conference, held from February 4-11, 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had issued a call for a United Nations conference at San Fransisco on April 24. Only nations that had declared war on Germany and Japan before March 1945 would be invited to the San Francisco Conference.
The Truman Doctrine changed U.S. foreign policy and created a new world (dis)order. It launched the Cold War and made the U.S. the world's policeman. Europe was, of course, the most geographically important region for the United States, which is why NATO was founded. The alliance's first secretary general, Baron Hastings Ismay, was right on the mark when he described its purpose as follows: "to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down."
It took several years for the Soviet Union to create a rival organization, and it did so only when NATO failed to keep the Germans down. Indeed, the Warsaw Pact was created in response to the integration of West Germany into NATO in 1955. In the early 1950s, the Soviet government considered joining NATO, but the idea was met with silence at first and later rejected on the grounds that Soviet membership was incomparable with NATO's promotion of democratic values. In fact, the Soviets seemed to have been quite sincere when they expressed interest in the establishment of pan-European security structures. They were deeply concerned about the prospect of a Third World War which, as far as they were concerned, would have meant the end of human civilization due to the existence of nuclear weapons. The west, however, had no interest in any European security treaty that involved the Soviets.
From the perspective of the Soviet Union and its Eastern allies, NATO became a security threat when West Germany was allowed to join the U.S-led military alliance.
The last country to join NATO before the collapse of the Soviet Union was Spain in 1982. The structure of NATO evolved throughout the Cold War and so did its approach towards defense and deterrence, though nuclear weapons remained a key component of the alliance's collective defense policy.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the end of the Cold War, and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev played a pivotal role not only in the events that led to the Berlin wall coming down and the subsequent unification of Germany but also in the political transformation of Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day 1991.
However, the end of the Cold War did not lead to the disappearance of NATO. Margaret Thatcher, who, incidentally, strongly opposed the reunification of Germany following the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, undoubtedly spoke for all Cold War warriors when she addressed the question of whether NATO should disappear now that the Cold War was over by stating: "You do not cancel your home insurance policy just because there have been fewer burglaries in your street in the last twelve months."
But expansion? No one spoke openly of a NATO expansion eastward in the immediate aftermath of the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. In fact, during discussions over the process of German reunification in 1990 and on into 1991, "not one inch eastward" assurances about NATO expansion were given by western leaders to Mikhail Gorbachev. On different occasions throughout this time period, President George H. W. Bush and scores of other western leaders (Kohl, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Major and others) offered assurances to the Soviets about "protecting Soviet security interests and including the USSR in future European security systems."
NATO's enlargement in the post-Cold War era, which began to take shape in the mid-1990s with the advent of the Partnership for Peace program, had two key objectives: first, to reshape the European order, and second, to marginalize Russia. Eastern European countries, especially the Baltic states, were of course more than eager to join NATO not simply for security purposes but also as a quicker path to European Union (EU) membership.
NATO made its first post-Cold War enlargement in 1999 when the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland became members. There was no reaction on the part of the Kremlin, even with regard to Poland. First, because Russia was in the midst of political and economic chaos, and second, because all political groups in Poland were supportive of both NATO and EU membership. But Russian opposition to NATO expansion was already on the record. In fact, in the autumn of 1996, the Russian State Duma unanimously adopted a resolution which condemned NATO expansion and warned that it would lead to a crisis.
NATO went through several other rounds of enlargement since the end of the Cold War. In 2004, seven countries became members of the alliance: Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; in 2009, Albania and Croatia joined NATO, while the most recent members to join the alliance were Montenegro in 2017 and the Republic of North Macedonia in 2020.
At the NATO Summit in Bucharest on April 2008, the U.S. also pushed for an immediate Membership Action Plan (MAP) to Georgia and Ukraine, but Germany, France and smaller NATO states balked at the idea. The case of Georgia and Ukraine was regarded by key European leaders as highly controversial because they knew that such a move would risk provoking a hostile reaction by Russia. On several occasions Vladimir Putin had warned NATO and U.S. leaders that offering NATO membership to Georgia and Ukraine are "red lines" for Russia. Nonetheless, in order to placate Washington, European leaders made a vague pledge to invite Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO at some point in the future.
"We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO," NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told a news conference during the NATO summit in Bucharest after leaders had failed to include Georgia and Ukraine at the present time in its MAP.
On August 8, 2008, Putin gave Russian forces a green light to invade Georgia. The conflict was over in a matter of days, but Human Rights Watch said that forces on all sides "committed numerous violations of the laws of war" during the conflict. The conflict was over South Ossetia. Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili made the tragic mistake of ordering a military assault on the pro-Russian breakaway region, but there is little doubt that Russia's invasion of Georgia was also a signal to NATO to keep away from its borders.
Russia's military invasion into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, is unjustified and in gross violation of international law. Noam Chomsky ranks the Russian invasion of Ukraine alongside the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Hitler-Stalin invasion of Poland. Yet, no one can overlook the fact that Russian leaders had been warning the west for decades about NATO's expansion eastward. No one can honestly say that the US was not in fact deliberately provoking the Russian bear throughout the post-Cold War era. As John Mearsheimer has pointed out in connection with the current invasion of Ukraine, the trouble actually started at the NATO Summit in Bucharest in April 2008.
Yet, none of this seems to matter to NATO and U.S. leaders. On the contrary, they are determined to double down on provocation and aggression. At the Madrid summit, NATO leaders took far-reaching decisions that could trigger global instability, and much worse.
NATO branded Russia "a direct threat" to its members' peace and security. This is a wild idea, because by doing so, NATO is implying that Russia has plans to attack western capitals.
The idea that Russia poses a military threat to the west is as ludicrous as Marjorie Taylor Greene saying that "children should be trained with firearms."
In fact, it is NATO that poses a direct threat to Russian security.
With the adoption of the new strategic concept, the U.S. will significantly expand its military presence (with more troops, warplanes, and ships) on European soil. As such, Europe's existential dilemma of whether to be or not to be a U.S. vassal has finally been resolved.
With the accession of Finland and Sweden, the NATO-ization of Europe is almost complete. The only EU member states who are not yet part of NATO are Austria, Cyprus, Ireland, and Malta.
For clearly defensive purposes, naturally, NATO will also increase massively the number of troops on the eastern flank nearest Russia, and the number of troops on high alert will soar well over 300,000, compared to 40,000 troops that make up the alliance's current quick response force.
There should be no mistake about it. The new strategic concept amounts to the revival and resurgence of an old NATO vision, which is none other than assuring the conditions for the reproduction of U.S. global hegemony.
This is why NATO's regional partners--Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea--were invited to participate in a NATO summit for the first time. The Indo-Pacific has emerged as one of the most dynamic regions in the world and it is home to China. The quest for global hegemony on the part of the U.S-led, western-centric military mandates that steps be taken to address existing, new, and future threats and challenges.
Accordingly, NATO leaders declared China a security challenge for the first time. They shied away from labelling it an "adversary" for various reasons, even though the U.S-China relationship is in fact quite adversarial.
Firstly, the economies of China and the United States are intricately linked. Cutting China out of the global supply chain and key industries is a nearly impossible task for the United States at the present stage. China is also the European Union's biggest trading partner. Therefore, neither Europe nor the United States have a strong wish to treat China as an adversary.
Secondly, while Russia can be contained in the military realm, China cannot. Only direct military confrontation with China may halt the growth of its military predominance in east Asia. But China is outside NATO's sphere of interest, and while the U.S. will seek to bridge Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific alliances, it cannot be taken as a given that European states will align themselves with the perspective of the U.S. regarding the Indo-Pacific region.
Indeed, one should not expect European citizens to offer support to military adventures abroad. A recent survey released by the European Council of Foreign Affairs reveals that, although in the first 100 days of Russia's war on Ukraine, European citizens supported western intervention and the economic sanctions, "now in all countries, apart from Poland," the public mood is in favor of peace. Indeed, "The surveyreveals a growing gap between the stated positions of many European governments and the public mood in their countries" and "only in Poland, Germany, Sweden, and Finland is there substantial public support for boosting military spending."
NATO's new strategic concept comes at a critical juncture in the evolution of the post-Cold War international system where insecurity reigns supreme and the dominant actors are nuclear superpowers. It is indeed a reckless and highly dangerous initiative that will lead to greater animosity between Russia and the West, to greater mistrust between U.S. and China, and will most likely solidify the authoritarian Russia-China axis. All the needed prerequisites for the eruption of total war.
Unsurprisingly, Beijing already slammed NATO over its so-called new strategic concept, and Chinese President Xi Jinping, perhaps in anticipation of the far-reaching decisions made by NATO leaders at the Madrid summit, assured Putin in mid-June of China's support on Russian "sovereignty and security."
Putin, for his part, warned Finland and Sweden that there would be symmetric responses on the part of Russia in the event that "military contingents and military infrastructure were deployed there," which would include the deployment of nuclear weapons in the Baltic Sea region.
To be sure, a bleak future lies ahead. NATO took decisions at the Madrid summit that may very well lead to the eruption of a global Cold War. In this sense, NATO continues to follow the same path of conflict escalation, except that its endless expansion policy is now broadening the prospect of Armageddon.
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