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unnecessary and intolerable transfusion to make NATO survive......

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - NATO declares the right to use force anywhere in the world, whether under the pretext of democracy or battling terrorism, Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov has said, summarizing the results of the NATO summit that has ended in Washington.

"The states of 'golden billion' want to keep in a squeezed state and suck the juices from all regions of the world. For the sake of imposing neocolonial orders, NATO actually declares the right to use force anywhere on the planet, whether under the pretext of exporting democracy, protecting human rights or fighting terrorism," Antonov told journalists on Thursday.

The Russian diplomat said that the Washington summit showed that NATO countries "have irrevocably embarked on the path of confrontation and material preparation for war," adding that "the US and its satellites are mobilizing maximum resources to preserve their failing hegemony."

Some sound thoughts expressed at the summit about a political and diplomatic settlement of the Ukraine conflict were "suppressed" by Russophobic rhetoric, he said, adding that "the hawks do not want to listen and hear anyone but themselves, and, apparently, are not capable of doing so."

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240712/nato-squeezes-juice-from-the-world-to-impose-neocolonialism---russian-ambassador-on-nato-summit-1119347469.html

 

 


By Michael Brenner

Novelty has observers rummaging through their inventory of ideas and concepts to find one to fit the new experience. Its application is supposed to provide some rudimentary meaning about the new phenomenon. Many are content with doing just that – however freighted with inappropriate connotations that label might be, however ambiguous its denotation(s). So, it is with concepts like populism, Fascism, and hegemony. All are in vogue; all are so promiscuously employed as to lose whatever capacity for clarification or explanation they could have for explicating the phenomena in question.

Let’s look at the last mentioned – Hegemony. The term holds a central place in the present discourse about the United States’ place in the world: what it has been, its sustainability, and alternative ways of formulating the country’s national interests.

Hegemony = dominance over places, political elites, institutions so as to control what a state does in its own interest. That dominance can vary in scope, in its methods of control, in its degrees of control.  The much discussed American hegemony after WW II was geographically delimited by the Communist bloc outside its ambit. After 1991, it took on a putative global dimension with the aspirational goal to solidify the United States’ primacy and dominion. It remains so today. (It was first enunciated in the notorious Wolfowitz Memorandum in February 1992, which since has become the template American foreign policymaking).1 During the earlier period, the United States’ preoccupation was security, the means primarily military – albeit buttressed by a dense network of favorable economic relationships partially institutionalized. Over the ensuing 30-odd years, the emphasis gradually shifted toward the multifaceted, politico-economic strategy of neo-liberalism. That change in the balance between ‘hard’ and ‘semi-soft’ power never eclipsed purely military considerations – as evinced in a) the Pentagon’s publicly stated commitment to broad spectrum military superiority in order to ensure escalation dominance in every region against any imaginable foe, b) the scatter-shot interventions conducted in the name of the Global War On Terror, c) the relentless expansion of NATO.

Washington’s readiness to use force to work its will, now expressed in its aggressive stance toward Russia and China, did not extinguish the idealistic Kantian belief that the spread of constitutional democracy along with the promised tangible rewards of world-wide economic independence, is the surest guarantee of international stability. A stability overseen by a benevolent America. The fulfillment of this presumed teleology, though, dictated the use of hard power to thwart/subdue those who could challenge it. 

Today, our political elites find themselves in a position where the goal of global hegemony has become unreachable – by any reasonable standard, for objective reasons. Yet, this logical conclusion is one that they are unwilling – or unable – to accept. That unwillingness is at once intellectual, ideological and emotional. The complex psychology of a declining great power that enjoyed unprecedented respect beyond its borders, that was founded on the belief in an inborn exceptionalness destining it to be the cynosure of ideas that would reshape the world, makes analysis of this behavior daunting. What we can say is that the prospect of diminished status is intolerable – even if the country’s security and welfare face no direct threat. The compulsive quest for an imagined absolute security and natural superiority does not allow Americans to rest content with what they achieved at home and abroad. For what the country aspired to, and felt itself near to accomplishing, is slipping out of our reach. The gap between aspiration and reality widens year by year. Therein lies the rub.

Fading prowess is one of the most difficult things for humans to cope with – whether it be an individual or a nation.  By nature, we prize our strength and competence; we dread decline and its intimations of extinction. This is especially so in the United States where for many the individual and the collective persona are inseparable. No other country tries so relentlessly to live its legend as does the U.S. For many Americans – in the age of anxiety and insecurity – their sense of individual self-esteem and self-worth is grounded on their intimate association with being part of a uniquely endowed and virtuous nation. Today, events are occurring that contradict the American narrative of a nation with an exceptional destiny. That creates cognitive dissonance and unease. 2

The remarkable uniformity of thinking among influential members of the political class militates against confronting that dilemma head-on. There is close to zero serious debate about foreign policy ends and means – at least, among those who have any access to the corridors of decision-making power. All observe the same holy writ and sing from the same hymnal. The result: deeply entrenched group-think impervious to contradictory evidence that is ignored or dismissed or twisted to fit preconceptions. That points to a troubling question: should American conduct internationally be understood in terms of a reasoned determination to follow chosen course internationally, however high the odds against achieving its ambitious goal? Or, are we observing compulsive actions rooted in deep-seated emotions and states of mind that are reified in doctrinal hegemony?

WHY HEGEMONY?

Every state’s paramount concern is its security. That stems from the intrinsic nature of international affairs. The distinguishing characteristic of that environment is that each entity determines when and how it might use force to achieve its objectives – there is no superior authority setting and enforcing rules of behavior. Hence, the ubiquity of potential conflict situations for which states must prepare themselves. Is the hallmark of international relations. This truism, though, trails some cardinal questions. The circumstance in which any state finds itself is not fixed; there are a multitude of strategic configurations – each with its peculiar traits. Too, there is a range of policies that a state could follow to secure itself under any of those conditions.

Obviously, those theoretical options are limited by relevant parties’ relative strength, domestic resources, degrees of internal cohesion, prevailing ideologies, etc. Nonetheless, alternative ways of setting one’s security needs and formulating strategies for meeting them do exist. That holds even where ‘discretionary response potential’ is limited by objective conditions.

Determining what constitutes a satisfactory security situation is a function of judgments made by main decision-makers in their country’s peculiar context and history. At one end of the continuum is the quest for absolute security – or, some approximation to it. Even then an assessment should be made of the feasible/preferable timeframe. Absolute security for as far as the strategic eye can see? for this generation? Until some envisaged change in the balance-of-power is expected to register?

Predominant thinking in the United States is located toward that absolutist point on the continuum. In addition, it leans heavily toward the long-term – if not permanency. That is understandable. For its first 130 years or so, the U.S. was secured against threat to its physical cum political integrity by geography. The only exception was the hovering danger posed in its early years by a Britain which harbored hopes of retribution and restoration as became manifest in the War of 1812. For the next century, the Americans engaged in conflict with other states only because of their own ambitions to extend its dominions.  (Against Spain: 1819, 1898; against Mexico: 1848). Those were choices, by no means a necessity. So, too, was entry into World War I. Washington leaders were evidently more comfortable with the pre-war status quo than they were with a Europe dominated by a triumphant Germany. Still, the threat assessment was more abstract than concrete and – such as it was – could not emerge in the near future. Hence, it rightly also should be labelled a ‘war of choice’ rather than a war of security necessity. It was natural, if not preordained, that the U.S. would revert to neo-isolationism during the inter-war period.

The American confidence in its insularity from tangible security threats subsequently was punctured by three events: Pearl Harbor, the Soviet detonation of a nuclear bomb, and 9/11. The last came 10 years after the dissolution of the threat from the USSR. In the intervening decade, the United States’ political elites felt reassured that the country’s near absolute security could be restored. The challenge was to exploit propitious conditions globally to establish a benign American hegemony wherein no threat could possibility materialize. A multiform strategy was in order to extend and deepen American influence, to affirm the allegiance and deference of other states, and to prepare for the use of force where necessary to PREVENT any prospective military rival from emerging. That is the underlying logic of the Wolfowitz Doctrine.

At present, its rootedness in the minds of the country’s leadership is evinced by our confrontational attitude toward Russia, China, Iran and a slew of less formidable states whom Washington sees as hostile or in some way antagonistic. As Joe Biden pithily pronounced last week: “not only am I campaigning, but I’m running the world.” Now, that sounds like hyperbole, but we are the essential nation of the world.” Interpolation: We should be running the entire world – for the world’s sake as well as for our sake.

‘Our sake’ implies a need. What sort of need? It is not an overt security need since there exists no manifest threat to the territorial integrity or political integrity. Nor is there such a threat to our principal allies/partners – the confected delusion about Putin being another Hitler and equally fanciful notion of a diabolical Chinese plot to replace us as the global supremo, notwithstanding. What is threatened is American hegemony as conceived a la Wolfowitz. That hegemony is needed not for security reasons, but rather to confirm United States’ entitlement to its exceptionalism and paramountcy embedded in the national psyche and its national creed.

That was the state-of-affairs when the Biden team of neo-cons and hardline nationalists came to power. They felt a sense of urgency. Trump had been too erratic in his dealings with Moscow and Beijing – a battery of sanctions notwithstanding. While he ‘dithered,’ China and Russia grew in strength, a progression that demanded swift action lest it get out of control. They were ready to take the bit between their teeth; they had a plan. The main players shared a clear – if unidimensional – cognitive map of the global environment, the goal was inscribed in granite, and their belief in the efficacy of American power unqualified. The main components were these. Russia was to be neutralized as a major power either by enticing it to shelter under the West’s wing so as to protect itself from the voracious ‘Yellow Peril” on its border OR gravely weakened by a combination of NATO expansion and economic sanctions – with the hope of that leading to Putin’s replacement by a more accommodating leadership. Joe Biden in March 2022: ‘That man just has to go!” China was to be contained by the formation a ring-fence of American-led alliances in Asia coupled to measures designed to restrict its access to Western markets, technology and finance. In addition, concrete steps would be taken to promote Taiwan’s independence while building up its defenses. The Bidens’ expected that such a strategy would mean stagnation of China’s economy with commensurate debilitation of its influence internationally. As for the other hostile parties. They could be dealt with by mobilizing America’s arsenal of coercion weapons against them.

This far-reaching strategy implied a basic change in not just objectives but in risk calculations as well. During the Cold War standoff with the USSR, Washington’s were tempered by prudence. No more. An historian of antiquity characterized the relations between the two great empires of Rome and Parthia this way: “Each empire needed to show respect to the other’s sensibilities. Pushing too hard risked bring on a far more serious war which neither side wanted.” Today’s hard-driving American leaders view that attitude as a quaint remembrance of a past epoch.

The common features of Washington’s plans for Russia and China were 1) their being grounded on profound ignorance of both countries, and 2) a gross overestimation of the West’s power relative to its postulated rivals. The stark demonstration by the Ukraine debacle and China’s economic resilience that all of Washington’s assumptions were misplaced has yet to be assimilated by the American foreign affairs community.

The obvious truth is that the Sino-Russian bloc’s growing strength makes the achievement of the hegemonic goal an impossibility. Indeed, the current trajectory points to an inexorable shift in the loci of international power and interaction toward a bifurcated (if still interdependent world system). Multi-nodal – to use Chas Freeman’s apt term.

America’s exalted sense of self is the principal obstacle to its coming to terms with this discomforting reality.  It has sparked the impulse to prove to ourselves (and to the rest of the world) that we remain the global paladin by launching a series of enterprises intended to repel foes and rivals with reinvigorating the bonds with vassals and retainers. That  foredoomed, audacious ambition to secure global dominance does not represent cool strategic judgment. Rather, it is the materializing of fantasies spawned deep in the collective American psyche. It is the go-for-broke strategy of a country suffering from a profound cognitive dissonance compounded by a collective identity crisis.

The United States has locked itself onto a course that permits no deviation, no adaptation, no deceleration.  All or nothing:  Hegemony or Armageddon. That steely determination blinds them to developments that are shifting the odds on that outcome. They are occurring not only in the BRICS part of the world. America’s disgraceful performance as an accomplice to the heinous crimes against the Palestinians has dissolved the United States’ standing in the world as a moral force, as a country with integrity and decent intention. The end of soft power as it had existed. Of course, Washington’s wishes are still taken as authoritative commands by its coterie of denatured vassals whose collective degree over control over their own affairs, as well as the words, is shrinking even faster even that that of their seigneur.

There is another, radically different alternative grounded on the belief that it is feasible to fashion a long-term strategy of nurturing ties of cooperation with Russia and China.

1. The Wolfowitz Credo animates almost all: the Classic neo-cons, the macho neo-cons, and the raw neo-imperialists. The few non-believers are irrelevant to America’s foreign policy discourse. If you urge engagement with Tehran and dialogue with Putin, you are shunned as a heretic – like the Gnostics, and then Cahors, except that the latter at least acknowledged Christ (American exceptionalism) and Satan (Putin/Khamenei) before they were administered their just punishment.  

This historical narrative brings to the fore two quite remarkable features of the present elite consensus that bears the imprint of the Neo-Con/Wolfowitz template. First, its near total conquest of the American mind succeeded despite an unmatched record of failure – in analysis and in action. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Belarus, Venezuela, Bolivia – capped by the catastrophe in Ukraine that we choreographed (including that fatal misreading of Russia). Second, the Biden administration has all but officially announced that we are now committed to a comprehensive hybrid war against a Sino-Russian bloc – a powerful rival that has come into existence because we did everything conceivable to encourage it. Yet, the foreign policy elite, the political class and the public have received the news of this titanic struggle with hardly a blink of the eye.  The country has set itself on a fateful course in a state of mindlessness induced by a willful coterie of true believers inspired by dogma wreathed in ignorance and pursued in stunningly incompetence. 

2. At the psychological level, this approach is understandable since it plays to the United States’ strength: overweening self-confidence coupled to material strength – thereby perpetuating the national myths of being destined to remain the world’s No. 1 forever, and of being in a position to shape the world system according to American principles and interests. President Obama declaimed: “Let me tell you something.  The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth.  Period.  It’s not even close. Period.  It’s not even close.  It’s not even close!”  So?  Is this meant as a revelation? What is the message? To whom?  Is it any different than someone shouting: “ALLAH AKBAR!” Words that are neither a prelude to action nor inspire others to act – nor even impart information – are just puffs of wind.  As such, they are yet another avoidance device – a flight from reality. They fail on receptive ears in London, Brussels, Berlin and Canberra. At NATO and G-7 summits, one hears the choral recitation of the ‘Shahada’: “there is only one God – Uncle Sam; and Wolfowitz is his prophet.” Yet, no President dares to repeat Obama’s exclamation in Moscow, Beijing, New Delhi, Brasilia, Riyadh, Brasilia, Jakarta ….

The tension associated with a nation so constituted encountering objective reality does not force heightened self-awareness or a change in behavior if the dominant feature of that reality is the attitudes and expressed opinions of others who share the underlying delusions. 

Accompanying it is the growing apprehension in the country that the United States’ supremacy in the world is slipping away, the sensation of losing national prowess, of its mastery in jeopardy. Together, they generate a predilection for seeking clear-cut outcomes in a relatively brief timeframe that reassure by confirming the optimistic belief in American exceptionalism.   

3. It is the national equivalent of ostentatious iron-pumping by bodybuilders worried about losing muscle tone. Those worries never disappear, though, even as one becomes muscle-bound striving ever more energetically to reassure oneself that nothing is creeping up behind you. The mirror is much preferred to the backward glance. More important, they fool themselves into the false belief that other, more relevant adjustments to reality are either unnecessary or intolerable.

https://scheerpost.com/2024/07/11/michael-brenner-hegemony-or-bust/

 

 

 

destructive militaristic culture...

 

Asia, say no to NATO: The Pacific has no need of the destructive militaristic culture of the Atlantic alliance     By Kishore Mahbubani

 

Something very dangerous happened when the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) held its meeting in Brussels. In its communique after the meeting on June 14, 2021, it identified China as a “systemic challenge” to areas “relevant to Alliance security”.

A repost from July 4, 2021

The implicit message was clear: Nato would like to expand its tentacles beyond the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. All of us who live close to the Pacific Ocean, especially in East Asia, should be deeply concerned. If Nato comes to the Pacific, it only means trouble for us. Why? Three reasons.

First, Nato is not a geopolitically wise organisation. It did a brilliant job in the Cold War, deterring Soviet expansion into Europe. During the Cold War, it was careful and restrained, building up military capabilities and avoiding direct military conflicts.

The Cold War ended 30 years ago. In theory, after “mission accomplished”, Nato should have shut down. In practice, it desperately looked for new missions. In the process, it destabilised Europe.

It bears remembering that relations between Russia and Nato used to be much better, so much so that in 1994, Russia officially signed up to the Partnership for Peace, a programme aimed at building trust between Nato and other European and former Soviet countries. But things fell apart because Nato rejected Russia’s repeated requests to refuse to accept new members in its “backyard”. Then, in April 2008, Nato pushed things further, opening the door to membership for Georgia and Ukraine at the Bucharest summit.

As US commentator Tom Friedman noted:

“There is one thing future historians will surely remark upon, and that is the utter poverty of imagination that characterised US foreign policy in the late 1990s. They will note that one of the seminal events of this century took place between 1989 and 1992 – the collapse of the Soviet Empire … 

Thanks to Western resolve and the courage of Russian democrats, that Soviet empire collapsed without a shot, spawning a democratic Russia, setting free the former Soviet republics and leading to unprecedented arms control agreements with the US. And what was America’s response? It was to expand the Nato Cold-War alliance against Russia and bring it closer to Russia’s borders.”

The result was inevitable. Russia had tried to be a friend of the Nato countries after the Cold War ended. Instead, it was slapped in the face with Nato expansion. Many Western media reports portray Russia as a “belligerent, aggressive actor”. They fail to mention that Nato actions generated this response.

A truly dangerous moment surfaced in 2014 when it looked as if Nato was about to encroach into Ukraine with the ouster of its pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych by Western-supported demonstrators. For President Vladimir Putin, that was the last straw, and soon after came the seizure of Crimea, which the Russians consider part of their cultural heartland.

The dangers of Western expansion into Ukraine were well known. Dr Henry Kissinger had pointed out:

“[The Ukrainians] live in a country with a complex history and a polyglot composition. The Western part was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1939, when Stalin and Hitler divided up the spoils. Crimea, 60 per cent of whose population is Russian, became part of Ukraine only in 1954, when Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian by birth, awarded it as part of the 300th-year celebration of a Russian agreement with the Cossacks. 

The west is largely Catholic; the east largely Russian Orthodox. The west speaks Ukrainian; the east speaks mostly Russian. Any attempt by one wing of Ukraine to dominate the other – as has been the pattern – would lead eventually to civil war or break-up. To treat Ukraine as part of an East-West confrontation would scuttle for decades any prospect to bring Russia and the West – especially Russia and Europe – into a cooperative international system”.

Sadly, since 2014, Ukraine has become a divided country. If Nato had shown greater geopolitical restraint, these problems could have been avoided.

The second major weakness of post-Cold War Nato is that its behaviour reflects the old adage: If you are a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Curiously, during the Cold War, Nato dropped very few bombs on foreign countries. Since the end of the Cold War, Nato has dropped a massive amount of bombs on many countries. Between March and June 1999, Nato bombing campaigns were estimated to have killed 500 civilians in the former Yugoslavia. Nato also dropped several thousand cluster bombs there, despite their use being illegal under the 2010 Convention on Cluster Munitions Treaty.

Nato airstrikes in Libya in 2011 resulted in 7,700 bombs dropped, and an estimated 70 civilians killed.

Many of the bombing missions were illegal under international law. I vividly remember having dinner at the home of a former Canadian diplomat in Ottawa when Nato decided to bomb Yugoslav forces in 1999. This Canadian diplomat was deeply worried. Since this military campaign was neither an act of self-defence nor authorised by the United Nations Security Council, it was clearly and technically illegal under international law.

Indeed, Ms Carla Del Ponte, a former special prosecutor in the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, tried to investigate whether Nato committed war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. Even though most Nato countries believe in the sanctity of international law, they applied so much political pressure that Ms Del Ponte could not carry out her investigations.

Even worse, Nato has often started a military campaign and then walked away from the disastrous consequences of its intervention. Libya is a classic example of this. The Nato countries were exultant when Muammar Gaddafi was removed from Libya. However, after the country split apart and became caught up in a civil war, Nato just walked away. Many years ago, a wise former US secretary of state, Mr Colin Powell, warned against such military interventions by citing a common statement in crystal shops: “If you break it, you own it.” Nato failed to own the wreckage it left behind.

This leads to the third danger: East Asia has developed, with the assistance of ASEAN, a very cautious and pragmatic geopolitical culture. In the 30 years since the end of the Cold War, Nato has dropped several thousand bombs on many countries. By contrast, in the same period, no bombs have been dropped anywhere in East Asia.

This is therefore the biggest danger we face in Nato expanding its tentacles from the Atlantic to the Pacific: It could end up exporting its disastrous militaristic culture to the relatively peaceful environment we have developed in East Asia. Indeed, if Nato was a wise, thinking and learning organisation, it should actually be studying the East Asian record – especially the ASEAN record of preserving peace – and learning lessons from it. Instead, it is doing the opposite, thereby creating real dangers for our region.

In view of the risks to East Asia through the potential expansion of Nato culture, all of East Asia should speak with one voice and say no to Nato.

This article is republished from the author’s personal publication KM 25 June 2021. Click here to read the original article.

https://johnmenadue.com/asia-say-no-to-nato-the-pacific-has-no-need-of-the-destructive-militaristic-culture-of-the-atlantic-alliance-2/

 

READ FROM TOP.

lies after lies....

 

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News

 

On March 7, 2022, two weeks after Moscow entered the civil war in Ukraine, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CBS News from Moldova that the U.S. would give Poland a “green light” to send Mig-29 fighter jets to Ukraine. 

Within days the Pentagon shot down the idea. Then U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer also supported the Polish planes scheme, but the Pentagon rejected it because it “could result in significant Russian reaction that might increase the prospects of a military escalation with NATO,” according to then Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. 

But yesterday Blinken told a public policy forum at the NATO summit in Washington: “As we speak the transfer of F-16 jets is underway coming from Denmark, coming from the Netherlands and those jets will be flying in the skies of Ukraine this summer to make sure that Ukraine can continue to effectively defend itself against the Russian aggression.”  

It is not quite NATO declaring a no-fly zone over Ukraine, which was dismissed by President Joe Biden in March 2022 because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.” 

“President Biden’s been clear that … if you establish a no-fly zone, certainly in order to enforce that no-fly zone, you’ll have to engage Russian aircraft. And again, that would put us at war with Russia,” added Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the time. 

Though not declaring a no-fly zone, these are still NATO fighter jets leaving from NATO countries to operate with Ukrainian pilots against Russian aircraft in Ukrainian airspace. More dangerously, NATO is permitting Ukraine to fly the F-16s to attack inside Russian territory.

So what changed since March 2022 to allow the U.S. and NATO to risk, in the previous words of Biden, “World War III?”  

What’s changed is that back then the White House and the Pentagon still thought the strategy of economic and information warfare plus a proxy ground war would defeat Russia in Ukraine, and ultimately bring down Vladimir Putin in Moscow.  

But for more than a year now it’s been evident that the U.S. — and NATO — have lost the economic and information war, as well as the proxy fighting on the ground in Ukraine. One year into the war, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at a dinner in February 2023 that he had to face facts: Ukraine would lose the war and should negotiate a settlement with Moscow.

The Wall Street Journal quoted Macron as telling Zelensky that “even mortal enemies like France and Germany had to make peace after World War II.” Macron told Zelensky “he had been a great war leader, but that he would eventually have to shift into political statesmanship and make difficult decisions,” the newspaper reported.  

[See: Western Leaders Privately Say Ukraine Can’t Win the War – CN] 

The Big Lie

U.S.-led NATO could not launch its economic, information and proxy war against Russia without cause. That cause would be Russia invading Ukraine to defend ethnic Russians in a civil war that had raged since 2014, sparked when the U.S. helped to overthrow the democratically-elected government that year.

The economic war, intended to spur Russians to overthrow their government, has failed spectacularly. The ruble did not collapse despite sanctions on the Russian central bank. Nor has the economy. 

Instead an alternative economic, commercial and financial system that excludes the West has arisen with China, India and Russia in the lead, and most of Asia, Africa and Latin America taking part in what appears to be the final chapter of Western colonialism. The sanctions instead backfired on the West, especially in Europe. 

The information war has failed across the world. Only the United States and Europe, which consider itself “the world,” believe their own “information.”  

The proxy war is being lost on the ground, though more than $100 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine has created a bloodbath. There will either be a negotiated settlement in which Ukraine loses territory; a total Russian victory; or potentially the final war. 

The U.S. pushed Russia to the brink to provoke its intervention. It began with a 30-year NATO expansion eastward with NATO exercises on Russia’s borders while calling for Ukraine to become a member, a call reiterated at the summit yesterday.

In December 2021 the West rejected Russian treaty proposals to roll back NATO troop deployments and missile installations in Eastern Europe, creating a new security architecture in Europe.  

[See: Biden Confirms Why the US Needed This War — Consortium News]

NATO’s aim is to regain control of Russian resources and finances as the West enjoyed in the 1990s, when it asset-stripped formerly state-owned industries, enriching themselves and a new class of oligarchs while impoverishing the Russian people. Putin is now standing in their way. 

Realizing it is losing, NATO has permitted Ukraine to attack Russian territory with its long-range missiles, which it had previously refused to do, and is now delivering the F-16s, which the Netherlands recklessly will allow Ukraine to fly inside Russia to strike targets there.   

Accompanying these dangerous moves, putting the entire world at risk, NATO is ramping up the fantasy that Putin, like Hitler before him, is bent on conquering all of Europe, a continuation of the decades-long exaggerated Soviet threat that justified NATO’s existence to begin with. 

Still desperate for direct NATO intervention, Zelensky’s hallucination at the summit was that the line of defense against Russia attacking the West lies in Ukraine. Macron has changed his tune from his dinner with Zelensky, now advocating sending French troops to the battlefield. And Biden, striving to appear lucid, made it a central theme of his address. 

Faking Defense for Offense

In his speech to the summit, Biden on Tuesday couched NATO’s aggressive designs as defensive moves to counter a non-existent Russian threat to the rest of Europe. It’s similar to dressing up Israel’s genocide as “self-defence.” He said:

“In Europe, Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine continues. And Putin wants nothing less — nothing less than Ukraine’s total subjugation; to end Ukraine’s democracy; to destroy Uraine’s cul- — Uraine — Ukraine’s culture; and to wipe Ukraine off the map.

And we know Putin won’t stop at Ukraine. But make no mistake, Ukraine can and will stop Putin — (applause) — especially with our full, collective support. And they have our full support.

Even before Russian bombs were falling on Ukraine, the Alliance acted. Or- — I ordered the U.S. reinforcements at NATO’s eastern flank — more troops, more aircraft, more capabilities. And now the United States has more than 100,000 troops on the continent of Europe.

NATO moved swiftly as well, not only reinforcing the four existing battle groups of the east but also adding four more in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia, essentially doubling NATO’s strength on the eastern flank.” 

Biden ridiculed Putin recently, saying he couldn’t even take the Ukrainian province of Kharkiv and now we are supposed to believe Putin has the absurd desire and capability to take Paris and beyond. 

Somebody Tell Washington the WWII Era Is Over

Until the U.S. and its Western allies accept that the World War II era is ended they will continue to lead the world towards a Third World War. 

At the end of the second one, the U.S. was the only major combatant undamaged at home and left with military bases flung around the world. The U.S. stood astride a devastated globe. It was faced with a choice: make good on its rhetoric of international social progress, or fortify those bases into the nodes of a global military and economic empire.  Over the decades since, the U.S. has sought to control world resources by installing the governments they need, through electoral interference, coups or invasions. 

World War II was the last just American war. That is why Washington brings it up every time the U.S. is gearing for a fight. It whitewashes its true intent — which is not to spread democracy.

Before the 1989 war on Panama, Gen. Manuel Noriega was called Hitler; before the 1999 attack on Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic was compared to Hitler; as was Saddam Hussein before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As tensions rose with Russia during her presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton called Putin Hitler, leaving the impression she too was itching for war.

World War II imagery and rhetoric has been so crucial to American imperial leaders since 1945 that they can’t let go. They have little else to sell themselves with. 

[See: Misusing the Sacrifices of WW II – Consortium News]

They have also ritually inflated the role the U.S. played in defeating Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union’s outsized contribution to destroying the Nazis has been airbrushed out of history and U.S. allies are relegated to a supporting cast, fitting for the vassals they’ve since 1945 become.  

But that era is ending. The U.S. can no longer use the Second World War to justify its aggression and demonize its enemies. Until the U.S. acknowledges it is no longer the preeminent power of the world and instead becomes a responsible international player, it will risk nuclear devastation to preserve its hubris. 

NATO’s Dangerous Declaration

The joint communique of the 32 NATO members reads:

“We stand in unity and solidarity in the face of a brutal war of aggression on the European continent and at a critical time for our security.  We reaffirm the enduring transatlantic bond between our nations.  NATO remains the unique, essential, and indispensable transatlantic forum to consult, coordinate, and act on all matters related to our individual and collective security.  NATO is a defensive Alliance. […]

The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) stated ambitions and coercive policies continue to challenge our interests, security and values.  The deepening strategic partnership between Russia and the PRC and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut and reshape the rules-based international order, are a cause for profound concern.  We are confronted by hybrid, cyber, space, and other threats and malicious activities from state and non-state actors.

Russia’s boldest red line is Ukraine joining NATO. As former C.I.A. analyst Ray McGovern wrote last week in a piece for Consortium News, Ukrainian negotiators understood this when they reached the outlines of a settlement of the war in April 2022, just weeks after it started. It was scuttled by the U.S. to keep the war going. Despite this, the NATO communicate vows to make Ukraine a member. 

That is like challenging Moscow to a nuclear duel. 

“We fully support Ukraine’s right to choose its own security arrangements and decide its own future, free from outside interference.  Ukraine’s future is in NATO.  Ukraine has become increasingly interoperable and politically integrated with the Alliance.  We welcome the concrete progress Ukraine has made since the Vilnius Summit on its required democratic, economic, and security reforms.  

As Ukraine continues this vital work, we will continue to support it on its irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership.  We reaffirm that we will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met.  The Summit decisions by NATO and the NATO-Ukraine Council, combined with Allies’ ongoing work, constitute a bridge to Ukraine’s membership in NATO.” 

The Mad Path to Annihilation

All this adds up to a collective madness. After innumerable wars since history began, the world is being led to perhaps its final confrontation.

At the core is NATO’s apparent belief that Putin is bluffing about using nuclear weapons to defend Russia’s sovereignty.  It is simply a bluff that cannot be tested.

The only solution is the two treaties Russia offered in December 2021 and a neutral Ukraine as it was under President Viktor Yanukovych, whom the U.S. helped overthrow in 2014 in part because of it. 

NATO leaders haven’t demonstrated a willingness to give up any of their collective or individual power, which is devolving rapidly into collective and individual madness. 

They don’t want to lose their role in Biden “running the world.”

Even if realists in Washington prevailed over the neocons in arguing that Ukraine can’t win this war, NATO leaders proclaim they can’t afford to lose it. Not because Putin will be at the Eiffel Tower by Christmas, but because so many political careers in the West would be ruined. 

From Keir Starmer to Olaf Scholz, to Giorgia Meloni, Emmanuel Macron and Joe Biden, a defeat in Ukraine would signify that they gambled their personal ambition — as well as their nations’ treasure and the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men — and lost it all.  

Instead of settling, they’re willing to drag us all into the existential crisis that could end it all.  

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/11/nato-summit-collectively-losing-their-minds/

 

 

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moribund....

 

BY Medea Benjamin/COMMON DREAMS

Like Biden, NATO Is Unfit to Lead

NATO’s 75th anniversary is an opportune time to take stock of NATO’s outdated world view and violations of international law. Sound familiar?

 

As NATO wrapped up its Summit and Biden held a crucial press conference, the media frenzy continued to focus on Biden’s age and cognitive abilities. Is he too old and disoriented to lead the “free world”? Was he able to get through his press conference without stumbling too many times? Lost in the media coverage about the Summit, however, has been a serious discussion of NATO’s advanced age and NATO's ability to lead the “free world.”

At 75, NATO has not aged well. Back in 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron was already sounding the alarm, accusing NATO of being “brain dead.” While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given NATO a new lease on life, NATO’s embrace of Ukraine actually makes the conflict–and the world–more dangerous.

Let’s remember why NATO was founded. As the contours of the Cold War were emerging after the devastation of WWII, 10 European nations, along with the U.S. and Canada, came together in 1949 to create an alliance that would deter Soviet expansion, stop the revival of nationalist militarism in Europe through a strong North American presence on the continent, and encourage European political integration. Or, as the alliance’s first Secretary General Lord Ismay quipped, its purpose was “to keep the Soviets out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” 

It is decades now since the Soviet Union has disintegrated and European nations have been well integrated. So why is NATO still hanging on? When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, along with its military alliance called the Warsaw Pact, NATO could have–and should have–declared victory and folded. Instead, it expanded from 16 members in 1991 to 32 members today. 

Its eastward expansion not only violated the promises made by Secretary of State James Baker to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, but it was a grave mistake. U.S. diplomat George Keenan warned in 1997 “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era.” Indeed, while NATO expansion does not justify Russia’s 2022 illegal invasion of Ukraine, it did provoke Russia and inflame tensions. NATO members also played a key role in the Ukraine’s 2014 coup, the training and arming of Ukrainian forces in preparation for war with Russia, and the quashing of negotiations that could have ended the war in its first two months. 

After two years of brutal war, the NATO Summit focused on how to shore up Ukraine’s flailing efforts to repel Russia. The insistence on setting up a “Trump-proof” scenario that would guarantee Ukraine billions in military aid for years to come and an “irreversible path” to NATO membership is really a guarantee that the war will drag on for years–precisely because NATO membership is Russia’s number one concern. There was no talk at the Summit of how to end the war by moving towards a ceasefire and peace talks. Why? Because NATO is a military alliance. The only tool it has is a hammer. 

We have seen NATO illegally and unsuccessfully wield that hammer in country after country over the past 30 years. From Bosnia and Serbia to Afghanistan and Libya, NATO has justified this violence and instability as defending “the Rules-Based Order,” while repeatedly violating the core precepts of the UN Charter. 

NATO is now a military behemoth with partners far beyond the North Atlantic that encircle the globe from Colombia to Mongolia to Australia. It has proven to be an aggressive alliance that initiates and escalates wars without international consensus, exacerbates global instability, and prioritizes arms deals over humanitarian needs. NATO provides a cover for the U.S. to place nuclear weapons in five European nations, bringing us closer to nuclear war in violation of both the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. NATO is endangering us all in a desperate attempt to reassert U.S. global hegemony in what is now a multipolar world. 

NATO’s 75th anniversary is an opportune time to take stock of NATO’s outdated world view and violations of international law. NATO should be laid to rest so we can revitalize and democratize the proper venue for dealing with global conflicts: the United Nations.

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/joe-biden-nato

 

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techno-feudalism....

Pepe Escobar

The outgoing epileptic slab of Norwegian wood posing as NATO Secretary-General put on quite a performance, Pepe Escobar writes.

We are the world. We are the people. We are NATO. And we’re comin’ to get ya – wherever you are, whether you want it or not.

Call it the latest pop iteration of the “rules-based international order” – duly christened at NATO’s 75th birthday in D.C.

Well, the Global Majority had already been warned – but brains under techno-feudalism tend to be reduced to mush.

So a gentle reminder is in order. This had already been stated in the first paragraph of the Joint Declaration on EU-NATO Cooperation, issued on January 9, 2023:

“We will further mobilize the combined set of instruments at our disposal, be they political, economic, or military, (italics mine) to pursue our common objectives to the benefit of our one billion citizens.”

Correction: barely one million, part of the 0.1% plutocracy. Certainly not one billion.

Cut to the 2024 NATO Summit Declaration – obviously redacted, with stellar mediocrity, by the Americans, with the other 31 assorted vassal members duly assenting.

So here’s the main 2024 NATO “strategic” trifecta:

  1. Extra tens of billions of dollars in “assistance” to the upcoming rump Ukraine; the overwhelming majority of these funds will be slushing around the industrial-military money laundering complex.
  2. Forceful imposition of extra military spending on all members.
  3. Massive hyping up of the “China threat”.

As for the theme song of the NATO 75 show, there are actually two. Apart from “China Threat” (closing credits), the other one (opening credits) is “Free Ukraine”. The lyrics go something like this: it looks like we are at war against Russia in Ukraine, but don’t be fooled: NATO is not a participant in the war.

Well, they are even setting up a NATO office in Kiev, but that is just to coordinate production for a Netflix war series.

Those malignant authoritarians

The outgoing epileptic slab of Norwegian wood posing as NATO Secretary-General – before the arrival of his Dutch Gouda replacement – put on quite a performance. Highlights include his fierce denunciation of “the growing alliance between Russia and its authoritarian friends in Asia”, as in “authoritarian leaders in Iran, North Korea and China”. These malignant entities “all want NATO to fail”. So there’s much work to do “with our friends in the Indo-Pacific”.

“Indo-Pacific” is a crude “rules-based international order” invention. No one across Asia, anywhere, has ever used it; everyone refers to Asia-Pacific.

The joint declaration directly blames China for fueling Russian “aggression” in Ukraine: Beijing is described as a “decisive enabler” of the Kremlin’s “war effort”. NATO script writers even directly threaten China: China “cannot enable the largest war in Europe in recent history without this negatively impacting its interests and reputation”.

To counter-act such malignity, NATO will expand its “partnerships” with “Indo-Pacific” states.

Even before the summit declaration, the Global Times was already losing their cool with these inanities: “Under the hype from the U.S. and NATO, it seems that China has become the ‘key’ to the survival of Europe, controlling the fate of the Russia-Ukraine conflict like a ‘decisive power.’”

The tawdry rhetorical fest in D.C. definitely won’t cut it in Beijing: the Hegemon just wants “to reach more deeply into Asia, trying to establish an ‘Asia-Pacific NATO’ to help achieve the U.S.’ ‘Indo-Pacific Strategy.’”

Southeast Asia, via diplomatic channels, essentially agrees: with the exception of bought and paid for misguided Filipinos, no one wants serious turbulence across Asia-Pacific like NATO has unleashed across Europe.

Zhou Bo, senior fellow at Tsinghua University’s Center for International Security and Strategy and a retired PLA officer, also dismissed the Indo-Pacific shenanigans even before the summit: we had an excellent exchange about it late last year at the Astana Forum in Kazakhstan.

Whatever happens, Exceptionalistan will remain on overdrive. NATO and Japan have agreed to establish a “highly confidential security information” line, around the clock. So count on meek Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to enhance Japan’s “pivotal role” in the building of an Asian NATO.

Everyone with a brain from Urumqi to Bangalore knows that the motto across Asia, for the Exceptionalists, is “Today Ukraine, Tomorrow Taiwan”. The absolute majority of ASEAN, and hopefully India, will not fall for it.

What is clear is that the NATO at 75 circus is absolutely clueless and impervious to what happened at the recent SCO summit in Astana. Especially when it comes to the SCO now positioned as a key node in bringing on a new, Eurasia-wide collective security arrangement.

As for Ukraine, once again Medvedev Unplugged, in inimitable style, delivered the Russian position:

“The Washington Summit Declaration of July 10 mentions ‘the irreversible path of Ukraine’ to NATO. For Russia, 2 possible ways of how this path ends are acceptable: either Ukraine disappears, or NATO does. Still better, both.”

In parallel, China is conducting military exercises in Belarus only a few days after Minsk officially became a SCO member. Translation: forget about NATO “expanding” to Asia when Beijing is already making it clear it is very much present in NATO’s alleged “backyard”.

A declaration of war against Eurasia 

Michael Hudson once again has reminded everyone with a brain that the running NATO warmongering show has nothing to do with peaceful internationalism. It’s rather about “a unipolar U.S. military alliance leading toward military aggression and economic sanctions to isolate Russia and China. Or more to the point, to isolate European and other allies from its former trade and investment with Russia and China, making those allies more dependent on the United States.”

The 2024 NATO declaration actually is a renewed declaration of war, hybrid and otherwise, against Eurasia – as well as Afro-Eurasia (yes, there are promises of “partnerships” advancing everywhere from Africa to the Middle East).

The Eurasia integration process is about geoeconomic integration – including, crucially, transportation corridors connecting, among other latitudes, northern Europe with West Asia.

For the Hegemon, this is the ultimate nightmare: Eurasia integration driving Western Europe away from the U.S. and preventing that perennial wet dream, the colonization of Russia.

So only plan A would apply, with absolute ruthlessness: Washington – literally – bombed Russia-Germany integration (Nord Stream 1 and 2, and more) and turned the vassal lands of frightened, discombobulated Europeans into a potentially very dangerous place, right beside a raging Hot War.

So once again, let everyone go back to that first paragraph of the January 2023 EU-NATO joint communiqué. That’s what we’re facing today, reflected on the title of my latest book, Eurasia v. NATOstan: NATO – in theory – fully mobilized, in military, political and economic terms, to fight against any Global Majority forces that may destabilize Imperial Hegemony.

Pepe Escobar

source: Strategic Culture Foundation

https://en.reseauinternational.net/nous-sommes-lotan-et-nous-venons-vous-chercher/

 

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SEE ALSO: https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/07/12/confusion-lies-and-fake-news-welcome-to-the-nato-summit/

Confusion, lies and fake news. Welcome to the NATO summit

history guffawing.....

 

NATO SUMMIT: Not a Shield But a Bloodied Sword

When leaders of the military pact’s member states pontificate about its invaluable role in defending democracy, you can almost hear history guffawing in the background, writes John Wight.

 

By John Wight
Medium 

 

 

The current and ongoing conflict in Ukraine reminds us that the existence of NATO 75 years on from its creation stands as an insult to the millions who died in WWII so that the U.N. Charter could be born.

Produced as the foundational document of the United Nations upon its birth in October 1945, enshrined within the charter’s articles was a solemn pledge that henceforth justice, international law and tolerance would reign in place of brute power, force and intolerance.

Consider for a moment the first section of the charter’s preamble:

“WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and 

to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and 

to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and 

to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.”

It is impossible to read those words and not lament the gaping disjuncture between the noble ideals they pledged to uphold and the grim reality that arrived in their wake.

For rather than mankind being saved from the “scourge of war,” rather than “respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law,” the scourge of war and violation of treaties and international law have grown to become a near-everyday occurrence across the globe.

The pressing question we are required to grapple with today is the question of why? What lies at the root and what is the common denominator responsible for mankind’s abject failure to achieve the vision set out in the U.N. Charter?

 

Upon due consideration, we are left in no doubt that, fundamentally, the series of conflicts that have come to define our existence are a consequence of the drive by one ideological bloc to dominate and impose a particular political, economic and value system onto a world defined by its diversity of languages, cultures, histories and traditions.

The result is the normalization of war and the apotheosis of hard power, rather than war and hard power being regarded as grotesque perversions and an impediment to human progress.

Seventy-five-years ago NATO, a military alliance whose entire existence and ethos is predicated on “might is right,” emerged from the womb of the Cold War objectives devised by a Truman administration of fanatical hawks, consumed with the goal of full-spectrum dominance at the close of WWII.

In his 1997 essay, “The Last Empire,” Gore Vidal savages the official history proffered by Western ideologues when it comes to the sudden shift that took place from Moscow being viewed as an indispensable ally in the war against Nazi Germany in the eyes of the Roosevelt administration, to implacable foe when Truman entered the White House upon Roosevelt’s death in April 1945.

Vidal:

“The National Security State, the NATO alliance, the forty-year Cold War were all created without the consent, much less advice, of the American people… The impetus behind NATO was the United States… We were now hell bent on the permanent division of Germany between our western zone (plus the British and French zones) and the Soviet zone to the east. Serenely, we broke every agreement that we had made with our former ally, now horrendous Communist enemy.”

Moving things forward, it is by now no secret that U.S. Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev in a meeting on Feb. 9, 1990 that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward” upon the reunification of Germany.

According to declassified documents, Baker’s pledge was made as part of a “cascade of assurances” over Soviet security given by Western leaders at that time and on into 1991, when the Soviet Union came to an end. It is the breaking of those assurances that lies at the heart of the deterioration in relations between East and West that has taken place since, and which informs the current conflict in Ukraine.

Flush with triumphalism over the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, NATO was loosed upon the world not in name of democracy but in the cause of imperialism. Neocon scribe Thomas Friedman wrote openly of the driving ethos of Western foreign policy after the Soviet Union’s demise:

“The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

Friedman’s unabashed celebration of the economic opportunities lying open to the U.S. in the post-Soviet world was shared by power brokers in Washington on both sides of the aisle. Intoxicated with a misplaced sense of exceptionalism and virtue, the world now lay before them like a vast banquet upon which they were invited to feast. 

The first course in this feast was the former Yugoslavia, which with its abundant human and natural resources, not to mention strategic location in the Balkans, was deemed ripe for the taking

Michael Parenti, in his definitive work on the destruction of Yugoslavia, To Kill A Nation, points out that after the fall of communism in eastern Europe 

“the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) remained the only nation in that region that would not voluntarily discard what remained of its socialism and install an unalloyed free market system. It also proudly had no interest in joining NATO.”

The decisive role of NATO in achieving the West’s objectives in the former Yugoslavia need not detain us. 

The point is that today — bearing in mind NATO’s role in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, its role in helping turn Afghanistan into a failed state, its critical role in toppling Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and turning that country into a failed state, and its stance in threatening Russia’s security in Eastern Europe — it is no longer feasible or possible to harbour any lingering belief that NATO is anything other than a tool of U.S. hard power, deployed not to protect and defend, but to destroy and dominate.

Whenever you hear U.S. President Joe Biden and other leaders and officials of NATO-member states pontificate about the invaluable role NATO plays in defending democracy in an evermore dangerous and volatile world, you can almost hear history guffawing away in the background, what with NATO’s inarguable role in creating this danger and volatility.

NATO’s disbandment and the embrace of the principles enshrined in the U.N. Charter are long overdue. Because if the decades since the demise of the Soviet Union have confirmed one thing above all others, it is that the overriding challenge facing humanity is not the lack of democracy within certain states, but the lack of democracy among all states.

Until the latter is achieved the former will always remain the product of the asphyxiating effects of Western imperialism and its bastard child, hegemony.

NATO is not a shield it is a sword, covered in blood.

John Wight, author of Gaza Weeps, 2021, writes on politics, culture, sport and whatever else. Please consider taking out a subscription at his Medium site.  

This article is from the author’s Medium site.

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/12/nato-summit-not-a-shield-but-a-bloodied-sword/

 

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NATO's cracks....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDONLsCGmZw

The Summit Of Retreat: Global NATO Is Finished | Amb. Chas Freeman

Instead of strengthening the NATO alliance and showing its power, the latest summit in Washington did the opposite, it laid bare its cracks, its failure to deal with reality, and its incapacity to respond to the unstoppable emergence of Multipolarity. It was a summit of retreat and will be remembered as the moment when NATO, instead of reinventing itself, doubled down with the same failed approach that ultimately leads to its demise.

The summit was a also an amazing show of undiplomatic visions of world-domination. However, there are luckily still people out there who understand the real meaning of all this. One of them is my guest today—a living legend of US diplomacy—Ambassador Chas Freeman.

Ambassador Freeman served as US Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1993-94, and as U. S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia (89–92), handling the fallout of the Gulf War. He was the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during the historic U.S. mediation of Namibian independence, And he was Richard Nixons principal interpreter during his 1972 visit to China, which lead to the normalization of US–China relations.

Ambassador Freeman recently wrote a short but highly useful peace on “Diplomatic Professionalism” which I which each and every diplomat in the service of what ever country would be forced to read and internalise.

 

 

In a world of shifting power balances, Americans can no longer compete internationally with wealth and weaponry alone.  We live in a world in which other nations no longer automatically defer to the United States.  Our national margin for error has demonstrably narrowed.  In several regions war has already replaced the Pax Americana.  It threatens to do the same in still others.  Our highly professional military remains peerless, but our diplomacy – our first line of defense – increasingly lacks traction.  Our country needs to get a lot better at diplomatic reasoning and the practice of diplomacy.  To match the professionalism of our competitors, we must professionalize our own diplomacy.  But what is diplomatic professionalism? 

  On Diplomatic Professionalism

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
July 2024

READ MORE: https://chasfreeman.net/on-diplomatic-professionalism/

 

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SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLDFX0kZyLA