NATO: Creating Crises
Talk about a contrived crisis. NATO, in its ongoing struggle to create enemies and thereby provide itself with a reason to exist, is now calling Russia its greatest threat. In other words, there really is no threat, unless NATO provokes Moscow and in doing so, creates one. In the current period—one that was preceded most recently by almost complete military domination of the world by the United States—Russia’s recent and relatively mild reactions to its growing encirclement by US client regimes and NATO military forces has been ratcheted up to what NATO is calling the greatest threat faced by NATO since that its heyday. Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether the Soviet Union (SU) was ever the threat US citizens were told it was by their government, this recent statement by NATO is overblown and, more importantly, potentially quite dangerous.
During the final years of the Soviet Union, numerous discussions took place between officials of the SU under Mikhail Gorbachev and officials of the US and Germany. These discussions intensified after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. A part of these discussions focused on the continuing existence of NATO and its eastern European counterpart, the Warsaw Pact. Although NATO survived the dissolution of the so-called Soviet Bloc, the Warsaw Pact did not. An undertone of the ongoing discussions between Moscow and Washington was an understanding that NATO would not attempt to recruit nations that were previously in the Moscow-led alliance. According to the NATO newsletter NATO Review, this understanding was never written down and was therefore essentially meaningless. In fact, here is a quote detailing this perception from the journal’s spring 2015 edition:
Thus, the debate about the enlargement of NATO evolved solely in the context of German reunification. In these negotiations Bonn and Washington managed to allay Soviet reservations about a reunited Germany remaining in NATO. This was achieved by generous financial aid, and by the “2+4 Treaty” ruling out the stationing of foreign NATO forces on the territory of the former East Germany. However, it was also achieved through countless personal conversations in which Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders were assured that the West would not take advantage of the Soviet Union’s weakness and willingness to withdraw militarily from Central and Eastern Europe. It is these conversations that may have left some Soviet politicians with the impression that NATO enlargement, which started with the admission of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in 1999, had been a breach of these Western commitments.
......Meanwhile, Kiev refuses to call the conflict a war. Instead, it is being termed a terrorist operation. Naturally, the reason is related to the neoliberal IMF loans Kiev has coming; such loans would be much more difficult to obtain if it was officially at war. The will of those being conscripted to fight in Ukraine’s military is less than enthusiastic, with draft resistance growing. Antiwar protests in both Russia and Ukraine are also growing in size. However, in the United States the citizens are allowing their politicians and generals to involve their nation in the conflict without any sizable protest.
Full article: http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/02/nato-creating-crises/
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