{"id":216471,"date":"2022-07-11T12:00:51","date_gmt":"2022-07-11T11:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=216471"},"modified":"2022-07-11T06:38:20","modified_gmt":"2022-07-11T05:38:20","slug":"nato-the-most-dangerous-military-alliance-on-the-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/07\/nato-the-most-dangerous-military-alliance-on-the-planet\/","title":{"rendered":"NATO: The Most Dangerous Military Alliance on the Planet"},"content":{"rendered":"

10 Jul 2022 – The massive expansion of NATO, not only in Eastern and Central Europe but the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia, presages endless war and a potential nuclear holocaust.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Together We Are Wrong \u2014 by Mr. Fish<\/p><\/div>\n

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the arms industry that depends on it for billions in profits, has become the most aggressive and dangerous military alliance on the planet. Created in 1949 to thwart Soviet expansion into Eastern and Central Europe, it has evolved into a global war machine in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia.<\/p>\n

NATO expanded its footprint, violating<\/a> promises<\/a> to Moscow, once the Cold War ended<\/a>, to incorporate 14 countries<\/a> in Eastern and Central Europe into the alliance. It will soon add Finland and Sweden. It bombed Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo. It launched wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, resulting in close to a million deaths and some 38 million people driven from their homes.<\/a> It is building a military footprint in Africa<\/a> and Asia. It invited Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, the so-called \u201cAsia Pacific Four,\u201d to its recent summit in Madrid at the end of June.<\/p>\n

It has expanded its reach into the Southern Hemisphere, signing a military training<\/a> partnership agreement with Colombia, in December 2021. It has backed Turkey, with NATO\u2019s second largest military, which has illegally invaded<\/a> and occupied parts of Syria as well as Iraq. Turkish-backed militias<\/a> are engaged in<\/a> the ethnic cleansing of Syrian Kurds and other inhabitants of north and east Syria. The Turkish military has been accused of war crimes \u2013 including multiple airstrikes<\/a> against a refugee camp and chemical weapons<\/a> use – in northern Iraq. In exchange<\/a> for President Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan\u2019s permission for Finland and Sweden to join the alliance, the two Nordic countries have agreed<\/a> to expand<\/a> their domestic terror laws making it easier to crack down on Kurdish and other activists, lift their restrictions on selling arms to Turkey and deny support to the Kurdish-led movement for democratic autonomy in Syria.<\/p>\n

It is quite a record for a military alliance that with the collapse of the Soviet Union was rendered obsolete and should have been dismantled. NATO and the militarists had no intention of embracing the \u201cpeace dividend,\u201d fostering a world based on diplomacy, a respect of spheres of influence and mutual cooperation. It was determined to stay in business. Its business is war. That meant expanding its war machine far beyond the border of Europe and engaging in ceaseless antagonism toward China and Russia.<\/p>\n

NATO sees the future, as detailed in its \u201cNATO 2030: Unified for a New Era<\/a>,\u201d as a battle for hegemony with rival states, especially China, and calls for the preparation of prolonged global conflict.<\/p>\n

\u201cChina has an increasingly global strategic agenda, supported by its economic and military heft,\u201d the NATO 2030 initiative warned. \u201cIt has proven its willingness to use force against its neighbors, as well as economic coercion and intimidatory diplomacy well beyond the Indo-Pacific region. Over the coming decade, China will likely also challenge NATO\u2019s ability to build collective resilience, safeguard critical infrastructure, address new and emerging technologies such as 5G and protect sensitive sectors of the economy including supply chains. Longer term, China is increasingly likely to project military power globally, including potentially in the Euro-Atlantic area.\u201d<\/p>\n

The alliance has spurned the Cold War strategy that made sure Washington was closer to Moscow and Beijing than Moscow and Beijing were to each other. U.S. and NATO antagonism have turned Russia and China into close allies. Russia, rich in natural resources, including energy, minerals and grains, and China, a manufacturing and technological behemoth, are a potent combination. NATO no longer distinguishes between the two, announcing in its most recent mission statement<\/a> that the \u201cdeepening strategic partnership\u201d between Russian and China has resulted in \u201cmutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order that run counter to our values and interests.\u201d<\/p>\n

On July 6, Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, and Ken McCallum, director general of Britain\u2019s MI5, held a joint news conference<\/a> in London to announce that China was the \u201cbiggest long-term threat to our economic and national security.\u201d They accused China, like Russia, of interfering in U.S. and U.K. elections. Wray warned the business leaders they addressed that the Chinese government was \u201cset on stealing your technology, whatever it is that makes your industry tick, and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market.\u201d<\/p>\n

This inflammatory rhetoric presages an ominous future.<\/p>\n

One cannot talk about war without talking about markets. The political and social turmoil in the U.S., coupled with its diminishing economic power, has led it to embrace NATO and its war machine as the antidote to its decline.<\/p>\n

Washington and its European allies are terrified of China\u2019s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) meant to connect an economic bloc of roughly 70 nations outside U.S. control. The initiative includes the construction of rail lines, roads and gas pipelines that will be integrated with Russia. Beijing is expected to commit $1.3 trillion<\/a> to the BRI by 2027. China, which is on track to become the world\u2019s largest economy<\/a> within a decade, has organized the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership<\/a>, the world\u2019s largest trade pact of 15 East Asian and Pacific nations representing 30 percent of global trade. It already accounts for<\/a> 28.7 percent of the Global Manufacturing Output, nearly double the 16.8 percent of the U.S.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s rate of growth last year was an impressive\u00a0 8.1 percent<\/a>, although slowing to around 5 percent<\/a> this year.\u00a0 By contrast, the U.S.\u2019s growth rate in 2021 was 5.7 percent<\/a> — its highest since 1984 — but is predicted to fall below 1 percent<\/a> this year, by the New York Federal Reserve.<\/p>\n

If China, Russia, Iran, India and other nations free themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar as the world\u2019s reserve currency and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network financial institutions use to send and receive information such as money transfer instructions, it will trigger a dramatic decline in the value of the dollar and a financial collapse in the U.S. The huge military expenditures, which have driven the U.S. debt to $30 trillion<\/a>, $ 6 trillion more than the U.S.\u2019s entire GDP, will become untenable. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military in 2021, $ 801 billion which amounted to 38 percent of total world expenditure on the military, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined. The loss of the dollar as the world\u2019s reserve currency will force the U.S. to slash spending, shutter many of its 800 military bases overseas and cope with the inevitable social and political upheavals triggered by economic collapse. It is darkly ironic that NATO has accelerated this possibility.<\/p>\n

Russia, in the eyes of NATO and U.S. strategists, is the appetizer. Its military, NATO hopes<\/a>, will get bogged down and degraded in Ukraine. Sanctions and diplomatic isolation, the plan goes, will thrust Vladimir Putin from power. A client regime that will do U.S. bidding will be installed in Moscow.<\/p>\n

NATO has provided more than $8 billion <\/a>in military aid to Ukraine, while the US has committed nearly $54 billion<\/a> in military and humanitarian assistance to the country.<\/p>\n

China, however, is the main course<\/a>. Unable to compete economically, the U.S. and NATO have turned to the blunt instrument of war to cripple their global competitor.<\/p>\n

The provocation of China replicates the NATO baiting of Russia.<\/p>\n

NATO expansion and the 2014 US-backed coup<\/a> in Kyiv led Russia to first occupy Crimea, in eastern Ukraine, with its large ethnic Russian population, and then to invade all of Ukraine to thwart the country\u2019s efforts to join NATO.<\/p>\n

The same dance of death is being played with China over Taiwan, which China considers part of Chinese territory, and with NATO expansion in the Asia Pacific. China flies warplanes<\/a> into Taiwan’s air defense zone and the U.S. sends naval ships<\/a> through the Taiwan Strait which connects the South and East China seas. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in May called China<\/a> the most serious long-term challenge to the international order, citing its claims to Taiwan and efforts to dominate the South China Sea<\/a>. Taiwan’s president, in a Zelensky-like publicity stunt, recently posed<\/a> with an anti-tank rocket launcher in a government handout photo.<\/p>\n

The conflict in Ukraine has been a bonanza for the arms industry<\/a>, which, given the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, needed a new conflict. Lockheed Martin’s stock prices are up 12 percent. Northrop Grumman is up 20 percent. The war is being used by NATO to increase its military presence in Eastern and Central Europe.<\/a> The U.S. is building a permanent military base<\/a> in Poland. The 40,000-strong NATO reaction force is being expanded to 300,000 troops<\/a>. Billions of dollars in weapons are pouring into the region.<\/p>\n

The conflict with Russia, however, is already backfiring. The ruble has soared to a seven-year high<\/a> against the dollar. Europe is barreling towards a recession<\/a> because of rising oil and gas prices and the fear that Russia could terminate supplies completely. The loss of Russian wheat, fertilizer, gas and oil, due to Western sanctions, is creating havoc in world markets and a humanitarian crisis<\/a> in Africa and the Middle East. Soaring food and energy prices, along with shortages and crippling inflation, bring with them not only deprivation and hunger, but social upheaval and political instability. The climate emergency, the real existential threat, is being ignored to appease the gods of war.<\/p>\n

The war makers are frighteningly cavalier about the threat of nuclear war. Putin\u202fwarned NATO countries that they \u201cwill face consequences greater than any you have faced in history\u201d if they intervened directly in Ukraine and ordered Russian nuclear forces to be put on heightened alert status<\/a>. The proximity to Russia of U.S. nuclear weapons based in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Turkey mean that any nuclear conflict would obliterate much of Europe. Russia and the United States control about 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, with around 4,000 warheads each<\/a> in their military stockpiles, according to the Federation of American Scientists.<\/p>\n

President Joe Biden warned<\/a> that the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would be \u201ccompletely unacceptable\u201d and \u201centail severe consequences,\u201d without spelling out what those consequences would be. This is what U.S. strategists refer to as \u201cdeliberate ambiguity.\u201d<\/p>\n

The U.S. military, following its fiascos in the Middle East, has shifted its focus from fighting terrorism and asymmetrical warfare to confronting China and Russia. President Barack Obama\u2019s national-security team in 2016 carried out a war game in which Russia invaded a NATO country in the Baltics and used a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon against NATO forces. Obama officials were split about how to respond.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe National Security Council\u2019s so-called Principals Committee\u2014including Cabinet officers and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff\u2014decided that the United States had no choice but to retaliate with nuclear weapons,\u201d Eric Schlosser writes in The Atlantic<\/a><\/em>. \u201cAny other type of response, the committee argued, would show a lack of resolve, damage American credibility, and weaken the NATO alliance. Choosing a suitable nuclear target proved difficult, however. Hitting Russia\u2019s invading force would kill innocent civilians in a NATO country. Striking targets inside Russia might escalate the conflict to an all-out nuclear war. In the end, the NSC Principals Committee recommended a nuclear attack on Belarus\u2014a nation that had played no role whatsoever in the invasion of the NATO ally but had the misfortune of being a Russian ally.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Biden administration has formed a Tiger Team of national security officials to run war games on what to do if Russia uses a nuclear weapon, according to <\/a>The New York Times. <\/em>The threat of nuclear war is minimized with discussions of \u201ctactical nuclear weapons,\u201d as if less powerful nuclear explosions are somehow more acceptable and won\u2019t lead to the use of bigger bombs.<\/p>\n

At no time, including the Cuban missile crisis, have we stood closer to the precipice of nuclear war.<\/p>\n

\u201cA simulation<\/a> devised by experts at Princeton University starts with Moscow firing a nuclear warning shot; NATO responds with a small strike, and the ensuing war yields more than 90 million casualties<\/a> in its first few hours,\u201d The New York Times<\/em> reported.<\/p>\n

The longer the war in Ukraine continues — and the U.S. and NATO seem determined to funnel billions of dollars of weapons into the conflict for months if not years — the more the unthinkable becomes thinkable. Flirting with Armageddon to profit the arms industry and carry out the futile quest to reclaim U.S. global hegemony is at best extremely reckless and at worst genocidal.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for\u00a0<\/em>The New York Times,\u00a0where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief. He previously worked overseas for\u00a0<\/em>The Dallas Morning News,\u00a0The Christian Science Monitor, and<\/em> NPR. He used to be the host of the Emmy Award-nominated <\/em>RT America show\u00a0<\/em>On Contact.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Copyright 2022 Chris Hedges<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – chrishedges.substack.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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