{"id":259955,"date":"2024-04-22T12:00:29","date_gmt":"2024-04-22T11:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=259955"},"modified":"2024-07-01T08:19:56","modified_gmt":"2024-07-01T07:19:56","slug":"russia-is-not-a-threat-to-nato-or-neutral-states-full-stop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/04\/russia-is-not-a-threat-to-nato-or-neutral-states-full-stop\/","title":{"rendered":"Russia Is Not a Threat to NATO or Neutral States. Full Stop."},"content":{"rendered":"

NATO just turned 75 \u2013 amid its deepest crisis ever, no matter what they say. During all these years, we have heard repeatedly that the \u201cRussians\u201d \u2013 the Soviet Union\/Warsaw Pact and today\u2019s Russia \u2013 are coming!<\/p>\n

But while the Soviets\/Russians have invaded other countries, they\u2019ve never invaded a NATO or a neutral country in Europe. And when the First Cold War ended a good 30 years ago, and archives were opened, allegedly no plans were found for an out-of-the-blue attack on and occupation of any such country \u2013 but there were plans for how to roll back attacking Western forces if they should try.<\/p>\n

If your predictions have been so consistently wrong over seven decades, wouldn\u2019t it be common sense to ask: Why is it that we\u2019ve been wrong all the time? Why do we spend trillions on guarding ourselves against a permanent threat that never happens \u2013 a bit like waiting for Godot in Beckett\u2019s equally absurd drama?<\/p>\n

The intellectually nonsensical (see later) NATO goal that all members must spend at least 2% of the GDP that used to be seen as a ceiling has rapidly turned into the floor.<\/p>\n

And why do NATO countries these years move in the direction of a war economy where guns take priority over butter to such an extent that their economies and welfare will be fundamentally undermined? This will be a main reason they will lose out more quickly than otherwise to the up-and-coming new actors in the emerging multi-polar world, China, India and Africa in particular?<\/p>\n

Virtually all that is needed to support those militarism-promoting and dangerously wrong predictions and policies are one or more of these four assertions or mantras:<\/p>\n

The Russians are coming.<\/p>\n

Putin is a dictator, an evil man.<\/p>\n

Look at his full-scale invasion in Ukraine \u2013 out-of-the-blue and unprovoked.<\/p>\n

After Putin has taken Ukraine, he will not be satisfied but will move on to take other countries.<\/p>\n

This is repeatedly stated without any evidence or probability, simply postulated. This is also the scenario stated by the US Secretary of Defence, Lloyd Austin<\/a>, in early March 2024 \u2013 from which he concluded that \u201cif Ukraine fell, NATO would be in a fighting Russia.\u201d The Swedish Chief of Defence has argued that Putin could do a partial invasion of Southern Sweden (Sk\u00e5ne).<\/p>\n

Why is Russia not a threat to NATO or neutral states?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s now go back to the Russian threat that isn\u2019t. Here follow some arguments \u2013 with no priority intended.<\/p>\n

1 \u2022 Russia lost at least 25 million people in the 2nd world war. The Russians know better than most what war means.<\/p>\n

2 \u2022 Russia sees a need for a security zone of some kind because it is Russia that has been invaded three times since 1812 \u2013 Napoleon, the White Revolution and Hitler \u2013 not the other way around, but handling an occupied NATO member is not productive or possible.<\/p>\n

3 \u2022 Russia has the largest reservoir in terms of natural resources and does not need to try to grab those of others \u2013 like the US and others the oil in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

4 \u2022 Russia has learnt from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact around 1990-91 that you cannot follow the NATO countries in terms of military expenditures without militarising yourself to death, i.e. undermining your civilian economy.<\/p>\n

5 \u2022 That points to the fact that Russia\u2019s economy is very small in comparison with those of the 32 NATO countries.<\/p>\n

6 \u2022 Russia\u2019s military expenditures were 8% of NATO\u2019s up to its invasion of Ukraine. It is true that military expenditures do not translate directly into capabilities to start wars, fight and sustain them. On the famous other hand, starting a war against an adversary with 12 times larger military expenditures and a vastly bigger economy would be madness, suicide or a Himalayan, fatal miscalculation based on complete irrationality. Putin and the people around him do not suffer from such diseases.<\/p>\n

7 \u2022 These limitations make it extremely unlikely that Russia would succeed, if it tried, in building anything faintly similar to the US global empire or be an imperialist\u2019 as it is often called. It has a few bases abroad, but not 600+ like the US. Russia is not an imperialist power.<\/p>\n

8 \u2022 If it invaded a NATO country (or any other for that matter), it would face a new problem: Occupied people will invariably work against their occupiers. How would Russia, with its relatively limited military resources, be able to administer, secure and develop a series of countries \u2013 and have none of them or a \u201cRest-NATO\u201d arm to get them back?<\/p>\n

9 \u2022 If aggression against NATO or neutral states \u2013 or against states around the world \u2013 was, so to speak, in the Russians\u2019 genes, why haven\u2019t they done much more of it? In the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviet Union\u2019s global reach, particularly in Africa as well as the Middle East\u2014politically and militarily\u2014was much bigger than Russia\u2019s today.<\/p>\n

10 \u2022 Putin\u2019s post-Cold War Russia has invested predominantly in getting Russia back on its feet after the complete and disastrous disintegration back then \u2013 and it has created a society that is admirable with a stronger economy than most have predicted \u2013 and also remained quite resistant to history\u2019s most intense and wide-ranging sanctions imposed by EU and NATO countries. Invading a NATO country would undermine or destroy all that.<\/p>\n

11 \u2022 Vladimir Putin has been president for more than 20 years. If he was a true expansionist or \u201cimperialist,\u201d how come he has not invaded one country after the other \u2013 also inspired by the US and NATO countries that have been doing that sort of thing permanently, not the least in the wake of 9\/11?<\/p>\n

12 \u2022 If Russia is such a formidable threat, why has it not built over 600 military bases worldwide like the US and hundreds more to match France and the UK in that field? (See the answer in 13).<\/p>\n

13 \u2022 While the Soviet Union represented another competing ideology until its dissolution \u2013 Soviet Communism, planned state economy, one Communist Party, etc. \u2013 Russia today can not possibly be perceived as a systemic or ideological threat.<\/p>\n

14 \u2022 All Russian leaders, including Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin, and Medvedev have expressed an interest in working with NATO, building \u2018a European\u2019 house\u2019 as Gorbachev called it. Former NATO S-G Robertson has informed us how he discussed a sort of NATO membership with the Soviet Union, and when Putin raised the issue, he was told by NATO that Russia would have to queue up after little Montenegro. The Soviet Union asked to become a NATO member in 1954, was turned down and then established the Warsaw Pact in 1955. These Russian attempts \u2013 in vain, however \u2013 can hardly be seen as only negative, more perhaps like a little Western brother who wants to join the larger brother rather than kill him.<\/p>\n

15 \u2022 President Putin has repeatedly stated that he sees Russia as \u2013 at least also \u2013 a European culture and state, that without interchanges between Western Europe and Russia throughout history, Russia would not have been what it is today. Western Europeans in NATO and the EU have never had a similar attitude to Russian culture; they had no problem or hesitancy cutting it off after the invasion of Ukraine.<\/p>\n

16 \u2022 Vladimir Putin has never said to NATO that \u201cif so and so happens \u2013 or if you do this or that \u2013 Russia will invade your country.\u201d His style has been to appeal to NATO not to continue the policy of expansion; one example is his speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. Overall, Russia\u2019s attitude to NATO has been much more defensive after the end of the end of the Cold War than during it.<\/p>\n

17 \u2022 Whatever you may think of Russia\u2019s President, he is neither inexperienced nor a hothead or a suicidal fool. And he did not fall ill or become a maniac during the day of February 23, 2022.<\/p>\n

NATO is not \u2018defensive\u2019 and has operated for the last 25 years in gross violation of its own Treaty.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If some or all of the 17 points above are reasonable, NATO has only one task now: Mind its own business.<\/p>\n

If you read NATO\u2019s Treaty of 1949 \u2013 and you may do that here<\/a> \u2013 it is basically a copy of the UN Charter. It argues that conflicts shall be transferred to the UN and solved by peaceful means, and then it adds Article 5, which states that if one NATO member is attacked, the others shall come to its defence. The alliance\u2019s words are indeed defensive, but since its first out-of-area operation \u2013 the ruthless 78 days of bombing of Yugoslavia from March 24 to June 10, 1999 \u2013 it has pursued offensive policies and operations in gross violation of its own Treaty.<\/p>\n

NATO countries\u2019 massive involvement in Ukraine, using it as a bridgehead or proxy for weakening Russia \u2013 or trying to defeat it once and for all \u2013 is the peak point of this criminal policy down the slippery slope.<\/p>\n

Those who call NATO \u2018defensive\u2019 lack basic insights in these matters \u2013 or practise opportune ignorance.<\/p>\n

An alliance \u2013 and members of it \u2013 that<\/p>\n