{"id":265899,"date":"2024-07-08T12:01:21","date_gmt":"2024-07-08T11:01:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=265899"},"modified":"2024-07-08T08:25:57","modified_gmt":"2024-07-08T07:25:57","slug":"confronting-natos-war-summit-in-washington","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/07\/confronting-natos-war-summit-in-washington\/","title":{"rendered":"Confronting NATO\u2019s War Summit in Washington"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Anti-NATO protest in Chicago, 2012. Photo credit: Julie Dermansky<\/p><\/div>\n

1 Jul 2024 <\/em>– After NATO\u2019s catastrophic, illegal invasions of Yugoslavia<\/a>, Libya<\/a> and Afghanistan<\/a>, on July 9th NATO plans to invade Washington DC. The good news is that it only plans to occupy Washington for three days.<\/p>\n

The British will not burn down the U.S. Capitol as they did in 1814, and the Germans are still meekly pretending that they don\u2019t know<\/a> who blew up their Nord Stream gas pipelines. So expect smiling photo-ops and an overblown orgy of mutual congratulation.<\/p>\n

The details<\/a> of NATO\u2019s agenda for the Washington summit were revealed at a NATO foreign ministers\u2019 meeting in Prague at the end of May. NATO will drag its members into the U.S. Cold War with China by accusing it of supplying dual-use weapons technology to Russia, and it will unveil new NATO initiatives to spend our tax dollars on a mysterious \u201cdrone wall\u201d in the Baltics and an expensive-sounding \u201cintegrated air defense system\u201d across Europe.<\/p>\n

But the main feature of the summit will be a superficial show of unity to try to convince the public that NATO and Ukraine can defeat Russia and that negotiating with Russia would be tantamount to surrender.<\/p>\n

On the face of it, that should be a hard sell. The one thing that most North Americans agree on about the war in Ukraine is that they support a negotiated peace. When asked in a\u00a0 November 2023 Economist\/YouGov<\/a> poll \u201cWould you support or oppose Ukraine and Russia agreeing to a ceasefire now?,\u201d 68% said \u201csupport,\u201d and only 8% said \u201coppose,\u201d while 24% said they were not sure.<\/p>\n

However, while President Biden and NATO leaders hold endless debates over different ways to escalate the war, they have repeatedly rejected peace negotiations, notably in April 2022<\/a>, November 2022<\/a> and January 2024<\/a>, even as their failed war plans<\/a> leave Ukraine in an ever worsening negotiating position.<\/p>\n

The endgame of this non-strategy is that Ukraine will only be allowed to negotiate with Russia once it is facing total defeat and has nothing left to negotiate with – exactly the surrender NATO says it wants to avoid.<\/p>\n

As other countries have pointed out at the UN General Assembly<\/a>, the U.S. and NATO\u2019s rejection of negotiation and diplomacy in favor of a long war they hope will eventually \u201cweaken\u201d Russia is a flagrant violation of the \u201cPacific Settlement of Disputes\u201d that all UN members are legally committed to under Chapter VI<\/a> of the UN Charter. As it says in Article 33(1),<\/p>\n

\u201cThe parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.\u201d<\/p>\n

But NATO\u2019s leaders are not coming to Washington to work out how they can comply with their international obligations and negotiate peace in Ukraine. On the contrary. At a June meeting in preparation for the Summit, NATO defense ministers approved a plan to put NATO\u2019s military support to Ukraine \u201con a firmer footing<\/a> for years to come.\u201d<\/p>\n

The effort<\/a> will be headquartered at a U.S. military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, and involve almost 700 staff. It has been described as a way to \u201cTrump proof<\/a>\u201d NATO backing for Ukraine, in case Trump wins the election and tries to draw down U.S. support.<\/p>\n

At the Summit, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg wants NATO leaders to commit to providing Ukraine with $43 billion worth of equipment each year, indefinitely. Echoing George Orwell\u2019s doublethink that \u201cwar is peace\u201d, Stoltenberg said, \u201cThe paradox is that the longer we plan, and the longer we commit [to war], the sooner Ukraine can have peace.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Summit will also discuss how to bring Ukraine closer to NATO membership, a move that guarantees the war will continue, since Ukrainian neutrality is Russia\u2019s principal war aim.<\/p>\n

As Ian Davis of NATO Watch reported<\/a>, NATO\u2019s rhetoric echoes the same lines he heard throughout twenty years of war in Afghanistan: \u201cThe Taliban (now Russia) can\u2019t wait us out.\u201d But this vague hope that the other side will eventually give up is not a strategy.<\/p>\n

There is no evidence that Ukraine will be different from Afghanistan. The U.S. and NATO are making the same assumptions, which will lead to the same result. The underlying assumption is that NATO\u2019s greater GDP, extravagant and corrupt military budgets and fetish for expensive weapons technology must somehow, magically, lead Ukraine to victory over Russia.<\/p>\n

When the U.S. and NATO finally admitted defeat in Afghanistan, it was the Afghans who had paid in blood for the West\u2019s folly, while the US-NATO war machine simply moved on to its next \u201cchallenge,\u201d learning nothing and making political hay out of abject denial<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Less than three years after the rout in Afghanistan, US Defense Secretary Austin recently called<\/a> NATO \u201cthe most powerful and successful alliance in history.\u201d It is a promising sign for the future of Ukraine that most Ukrainians are reluctant<\/a> to throw away their lives in NATO\u2019s dumpster-fire.<\/p>\n

In an article<\/a> titled \u201cThe New Theory of Ukrainian Victory Is the Same as the Old,\u201d the Quincy Institute\u2019s Mark Episkopos wrote, \u201cWestern planning continues to be strategically backwards. Aiding Kyiv has become an end in itself, divorced from a coherent strategy for bringing the war to a close\u201d.<\/p>\n

Episkopos concluded that \u201cthe key to wielding [the West\u2019s] influence effectively is to finally abandon a zero-sum framing of victory\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

We would add that this was a trap set by the United States and the United Kingdom, not just for Ukraine, but for their NATO allies too. By refusing to support Ukraine at the negotiating table in April 2022, and instead demanding this \u201czero-sum framing of victory\u201d as the condition for NATO\u2019s support, the U.S. and U.K. escalated what could have been a very short war into a protracted, potentially nuclear, war between NATO and Russia.<\/p>\n

Turkish leaders and diplomats complained<\/a> at how their US and UK allies undermined their peacemaking, while France<\/a>, Italy<\/a> and Germany<\/a> squirmed for a month or two but soon surrendered to the war camp.<\/p>\n

When NATO leaders meet in Washington, what they should be doing, apart from figuring out how to comply with Article 33(1)<\/a> of the UN Charter, is conducting a clear-eyed review of how this organization that claims to be a force for peace keeps escalating unwinnable wars and leaving countries in ruins.<\/p>\n

The fundamental question is whether NATO can ever be a force for peace or whether it can never be anything but a dangerous, subservient extension of the U.S. war machine.<\/p>\n

We believe that NATO is an anachronism in today\u2019s multipolar world: an aggressive, expansionist military alliance whose inherent institutional myopia and blinkered, self-serving threat assessments condemn us all to endless war and potential nuclear annihilation.<\/p>\n

We suggest that the only way NATO could be a real force for peace would be to declare that, by this time next year, it will take the same steps that its counterpart, the Warsaw Pact, took in 1991, and finally dissolve what Secretary Austin would have been wiser to call \u201cthe most dangerous military alliance in history.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, the world\u2019s population that is suffering under the yoke of militarism cannot afford to wait for NATO to give up and go away of its own accord. Our fellow citizens and political leaders need to hear from us all about the dangers posed by this unaccountable, nuclear-armed war machine, and we hope you will join us<\/a>\u2014in person or online\u2014in using the occasion of this NATO summit to sound the alarm loudly.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Medea Benjamin is cofounder of <\/em>CODEPINK for Peace<\/em><\/a>, and author of several books, including <\/em>Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of<\/em> Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of<\/em> War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict<\/a>, available from OR Books in November 2022.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1 Jul 2024 – The summit’s goal is to cement NATO’s plans to escalate the war in Ukraine and prevent the negotiated peace most North Americans support and the UN Charter requires. We wonder whether NATO can ever be the force for peace that it claims to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":265900,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3102],"tags":[2914,1161,609,291,112,1378,95,70,1594,2534],"class_list":["post-265899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nato","tag-anti-nato","tag-arms-industry","tag-demonstrations","tag-military","tag-pentagon","tag-protests","tag-us-military","tag-usa","tag-war-economy","tag-wwiii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265899"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":265906,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265899\/revisions\/265906"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}