I don't believe NATO expands maliciously or even deliberately most of the time, though certainly it does some of the time--consider John Bolton's remarks on coups just today. Rather, it's an almost instinctual behavior because as shareholder driven capitalism expands and encounters natural resistances, it "feels" dread, an existential fear: the dread of not being able to grow anymore (the whole thing falls apart without that!), and the dread of hostile pushback. The irony is that it is the growth itself which brings the uncooperative, menacing frontier closer, and makes those living in the frontier themselves feel more threatened.
OK, if Belgrade is not enough, remember Libya, which was doing fine before the intervention. This country practically does not exist anymore. Remember Iraq, which was not doing fine but still way better than it is now. NATO is an evil, which tries to picture itself as a pigeon. It is smoke and mirrors of the political and military fight, which resulted in the death of multiple nations.
Reply to author's post is inline, below. Formatting of article was changed to provide clarity with the author's points I am addressing. QUOTE="Ricter, post: 5632845, member: 26926"]"One cannot talk about war without talking about markets." https://scheerpost.com/2022/07/11/hedges-nato-the-most-dangerous-military-alliance-on-the-planet/ July 11, 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. By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost 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. The impetus for expansion is not just geopolitical. It is economic. To open markets for US corporations, such as McDonalds, Apple, Starbucks, etc. Expansion seems to have a political impetus as well, because where money flows, opportunities of various kinds abound, if you catch my drift. NATO expanded its footprint, violating promises to Moscow, once the Cold War ended, to incorporate 14 countries in Eastern and Central Europe into the alliance. Russia benefitted from heavy Western investment after the fall of the Soviet Union, including receiving much needed managerial expertise. Part of the recent sanctions was with West giving up their ownership interests and support in projects within Russia. Does this not suggest that NATO was more about opening markets than war with Russia? 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. It is building a military footprint in Africa and Asia. It invited Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, the so-called “Asia Pacific Four,” to its recent summit in Madrid at the end of June. It has expanded its reach into the Southern Hemisphere, signing a military training partnership agreement with Colombia, in December 2021. NATO, especially the United States, has been involved heavily in military operations of various kinds for various reasons, many of which are questionable from a moral and perhaps a legal standpoint under established international law. Russia and China have also expanded their geopolitical influence using military force, economic agreements, and political pressure. Where interests of these three major powers directly collide, risks of global war become dangerously high. It has backed Turkey, with NATO’s second largest military, which has illegally invaded and occupied parts of Syria as well as Iraq. Turkish-backed militias are engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Syrian Kurds and other inhabitants of north and east Syria. The Turkish military has been accused of war crimes – including multiple airstrikes against a refugee camp andchemical weapons use – in northern Iraq. In exchange for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s permission for Finland and Sweden to join the alliance, the two Nordic countries have agreed to expand 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. Diplomacy can be ugly, with smaller countries or long suffering ethnic communities often getting thrown under the bus. The Kurds certainly deserve their own identity. It seems unjust, but powerful countries look to satisfy their own priorities first, whether it is NATO, Russia, or China. 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 “peace dividend,” 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. There seemed to be a peace dividend for a while with Western and Russian cooperation on space and science. However, there are think tanks in the US who seem to hold on to old ideas and have financial and political interests in maintaining a strong military-industrial complex. NATO sees the future, as detailed in its “NATO 2030: Unified for a New Era,” as a battle for hegemony with rival states, especially China, and calls for the preparation of prolonged global conflict. In my opinion, there is a fundamentally flawed reasoning process on the US side regarding China and other burgeoning major powers, in spite of high quality US Intelligence Agency analysis. It seems many of our politicians and thinkers perceive reality as the way they want or believe it should be. The reality is China, India, and perhaps Brazil and Turkey have strong national goals and capable people. China's planning, population size, and cultural emphasis on education, to name a few powerful attributes means they will not be denied from being a top global power. No matter what we do, China and China's allies will increase their economic and military influence. Again, the key point is when each side perceives their interests have become in direct conflict, such as Ukraine and Taiwan, what is the best way to handle it? War between major powers is certainly counterproductive by most any measure. Fairly often, even war between a major and a minor power can be counterproductive for the major power as it is. As the saying goes, "The team to beat is often the one to be on". In poker tournaments, the big stacks tend to avoid each other unless very confident because a mistake can immediately end or severely impair one's chances. “China has an increasingly global strategic agenda, supported by its economic and military heft,” the NATO 2030 initiative warned. “It 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’s 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.” 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 that the “deepening strategic partnership” between Russian and China has resulted in “mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order that run counter to our values and interests.” Each major power has an advantage in at least one critical area. Cooperation allows all powers to benefit from their respective strengths. The US has managerial expertise, Russia has resources, including plentiful land, China has cheap labor and superior long term planning. Other countries not mentioned also have their advantages that can benefit all in a stable world. On July 6, Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, and Ken McCallum, director general of Britain’s MI5, held a joint news conference in London to announce that China was the “biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security.” 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 “set on stealing your technology, whatever it is that makes your industry tick, and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market.” China, Russia, and the US only seem to respect international law when it suits them. They have veto power in the United Nations, for example. That said, Russia and China don't respect intellectual property of the West, saving themselves substantial development costs and thus obtaining an economic and perhaps military technology advantage in some areas. How to enforce international laws is an critical and difficult-to-resolve issue. This inflammatory rhetoric presages an ominous future. We can fight a war that uses and destroys resources or cooperate and benefit from the resources that represent each country's competitive strengths. Global resources, including very plentiful resources that are lower grade, but are currently technologically feasible to recover are ample for the world's needs well into the future. It would be a shame to throw our future away because we couldn't figure out a way to cooperate in spite of knowing the consequences if we don't cooperate. 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. Productivity and Debt to GDP measures, among others, can provide some sense weather a economy is gaining or losing ground. The aforementioned measures do indicate that many Western economies are losing ground, but there are intangibles that include culture, quality and location of land, and competitive advantages that make assessing current relative economic and military strength between countries difficult. Again, simpler is: We all cooperate, life is good. Ultimately, our best weapon is not a new missile system, it is a problem solving attitude that is used to resolve the issues that divide us. Washington and its European allies are terrified of China’s 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 to the BRI by 2027. China, which is on track to become the world’s largest economy within a decade, has organized the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the world’s largest trade pact of 15 East Asian and Pacific nations representing 30 percent of global trade. It already accounts for 28.7 percent of the Global Manufacturing Output, nearly double the 16.8 percent of the U.S. China’s rate of growth last year was an impressive 8.1 percent, although slowing to around 5 percent this year. By contrast, the U.S.’s growth rate in 2021 was 5.7 percent — its highest since 1984 — but is predicted to fall below 1 percent this year, by the New York Federal Reserve. If China, Russia, Iran, India and other nations free themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar as the world’s 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, $ 6 trillion more than the U.S.’s 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’s 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. The West's financial system is more mature than their competitors. For all the money the West has spent, has not the West received something in return? Something often tangible in exchange for something intangible? As far as property rights of foreigners, eminent domain in each respective country could potentially come into play during time of conflict. Are we not seeing some of this play out with Ukraine and NATO versus Russia? Russia, in the eyes of NATO and U.S. strategists, is the appetizer. Its military, NATO hopes, 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. NATO has provided more than $8 billion in military aid to Ukraine, while the US has committed nearly $54 billion in military and humanitarian assistance to the country. China, however, is the main course. Unable to compete economically, the U.S. and NATO have turned to the blunt instrument of war to cripple their global competitor. The provocation of China replicates the NATO baiting of Russia. NATO expansion and the 2014 US-backed coup 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’s efforts to join NATO. 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 into Taiwan’s air defense zone and the U.S. sends naval shipsthrough the Taiwan Strait which connects the South and East China seas. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in May called China the most serious long-term challenge to the international order, citing its claims to Taiwan and efforts to dominate the South China Sea. Taiwan’s president, in a Zelensky-like publicity stunt, recently posed with an anti-tank rocket launcher in a government handout photo. The conflict in Ukraine has been a bonanza for the arms industry, 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. The U.S. is building a permanent military base in Poland. The 40,000-strong NATO reaction force is being expanded to 300,000 troops. Billions of dollars in weapons are pouring into the region. The West needs to wean the arms industry off of weapons and point them towards major energy and food security projects, including environmental related projects such as reclamation. This can only be done if the threat of escalation is reduced and trust restored. The conflict with Russia, however, is already backfiring. The ruble has soared to a seven-year high against the dollar. Europe is barreling towards a recession 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 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. It is an error to characterize the Ruble's performance as a sign Russia is winning. The US dollar is "Suffering" from appreciation due to relatively higher interests rates than other developed countries, with the prospect of this interest rate differential increasing further still. What is the current official interest rate in Russia? 14%? What is really dangerous for Russia is if the West becomes independent of Russian resources though the development of Nuclear, including cobalt based reactors, tidal, methane clathrate, clean coal, and additional alternative energy sources. Plentiful, cheap energy means lower cost of extracting lower grade ores, including fertilizers. Food security can be enhanced with multi-use marine infrastructure investments and land reclamation. The war makers are frighteningly cavalier about the threat of nuclear war. Putin warned NATO countries that they “will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history” if they intervened directly in Ukraine and ordered Russian nuclear forces to be put on heightened alert status. 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 in their military stockpiles, according to the Federation of American Scientists. It is hard to take seriously, oft repeated, unreasonable threats of use of WMDs. That said, it does seem the West is "Cavalier" to risks imposed by escalating in Ukraine. I wonder if the West may be "Secretly hoping" Russia will set off a WMD to scare potential NATO member countries into the fold, as it were. President Joe Biden warned that the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would be “completely unacceptable” and “entail severe consequences,” without spelling out what those consequences would be. This is what U.S. strategists refer to as “deliberate ambiguity.” 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’s 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. “The National Security Council’s so-called Principals Committee—including Cabinet officers and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—decided that the United States had no choice but to retaliate with nuclear weapons,” Eric Schlosser writes in The Atlantic. “Any 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’s 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—a nation that had played no role whatsoever in the invasion of the NATO ally but had the misfortune of being a Russian ally.” 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 The New York Times. The threat of nuclear war is minimized with discussions of “tactical nuclear weapons,” as if less powerful nuclear explosions are somehow more acceptable and won’t lead to the use of bigger bombs. At no time, including the Cuban missile crisis, have we stood closer to the precipice of nuclear war. “A simulation devised by experts at Princeton University starts with Moscow firing a nuclear warning shot; NATO responds with a small strike, and the ensuing war yieldsmore than 90 million casualties in its first few hours,” The New York Times reported. 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.[/QUOTE Any system that risks its existence for a gain that is less that its whole is deficient. By this definition, the West and Russia systems seem deficient. This systemic deficiency appears related to the disconnect between each country's leaders and the people. What mother would be willing to risk her children so that "The world knows we didn't blink first"? What father, brother, or sister? Any exchange of WMDs between Russia is inherently strongly escalatory because each side will have different assessments of "Parity". By parity, I mean the assessment of damage each side perceives they've received and delivered versus the other side. Differing assessments means someone will feel the need to "Catch up" or risk losing the war. The end result is both combatants will end up utilizing all their WMDs, not just 8000 nuclear weapons and take most of the world, including China, into their hell. Russia, Ukraine, and NATO should seriously think about and discuss proposals for peace. In reality, such discussion may be appropriate for all countries as we all are likely to have a vested interest in the outcome of the Russia-Ukrainian and NATO conflict.
Ukraine is the result of NATO expansion towards Russian border and then even openly denying Russia security guarantees. Lithuania (and the other 2 Baltic states east of it) will be the result of NATO expansion as well (Finland, Sweden), IMHO...
The other side of this is NATO membership or affiliation brings stability. Look at Poland joining NATO then EU has lifted the quality of life for the Polish dramatically. Don’t forget the alternative to NATO in Europe is not exactly safe or prosperous.
If Russia invades Lithuania (b/c of this tiny country since few weeks blocking the transit of goods from Russia to its exclave Kaliningrad, and vice-versa, through Lithuania (road & rail)) then I doubt NATO nor the US/West will do anything to free Lithuania, because the stake is too high (--> WW3)... Q.E.D.