Tag Archives: NATO expansion

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s interview with the Xinhua News Agency (China), April 30, 2022,

Posted on May 2, 2022 | Leave a comment

If you read speeches by or interviews with Sergey Lavrov or Vladimir Putin, you realize they’re spotting their American counterparts at least 75 IQ points. From Lavrov at thesaker.is:

https://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1811525/

Question: What do you think is at the root of the Ukrainian crisis? What can the international community do to solve this problem?

Sergey Lavrov:  When we talk about the Ukrainian crisis, first of all we need to look at the destructive policy of the Western states conducted over many years and led by the United States, which set a course to knock together a unipolar world order after the end of the Cold War. NATO’s reckless expansion to the East was a key component of those actions, despite the political obligations to the Soviet leadership on the non-expansion of the Alliance. As you know, those promises were just empty words. All these years, NATO infrastructure has been moving closer and closer to the Russian borders.

The West was never concerned about the fact that their actions grossly violated their international obligations not to strengthen their own security at the expense of the security of others. In particular, Washington and Brussels arrogantly rejected the initiatives put forward by Russia in December 2021 to ensure our country’s security guarantees in the west: to stop the expansion of NATO, not to deploy armaments that pose a threat to Russia in Ukraine and to return the Alliance’s military infrastructure to the 1997 configuration, when the NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed.

It is well-known that the United States and NATO member states have always viewed Ukraine as a tool to contain Russia. Over the years, they have actively fuelled anti-Russia sentiments there, forcing Kiev to make an artificial and false choice: to be either with the West or with Moscow.

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Posted in Geopolitics, Governments, History, Imperialism, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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Humanity at a Crossroads: Cooperation or Extinction, by Matthew Ehret

Posted on March 8, 2022 | Leave a comment

It appears that some people have chosen the latter option. From Matthew Ehret at strategic-culture.org:

If humanity is morally fit to survive the current storm, it will be due to the rectification of the fallacious rules underlying today’s geopolitics.

We hold in our hands vast power to both create and destroy the likes of which has never been seen in history.

Up until the turn of the 20th century, the only forces capable of wrecking extinction-level havoc onto the biosphere remained comets and asteroids travelling 18 km/second which periodically slammed into the earth every few million years. But with the discovery of atomic decay in the form of fission and also the associated processes of fusion (where lighter isotopes were found to fuse together forming heavier atoms holding masses that were slightly less than the total of the fused atoms), suddenly a new force of destruction was added to the list.

After the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the top secret Manhattan Project with its three nuclear bombs was revealed to a confused Harry Truman who was quick to dump two of them onto a defeated Japan in 1945 establishing a new set of geopolitical rules that would profoundly misshape the 20th century.

The 14 kiloton bomb “Little Boy” which erupted over Hiroshima killed 140 thousand people instantly, with countless tens of thousands more who died in agony during the weeks and months following the explosion. The bomb that destroyed Nagasaki days later was 23 kilotons.

To put this into perspective, one modern U.S. Ohio Class Submarine travelling in the waters of China’s back yard carries 24 Trident missiles.

Each Trident missile can carry up to 8 nuclear warheads and each warhead utilizing thermonuclear technology packs the equivalent of 475 kilotons of TNT. When all warheads contained on one Trident II missile are added together, a force 253 times more powerful than the bomb that annihilated Hiroshima is unleashed. Although nuclear reduction treaties established since 1991 have reduced the global nuclear stockpiles from 64,000 warheads in 1986 to approximately 20,000 today, the fact Is that over 5000 megatons of nuclear bombs ready to be unleashed still litter the face of the earth.

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Posted in Collapse, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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A Surprising Explanation Of Russia’s Invasion From A Former Top-Level CIA Official, by Tyler Durden

Posted on March 8, 2022 | Leave a comment

From the bowels of the mainstream media propaganda complex comes a non-mainstream assertion that the U.S. and NATO could have prevented the Ukraine invasion. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

A surprising op-ed in MSNBC arguing that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was likely “preventable” if the US and NATO had merely tried to take a path of muscular diplomacy and potential compromise appears to have slipped passed the mainstream media censors and gate-keepers.

Since the start of the Thursday Feb.24 invasion, the prevailing narrative concerning Russia’s motives has been largely limited to an ultra-simplistic hollywoodwesque story that goes something like this: one day a big bully and monster named Putin decided he wanted to invade and kill people in a neighboring country, and that he further wants to “resurrect the old Soviet Union”.

But in a refreshingly realist op-ed piece, MSNBC political columnist Zeeshan Aleem exposed the self-serving Washington narrative which was intended more for the consumption of masses as false. Aleem points to a much more complex and nuanced reality, reminding the public of what should be obvious to any student of history – that the top diplomats and US officials who oversaw post-Soviet negotiations with Russia over Europe’s security order in the 1990’s knew full well that if NATO ever got expanded up to Russia’s borders, it would be suicide. It was predicted decades ago that war would be triggered in such a scenario.

AFP via Getty Images

As the political relations professor and scholar John Mearsheimer put it in 2015, “What’s going on here is that the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.”

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Propaganda, War

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Experts Warned For Years That NATO Expansion Would Lead To This, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on February 26, 2022 | 1 comment

A fair number of knowledgeable people warned that NATO expansion would end in disaster when it reached Russia’s doorstep, reaching back to the legendary George Kennan in 1998. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

Chris Hedges introduces his latest article for Scheer Post, titled “Chronicle of a War Foretold“, with the following:

“After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a near universal understanding among political leaders that NATO expansion would be a foolish provocation against Russia. How naive we were to think the military-industrial complex would allow such sanity to prevail.”

Imperial narrative managers have been falling all over themselves working to dismiss and discredit the abundantly evidenced idea that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was due largely to Moscow’s fear of NATO expansion and the refusal of Washington and Kyiv to solidify a policy that Ukraine would not be added to the alliance.

Take Michael McFaul, the mass media’s go-to pundit on all things Russia:

https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1496726589828067339?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1496726589828067339%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcaitlinjohnstone.com%2F2022%2F02%2F25%2Fexperts-warned-for-years-that-nato-expansion-would-lead-to-this%2F

Or New Jersey Congressman Tom Malinowski:

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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How American Duplicity on NATO Expansion Ultimately Led to Today’s Crisis, by Claudio Gallo

Posted on February 5, 2022 | Leave a comment

Notwithstanding that they said they wouldn’t, U.S. policymakers expanded NATO right up to Russia’s doorstep, all the while disingenuously claiming that they didn’t understand why Russia was nervous. From Claudio Gallo at strategic-culture.org:

The U.S. Empire has its iron rules, and you cannot expect that it doesn’t use its power to pursue its interests. But the means can vary a lot.

European media are fanning the flame of war in Ukraine, apparently unaware that it would happen in their courtyard. As with the Euro missiles crisis at the end of ’70, Washington is always delighted to sacrifice Europe, playing it against Russia. Informed to dead by too much news, the people are often unable to check the accuracy, especially when blatant propaganda depicts the sources as trustable by default.

Take the American secretary of state Antony Blinken; he recently said about Russia: “One country does not have the right to exert a sphere of influence. That notion should be relegated to the dustbin of history.” Stop the world; I want to get off. Unbelievable, have you ever heard about the Monroe Doctrine, the invasion of Guatemala in 1954, the coups and involvement in Costa Rica, Cuba, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Grenada, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay. Has the secretary of state ever read Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America? Chavez uselessly presented the book to Obama in 2009 (a long seller, despite the author half repudiated it late in life, mainly for the style).

Like the other historical empires, the U.S. Empire has its iron rules, and you cannot expect that it doesn’t use its power to pursue its interests. But the means (including its farsighted compromise capacity) can vary a lot, depending on its leader’s level. So, it is no surprise that a great senior American diplomat, like Jack Matlock, sees Ukraine with the Nato’s flag slightly differently from today’s colleagues. U.S. Ambassador in Moscow from 1987 to 1991, the years of Berlin’s Wall fall and the Soviet Union’s twilight, he is a refined intellectual with a deep knowledge of the Russian culture.

In a recent long interview with the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, he recalls: “I testified in Congress against NATO expansion, saying that it would be a great mistake and that if it continues, that certainly it would have to stop before it reaches countries like Ukraine and Georgia. That this would be unacceptable to any Russian government”.

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Posted in Financial markets, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History

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NATO Splits Reveal Alliance is Redundant, by the Strategic Culture Editorial Board

Posted on December 7, 2019 | Leave a comment

Does NATO have a credible purpose? From the Strategic Culture Editorial Board at strategic-culture.org:

If the NATO summit this week marking the 70th anniversary of its foundation in 1949 was meant to be a resounding celebration, it backfired spectacularly, more as a resounding farce. Amid all the pomp and ceremony afforded by an official reception at Buckingham Palace, hosted by the British Queen, the two-day gathering descended into squabbling, sneering and back-stabbing.

For an organization that declares its mission to be about “maintaining peace and security”, the infighting between NATO leaders showed an organization virtually at war with itself.

The culmination of comedy was when US President Donald Trump stormed off before the closing session on Wednesday after he found out about video footage showing other leaders mocking him for his rambling press conferences. The video recording of a “hot-mic” discussion went viral, appearing to show Canada’s Justin Trudeau, Britain’s Boris Johnson and France’s Emmanuel Macron making jokes about Trump. Trump hit back by slamming Trudeau as “two-faced”.

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