Yves here. While NATO plans to escalate the conflicts of the Collective West to the point where they are too wide to win, it is not as if the hawks have not repeatedly tried to use these gatherings to organize society as a whole. With the warmongers Biden and Macron both look shaky. this circle may be on a political basis that is too uncertain for any permanent commitments to be made. Either way, this NATO summit is a bear to watch.
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas JS Davies, authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books in November 2022. Medea Benjamin is the founder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran. : The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nicolas JS Davies is a freelance journalist, CODEPINK researcher and author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
Anti-NATO protest in Chicago, 2012. Photo credit: Julie Dermansky.
After the disastrous, illegal attacks of NATO in Yugoslavia, Libya and Afghanistan, on July 9 NATO plans to attack Washington DC. The good news is that he only plans to stay in Washington for three days. The British are not going to burn down the US Capitol like they did in 1814, and the Germans are still pretending they don’t know who blew up their Nord Stream gas pipelines. So expect smiling photo-ops and overflowing happiness of congratulating each other.
Details of NATO’s agenda for the Washington summit were revealed at the NATO ministerial meeting in Prague at the end of May. NATO will drag its members into the US Cold War with China for accusing it of providing dual-use weapons technology to Russia, and it will reveal new NATO plans to spend our tax dollars on a mysterious “drone” wall in the Baltics and the cost. -sounding “combined air defense system” throughout Europe.
But the main feature of this meeting will be an external show of unity to try to convince the public that NATO and Ukraine can defeat Russia and that negotiating with Russia will be tantamount to surrender.
On the face of it, that should be a tough sell. One thing most Americans agree on about the war in Ukraine is that they support a negotiated peace. When asked in a November 2023 Economist/YouGov poll “Would you support or oppose Ukraine and Russia agreeing to a ceasefire now?,” 68% said they “support,” and only 8% said they “oppose,” while 24% said they were inconsistent. for sure.
However, while President Biden and NATO leaders have been holding endless debates on various ways to escalate the war, they have repeatedly rejected peace talks, especially in April 2022, November 2022 and January 2024, as their failed war plans leave Ukraine out of the talks. which keep getting worse. position.
The upshot of this non-strategy is that Ukraine will only be allowed to negotiate with Russia if it faces total defeat and has nothing left to negotiate with – the very surrender NATO says it wants to avoid.
As other countries pointed out in the UN General Assembly, the refusal of the US and NATO to negotiate and negotiate in favor of a long war that they hope will eventually “weaken” Russia is a clear violation of the “Pacific Settlement of Disputes” by the UN. members are legally bound under Chapter VI of the UN Charter. As stated in Article 33(1),
“The parties involved in any conflict, the continuation of which may endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, first, they will seek a solution through negotiation, investigation, negotiation, reconciliation, settlement, court settlement, referring to regional organizations. or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choosing.”
But NATO leaders are not coming to Washington to see how they can live up to their international obligations and negotiate peace in Ukraine. On the contrary. At a June preparatory meeting for the Summit, NATO defense ministers approved a plan to put NATO’s military support in Ukraine “on a firm footing for years to come.”
The effort will be hosted at a US military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, and includes approximately 700 personnel. It has been described as a form of “Trump proof” that NATO supports Ukraine, in case Trump wins the election and tries to reduce US support.
At the conference, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg wants NATO leaders to commit to providing Ukraine with equipment worth $43 billion each year, indefinitely. Echoing George Orwell’s double thought that “war is peace”, Stoltenberg said, “The irony is that the longer we plan, the longer we commit ourselves. [to war]soon Ukraine can have peace.”
The Summit will also discuss how to bring Ukraine closer to NATO membership, a move that ensures the war will continue, as Ukraine’s neutrality is Russia’s main war goal.
As NATO Watch’s Ian Davis reports, NATO’s rhetoric echoes the same lines it heard during two decades of war in Afghanistan: “The Taliban (now Russia) cannot wait for us.” But this vague hope that the other side will eventually sacrifice itself is not a trick.
There is no evidence that Ukraine will be any different from Afghanistan. The US and NATO are doing the same thinking, which will lead to the same result. The basic assumption is that NATO’s huge GDP, extravagant and corrupt military budget and the illusion of expensive weapons technology should somehow, magically, lead Ukraine to defeat Russia.
When the US and NATO finally conceded defeat in Afghanistan, it was the Afghans who had paid in blood for the stupidity of the West, while the US-NATO war machine simply moved on to the next “challenge”, learning nothing and making political hay. extreme denial.
Less than three years after the violence in Afghanistan, United States Defense Secretary Austin recently called NATO “the most powerful and successful alliance in history.” It is a promising sign for Ukraine’s future that the majority of Ukrainians are reluctant to throw their lives in the crosshairs of NATO.
In an article titled “The New Theory of Ukraine’s Victory Is the Same as the Old,” Mark Episkopos of the Quincy Institute wrote, “Western planning continues to retreat strategically. Helping Kyiv has become an end in itself, divorced from a unified strategy to end the war”.
Episkopos concluded that “the key to use [the West’s] the practical effect is to stop at last the zero frame of victory…”
We can add that this was a trap set by the United States and the United Kingdom, not only Ukraine, but also their NATO allies. By refusing to support Ukraine at the negotiating table in April 2022, and instead demanding this “zero-sum framing of victory” as a condition of NATO support, the US and the UK are escalating what could be a very short war into a protracted war, possible nuclear, war between NATO and Russia.
Turkish leaders and ambassadors complained about how their American and British allies were undermining their peace, while France, Italy and Germany bounced around for a month or two but quickly surrendered to the war camp.
When the leaders of NATO meet in Washington, which they should be doing, without finding out how to comply with Article 33(1) of the UN Charter, they make a clear review that this organization claims to be a force for peace. it keeps fueling unwinnable wars and leaving countries in ruins.
The key question is whether NATO can be a force for peace or never become a dangerous, expanding part of the US war machine.
We believe that NATO is an anachronism in today’s multipolar world: an aggressive, expanding military alliance whose inherent myopia and blinkered, independent, threat assessment condemns us all to endless war and nuclear annihilation.
We suggest that the only way NATO can become a real force for peace would be to announce that, this time next year, it will take the same steps as its counterpart, the Warsaw Pact, in 1991, and finally dissolve what Secretary Austin. it would be wise to call it “the most dangerous military alliance in history.”
However, the world’s population suffering under the military yoke cannot wait for NATO to give up and go of its own accord. Our citizens and political leaders need to hear from all of us about the dangers posed by this irresponsible nuclear war machine, and we hope you will join us—in person or online—in taking advantage of this NATO summit to sound the alarm.
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