NATO Expands but Original Anti-Russia Mission Is Static 73 Years On

NATO's current chief and pawn of US foreign policy, Norwegian politico Jens Stoltenberg

The foreign ministers of the NATO military alliance met this week for a summit in the Romanian capital Bucharest for what was a celebration of the bloc’s expansion.

The anti-Russia rhetoric and hostility were also effervescent. “Russia does not have a veto,” crowed the delegates who swore to “not back down” in supplying even more deadly weaponry to Ukraine in order to strike Russia’s heartlands.

It’s astounding how such ghoulish warmongering can be projected as upholding international law, democracy and human rights.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed in 1949 and arguably marked the initiation of the Cold War when the world was demarcated into a U.S.-led camp and the Soviet Union. Remarkably, only four years prior, those nations were declared allies in the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Thus, within a metaphorical blink of an eye, the Soviet Union would be designated as the “new enemy”. And that was even while the Soviet people were still grieving up to 30 million killed during the war against the Nazi Third Reich. The bloodlust is shocking but revealing.

Four decades later when the Cold War was presumed to be over in 1990 with the political collapse of the Soviet Union, one might have thought that the NATO alliance would also dissolve, having its ostensible core purpose made redundant by history. Far from it, the military organization has doubled its membership to the current 30 nations. Most of the post-Cold War joining nations were former Soviet allies. The eastward expansion of NATO was in direct contravention of assurances given to the last Soviet leaders by their American counterparts. This has been documented and confirmed by honorable U.S. diplomats and scholars like Jack Matlock, John Mearsheimer and the late Stephen Cohen.

The enlargement continues apace with Sweden and Finland set to ratify membership. Other prospective members include Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Russia has long been critical of NATO’s growth, firstly out of principle as a broken promise, and, secondly, due to posing a threat to its national security because the empirical pattern speaks of sinister encirclement. The military alliance positions hostile forces increasingly along Russia’s borders. Given that the United States has abrogated several arms-control treaties since the end of the Cold War, the presence of NATO on Russia’s borders constitutes an existential threat.

Against all the evidence, NATO asserts that it does not threaten Russia. That is a risible insult to intelligence. The relentless expansion of NATO has repeatedly dismissed Russia’s strategic security concerns. The U.S.-led bloc does not build security with Russia. It is driven by building security against Russia and of dividing the continent of Europe into hostile camps as in the Cold War. Indeed, one should conclude that the Cold War never really ended. It just found a reinvention with the demonization of Russia in place of the Soviet Union.

The CIA-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014 was a key part of NATO’s agenda to destabilize and militarize relations with Russia.

NATO is an imperialist crime syndicate that operates to gratify the geopolitical interests of its leader, the United States. Washington does not want peace or international security. That would be anathema. It needs conflict, tensions and war to satisfy its militarized capitalist economy.

The membership of the former Soviet republic was first formally proposed in 2008 along with Georgia. Moscow has continually said such plans were impermissible to its national security. Yet the U.S.-led NATO alliance has pushed on with its plans in a heedless way that can only be described as calculated aggression.

The Kiev regime that was ushered into power by the CIA-orchestrated 2014 coup was a particular provocation. The regime’s veneration of former Nazi collaborators and its rabid Russophobia is an intolerable threat. An unrelenting low-intensity war against the Russian-speaking people of former Ukraine from 2014 to 2022 was weaponized and sponsored by NATO. This week, NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg brazenly admitted that the present war actually began in 2014 with the training and arming of Kiev regime forces by the United States, Britain, Canada and others.

Despite the huge disinformation machine twisting reality 24/7, a significant number of people see through the lies. The problem is the system has so far succeeded in blocking any path to effective leadership.

It is therefore clear that the current war in Ukraine is the culmination and manifestation of NATO’s imperialist agenda towards Russia. That agenda never disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It has only grown evermore intense. It is no coincidence that the dissolution of the USSR was quickly followed by a phase of permanent wars waged by the United States alone or with its NATO partners. The barbaric bombing of former Yugoslavia in 1999 was the organization baring its teeth. There followed bloody wars and illegal interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Ukraine, among other places.

NATO is an imperialist crime syndicate that operates to gratify the geopolitical interests of its leader, the United States. Washington does not want peace or international security. That would be anathema. It needs conflict, tensions and war to satisfy its militarized capitalist economy. It is simply staggering how European nations have prostrated themselves before the diktats of Washington even when that means incurring massive damage to the interests of Europe. Well, to be fair, it is not the people of Europe who are being perverse. It is their so-called leaders who are betraying their interests out of mental servitude to Uncle Sam.

Laughably, while France’s Emmanuel Macron was at the White House this week feasting on roast beef and lobsters with American President Joe Biden, the French at home were being hit with power blackouts because of the U.S.-led NATO energy war against Russia.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov this week said the NATO bloc is still guided by the 1949 foundational mission of “keeping the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”. The present confrontation in Ukraine and its geopolitical and geo-economic ramifications are proof of that mission. It’s not just about keeping Germans down, it’s about keeping Europe down and under American hegemony. And the pathetic European politicians roll over like a French poodle to oblige.

The NATO organization may have greatly expanded but its imperialist mindset is as static as it was in 1949. The point is that “communism” wasn’t the ideological problem. The ideological problem was and still is American capitalism and its insatiable militarism and imperialism.

The war in Ukraine is proof of NATO’s original sin. The organization is the heir to the throne that was vacated after Nazi Germany’s defeat. Even as the war rages in the Ukraine, the NATO chiefs maintain that the bloc is not a party to the conflict. It seems the bloc has even inherited a Goebbels’ penchant for Big Lies.