The greater part of Europe has for long enjoyed the status of very high levels of prosperity and even higher levels of prestige. It has been the desired land not only for those persons of the majority world who seek to improve their economic prospects but even for prominent members of their business and political elite who have been willing[Read More…]
by Medea Benjamin and Marcy Winograd At his speech during the NATO Summit in Lithuania, President Biden called the U.S. and Europe “anchors for global security” when in reality there are no anchors during this increasingly dangerous and polarized time of never-ending war in Europe. Our NATO allies are not, as Biden would suggest, anchors in a turbulent sea of[Read More…]
Since the end of the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has distinctly strayed from its original purpose. It has become, almost shamelessly, the vessel and handmaiden of US power, while its burgeoning expansion eastwards has done wonders to upend the applecart of stability. From that upending, the alliance started bungling. It engaged, without the authorisation of the UN[Read More…]
On July 11-12, 2023, the 31 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will hold their annual summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. To prepare for the summit, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg met with U.S. President Joe Biden to discuss the agenda for the summit. They spoke about the importance of Western support for Ukraine “for the long haul” and Stoltenberg told Biden that[Read More…]
North Korea’s Foreign Ministry has claimed NATO is seeking to increase its influence in Asia, citing growing “military collusion” with Japan, which hosted a delegation from the military alliance last month to discuss ways to step up cooperation. In comments carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on Monday, an official with the Foreign Ministry’s Japan Research Center,[Read More…]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies On April 4, 2023, Finland officially became the 31st member of the NATO military alliance. The 830-mile border between Finland and Russia is now by far the longest border between any NATO country and Russia, which otherwise borders only Norway, Latvia, Estonia, and short stretches of the Polish and Lithuanian borders where[Read More…]
Today, 4 April 2023, Finland — which is only 507 miles away from Russia’s central command center, The Kremlin in Moscow — has joined America’s NATO military alliance against Russia, and so becomes an allowable location for the U.S. to place its nuclear missiles, which would then be within just a 7-minute blitz striking distance away from instantaneously annihilating Russia’s[Read More…]
The Illegality of NATO: Violation of the UN Charter and the Nuremberg Principles In recent years, participation in NATO has made European countries accomplices in US efforts to achieve global hegemony by means of military force, in violation of international law, and especially in violation of the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Principles. Former UN Assistant Secretary General Hans Christof von[Read More…]
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, in Japan as part of his East Asia tour, said “our security is closely interconnected” and called for stronger ties with Japan as Russia’s war on Ukraine raises global dangers and shows that democracies need stronger partnerships. Stoltenberg said his visit to Japan “is a way to further strengthen the partnership between NATO and our highly[Read More…]
The European people suffered a lot in the two world wars, and hence in the post-1945 period it was only to be expected that there would be yearning for avoiding conflict and war within Europe. To the extent that the unity of Europe in the form of the European Union (EU) is a manifestation of this yearning, this should be[Read More…]
![A graphic created by NATO showing the military alliance’s “eastern flank.” [Photo: NATO]](https://cdn.countercurrents.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/NATO-Ukraine-200x150.webp "NATO summit vows to continue troop surge to Russia’s borders 19")
NATO foreign ministers met in Bucharest, Romania, on Tuesday, along with representatives of the prospective NATO members Ukraine, Finland, and Sweden to discuss a further expansion of the NATO war with Russia in Ukraine and the stationing of more troops on Russia’s Western borders. “In response to Russia’s full-fledged invasion of Ukraine, we are raising the readiness of our troops,”[Read More…]
A lot of dilemmas, lies, and misconceptions are present in Western geopolitical narratives taken without any critical approach by domestic Serbian pro-Western supporters (usually financed by Western agencies and Governments) about the war in NATO/EU-sponsored Ukraine, and Serbian position in newly geopolitical circumstances. This article aims to present the focal Western lie about Serbia trying to give some reasonable arguments[Read More…]
Regional alliances should, for the most part, remain regional. Areas of the globe can count on a number of such bodies and associations with varying degrees of heft: the Organization of American States; the Organisation of African Unity; and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Only one has decided to move beyond its natural, subscribed limits, citing security and a[Read More…]
At the conclusion of this week’s NATO summit in Madrid, Spain, the members of NATO, including most European states as well as the United States and Canada, adopted a strategy document outlining plans to militarize the European continent, massively escalate the war with Russia, and prepare for war with China. The document pledges to “deliver the full range of forces” needed “for[Read More…]
On the eve of the NATO summit focusing on war against Russia in Ukraine as well as confronting China, top officials from Turkey, Sweden and Finland agreed on Tuesday in Madrid to a trilateral memorandum of understanding allowing Stockholm’s and Helsinki’s entry into the military alliance. After a meeting attended by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Turkish President Recep Tayyip[Read More…]
In remarks at the NATO Summit in Madrid, Spain, US President Joe Biden announced a sweeping increase in US troop deployments to Europe as part of a plan by NATO to militarize the continent for its ongoing war with Russia and escalating conflict with China. The NATO summit formally invited Sweden and Finland to join the alliance, effectively doubling NATO’s[Read More…]
Thousands of people marched in Madrid on Sunday to protest the NATO summit. A Reuters report said: Carrying the hammer and sickle flags, thousands protested in Madrid against a NATO summit in the Spanish capital next week. Amid tight security, the NATO leaders will meet in Madrid between 29-30 June. “Tanks yes, but of beer with tapas,” sang demonstrators, who[Read More…]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies As NATO holds its Summit in Madrid on June 28-30, the war in Ukraine is taking center stage. During a pre-Summit June 22 talk with Politico, NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg bragged about how well-prepared NATO was for this fight because, he said: “This was an invasion that was predicted, foreseen by[Read More…]
On May 16, Sweden and Finland announced an end to decades of neutrality, proclaiming their intention to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and its escalating conflict with Russia. Less than three weeks later, Stockholm, Sweden’s capital, has been turned into a naval garrison with the arrival of a US amphibious assault battle group, consisting of the assault ship[Read More…]
Complacency has been the hallmark of NATO expansion. Over time, it has even become a form of derision, notably directed against Russia. As with many historical matters, records ignored can be records revisited, the second time around sometimes nastier than the first. With the Ukraine conflict raging, a few of Russia’s neighbours have reconsidered their position of military non-alignment and[Read More…]
Anxiety about the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) toward the Russian border is one of the causes of the current war in Ukraine. But this is not the only attempt at expansion by NATO, a treaty organization created in 1949 by the United States to project its military and political power over Europe. In 2001, NATO conducted an “out[Read More…]
Brookings, a think tank founded in 1916, presented a timely discussion this week titled “Finland, Sweden, and the future of NATO.” Discussing the urgent need to join NATO were Finnish ambassador to the U.S., Mikko Hautala, and the Swedish ambassador to the U.S., Karin Olofsdotter. The two ambassadors appeared in the wake of last week’s official state visit by their[Read More…]
Geopolitical Update: Historic Shifts In Europe’s Balance Of Power As NATO Expands North With Sweden And Finland Joining The Military Alliance Sweden’s ruling party dropped the country’s historic military nonalignment on Sunday and agreed to join NATO, shortly after Finland’s leaders officially announced they would do the same. Media reports from Europe and other places said: The moves were[Read More…]
On May 12th, Russia’s RT bannered “Finland’s NATO membership will trigger response – Moscow”, and reported that Moscow has warned that Finland joining NATO would pose a direct threat to Russia’s security and its acceptance to the military alliance would prompt Russia to develop measures to ensure its safety. That’s after Finnish officials confirmed on Thursday their commitment to join[Read More…]
Western Diplomats and Experts Have Been Warning About US and NATO policies Escalating Ukraine Crisis Much before the Ukraine war this year, several internationally renowned foreign policy experts, including retired senior officials and other persons close to the establishment in the USA and its western allies, have been warning that a policy of excessive hostility towards Russia, persistent interference in[Read More…]
Insanity has often been defined as trying the same thing over and over and getting the same result. Case in point, Ukraine was seeking NATO membership to bolster its security. This membership would have come at the expense of Russian security, as Russian president Vladimir Putin made clear. To thwart NATO’s (i.e., the US’s) hegemonic ambitions and preserve its own[Read More…]
As the United States, the UK and other NATO powers surge weapons into Ukraine, the NATO alliance is being transformed into a fighting force capable of directly waging wars with Russia and China. Using the war between Russia and Ukraine as a pretext, NATO has already mobilized its 40,000-strong rapid response force against Russia. But this is only the beginning[Read More…]
Much has been said and written about media bias and double standards in the West’s response to the Russia-Ukraine war, when compared with other wars and military conflicts across the world, especially in the Middle East and the Global South. Less obvious is how such hypocrisy is a reflection of a much larger phenomenon which governs the West’s relationship to[Read More…]
Three weeks into the Ukraine war, all of the sides involved are taking ever greater risks. The hitherto unthinkable, a nuclear exchange in Europe, is being openly considered and built up as a threat. Voices of caution, restraint and appeals to reason have largely fallen silent. Despite the looming catastrophe, NATO is not prepared to compromise. In a televised speech[Read More…]
Why the Lessons of History are Ignored America, Russia and NATO’s Geneva diplomatic talks ended in failure without any formal course of action to avoid military confrontation on Ukraine’s border. Other vital issues include how to treat each other in a futuristic imaginary encounter of common interests. The global community is watching the prelude to a staged drama of unwarranted[Read More…]
Like the bilateral negotiations between the US and Russia on Monday, the meeting of the NATO-Russia Council on Wednesday also ended with no tangible result. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called it a “positive sign” that the 30 NATO countries and Russia were “sitting at the same table again for the first time in two and a half years and[Read More…]
A fateful week is ending today for international security with the Russian Foreign Ministry releasing the two documents on security guarantees that Moscow had proposed to Washington as the basis for discussions to ease the tensions over NATO’s eastward expansion and to cease the alliance’s deployments close to Russia’s borders, including in Ukraine. Out of the two documents, one is a[Read More…]
Amid numerous discussions about the future of Ukraine – a country that has been unable to form a single nation in 30 years of independence, and is torn apart by interethnic, linguistic and economic contradictions, Europe should ask itself just what Ukraine really means to it. And the answer will be the same – a buffer zone, because this clearly[Read More…]
Moscow has butted the grand old transatlantic alliance in the chest on Monday with the foreign ministry announcing that it will suspend the NATO military liaison mission with effect from November 1 and recall the accreditation of its staff in response to the NATO decision to withdraw the accreditation of eight Russian diplomats. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov curtly added, “if NATO has[Read More…]
After Yugoslavia’s (Serbia) President Slobodan Milosevic refused to accept the so-called Rambouillet Agreement in 1999, which in reality was NATO ultimatum that demanded from Serbia and Montenegro to allow NATO troops to occupy the province of Kosovo as well as that NATO can build bases in Serbia, and that all NATO personnel have diplomatic immunity, which means that they could[Read More…]
Family Portrait of NATO Allies, Brussels, Belgium, June 14, 2021 The NATO brings to mind the classic paradigm of someone all dressed up and nowhere to go. It has to constantly reinvent a reason for its existence. The NATO is a lucrative hunting ground for the American arms industry. The bigger the NATO’s threat perceptions, the greater the scope for[Read More…]
Written by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies The world has been treated to successive spectacles of national leaders gathering at a G7 Summit in Cornwall and a NATO Summit in Brussels. The U.S. corporate media have portrayed these summits as chances for President Biden to rally the leaders of the world’s democratic nations in a coordinated response to[Read More…]
Written by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies The February meeting of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) Defense Ministers, the first since President Biden took power, revealed an antiquated, 75-year-old alliance that, despite its military failures in Afghanistan and Libya, is now turning its military madness toward two more formidable, nuclear-armed enemies: Russia and China. This theme was emphasized[Read More…]
The colonial and imperialist powers have imposed bipolar world order after the Second World War by establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The idea was to destroy every alternative like USSR experiments and establish capitalism as the only political and economic ideology. The hegemonic world politics emanating from it during 1945 to 1953 had created conditions for the growth of[Read More…]
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is an alliance in name alone. Recent events notwithstanding, the brewing conflict over territorial waters in the Eastern Mediterranean indicates that the military union between mostly Western countries is faltering. The current Turkish-Greek tension is only one facet of a much larger conflict involving, aside from the two Mediterranean countries, Israel, Egypt, Cyprus, France,[Read More…]
“EXIT NATO!” – was the glaring title on a huge screen greeting the several hundred participants of the Anti-NATO Conference in Florence, Italy, on 7 April 2019. Officially it was called The International Conference on the 70th Anniversary of NATO, sponsored by Global Research of Canada and the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons (ICBUW). I had the privilege to[Read More…]
Greens are political activists and can be found in every movement for economic, racial andenvironmental justice as well as peace. They do not organize as Greens but as people who are part of the popular movement. The article below about the week of protests against NATO highlights Greens who participated, often as organizers with other peace and justice activists. There were many[Read More…]
On 4th of April 2019 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)“celebrated” the 70th Anniversary of its murderous existence. Thishorror organization was born sort of as a “Rosemary’s Baby”, signed into life in Washington DC, as the North Atlantic Treaty. Itscreation was absolutely unethical but also absolutely “legal” -meaning what we, the west, have made the law, a man-made law for war,[Read More…]
On November 8th, Britain’s Daily Mail bannered “NATO tells Europe to prepare for ‘rapid deployment’:” and sub-headed “Defence chiefs say roads, bridges and rail links must be improved in case tanks and heavy vehicles need to be quickly mobilised” (to invade Russia, but the newspaper’s slant was instead that this must be done purely defensively: “In October, NATO accused[Read More…]
It should be a point of some delicious reflection for peace activists who have fought for decades against the nature of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. It brought the US deep into West European affairs, turning European states into garrisons. It involved the stationing of nuclear weapons. It compelled member states to go to war if the security of any[Read More…]
NATO defense ministers convened a two-day meeting in Brussels Wednesday to thrash out final plans for the deployment of some 4,000 combat troops organized in four battle groups within striking distance of Russia’s border. These front-line forces are to be backed by a 40,000-strong rapid reaction force capable of going into battle within days. The plan represents the largest military[Read More…]
In September, the German pro-government think tank “Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik” (SWP) published a study on the implications of US policy towards Russia and European security. [1] The 28-page document is aimed at a professional audience and is written in political and military jargon that couches the annihilation of millions of human lives in matter-of-fact terms, as if dealing with[Read More…]
NATO will deploy an additional 4,000 soldiers in Poland and the Baltic states in May 2017, with some units sent to Eastern Europe in advance. This was confirmed by a NATO spokesman after the US-led military alliance held consultations in Split, Croatia at the weekend. According to a Wall Street Journal report, about 1,000 American soldiers from the 2nd Cavalry[Read More…]
On Saturday, the second and final day of the NATO summit in Warsaw, NATO officials and heads of state approved a major military escalation in Eastern Europe and continuing deployments to Afghanistan. These initiatives, together with expanded NATO military cooperation with former Soviet republics, including Georgia and Ukraine, are all aimed at encircling and preparing for war against Russia. The[Read More…]
When NATO was founded, that was done in the broader context of the U.S. Marshall Plan, and the entire U.S. operation to unify the developed Atlantic countries of North America and Europe, for a coming Cold War allegedly against communism, but actually against Russia — the core country not only in the U.S.S.R. but also in Eastern Europe (the areas that[Read More…]
The issues that were discussed at this year’s NATO Summit were mainly preparations for a possible war against Russia. The two-day Summit in Warsaw Poland ended on Saturday July 9th, with a 139-part “Warsaw Summit Communiqué” which used the word “terrorism” 17 times, “jihad” and “jihadist” and “jihadism” 0 (zero) times, and “Russia” 58 times — never favorably, and often with overt[Read More…]
All NATO leaders will meet together at a crucial July 8th-9th Summit meeting in Warsaw, to agree regarding what to do to Russia, about which U.S. General Philip Breedlove, then the Supreme Commander of NATO, said earlier this year “Russia has chosen to be an adversary and poses a long-term existential threat to the United States and to our[Read More…]
In the historic port city of Yalta, located on the Crimean Peninsula, we visited the site where Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, in February of 1945, concluded negotiations ending World War II. These leaders and their top advisors were also present at the creation of the United Nations and other instruments of international negotiation and non-military cooperation. Tragically, the creation of[Read More…]
The NATO Founding Act was agreed to between the U.S. and Russia in 1997 in order to provide to Russia’s leader Boris Yeltsin some modicum of assurance that America wouldn’t invade his country. When his predecessor Mikhail Gorbachev had ended the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact military alliance in 1991, the representatives of U.S. President GHW Bush told him[Read More…]
There are dangerous provocations along Russia’s western border that have received little or incredibly one-sided coverage by the U.S. media. Thus the U.S. public is not aware of the possibility of a major conflict between two nuclear-armed powers occurring due to an accident or misinterpretation. The genesis of this current situation goes back in ancient history to 1989 and[Read More…]
I wasn’t at first going to listen to Rosemary Barton’s interview (CBC) with NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg considering I would probably not learn anything new. But I did and I didn’t – I did listen and I didn’t learn anything new, the interview only reinforced previously held ideas. In general that falls into two parts. First it reminded me[Read More…]
When the democratically elected President of Ukraine was violently overthrown in February 2014 and replaced by a rabidly anti-Russian regime, not only the residents in the areas of Ukraine that had voted heavily for him (Crimea having voted 75% for him, and Donbass having voted 90% for him) were terrified by what they viewed to be a bloodthirsty new regime,[Read More…]
NATO is supposed to be a defensive alliance, whose purpose is to “protect Europe from aggression”; but today it is aggressive tool of the United States. Today NATO is threatening to drive Europe into an all-destroying thermonuclear war with Russia. In recent years, participation in NATO has made European countries accomplices in US efforts to achieve global hegemony by means[Read More…]
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is sending 4,000 additional troops to Eastern Europe in the name of reassuring Poland and the Baltic states, the alliance’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed on Monday. “We will agree to deploy by rotation four robust multi-national battalions in the Baltic states and Poland,” Stoltenberg told NATO officials. The US, Germany and Britain will[Read More…]
On Tuesday, June 14th, NATO announced that if a NATO member country becomes the victim of a cyber attack by persons in a non-NATO country such as Russia or China, then NATO’s Article V “collective defense” provision requires each NATO member country to join that NATO member country if it decides to strike back against the attacking country. The preliminary[Read More…]
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My Amma (Malayalam word for Mother) passed away on August 22, 2023 at 3.10 AM. It is always difficult to deal with the passing of a parent, that too one’s mother. I thought the grief would go away. No it didn’t. All those bitter sweet memories won’t go away. At night I lie awake for hours. My friend, guide and[Read More…]
