Yves here. As NATO plans to escalate Western collective conflicts that it is too stretched to win, it is not as if the hawks have not repeatedly tried to use these gatherings to plot against public opinion. Both the warmongers Biden and Macron appear shaky. This gathering may be on too uncertain a political footing for lasting commitments to be made. Either way, this NATO summit is worth watching closely.
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas JS Davies, the authors of War in Ukraine: Understanding a Senseless Conflictpublished by OR Books in November 2022. Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of CODEPINK for Peaceand 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, researcher for CODEPINK and author of Blood on Our Hands: The US Invasion and Destruction of Iraq
Anti-NATO protest in Chicago, 2012. Photo credit: Julie Dermansky.
After the illegal and catastrophic NATO invasions Yugoslavia, Libya And AfghanistanOn July 9, NATO plans to invade Washington DC. The good news is that they only plan to occupy Washington for three days. The British will not burn the US Capitol as they did in 1814, and the Germans still meekly pretend that they have succeeded in doing so. I don’t know who blew up their Nord Stream gas pipelines. So expect smiling photo ops and an orgy of mutual congratulations.
THE details NATO’s agenda for the Washington summit was unveiled at a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Prague in late May. NATO will draw its members into the Cold War between the United States and China by accusing it of supplying Russia with dual-use weapons technology, and it will unveil new NATO initiatives to spend our tax dollars on a mysterious “drone wall” in the Baltics and an expensively named “integrated air defense system” across Europe.
But the main point of the summit will be a superficial show of unity to try to convince the public that NATO and Ukraine can defeat Russia and that negotiating with it would amount to capitulation.
At first glance, this should be a tough sell. The only thing most Americans agree on about the war in Ukraine is that they support a negotiated peace. When asked in a November 2023 article Economist/YouGov Poll “Would you support or oppose Ukraine and Russia agreeing to a ceasefire now?”, 68% answered “supportively” and only 8% “opposed”, while 24% said they were not sure.
However, while President Biden and NATO leaders have held endless debates over ways to escalate the war, they have repeatedly rejected peace negotiations, including by April 2022, November 2022 And January 2024even if their Failed war plans leaving Ukraine in an increasingly difficult negotiating position.
The ultimate goal of this non-strategy is that Ukraine will only be allowed to negotiate with Russia once it faces total defeat and has nothing left to negotiate with – exactly the capitulation NATO says it wants to avoid.
As other countries have pointed out at the UN General meetingThe US and NATO’s rejection of negotiation and diplomacy in favor of a long war that they hope will eventually “weaken” Russia is a flagrant violation of the “peaceful settlement of disputes” to which all UN members are legally bound. Chapter VI of the Charter of the United Nations. As stipulated in Article 33(1),
“The parties to any dispute the prolongation of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, inquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, recourse to regional organizations or arrangements, or any other peaceful means of their choice.”
But NATO leaders are not coming to Washington to figure out how they can meet their international obligations and negotiate peace in Ukraine. Quite the opposite. At a meeting in June in preparation for the summit, NATO defense ministers approved a plan to put NATO military support for Ukraine “on the table.” a more solid base for the coming years.”
THE effort The operation will be headquartered at a U.S. military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, and will involve nearly 700 personnel. It has been described as a way to “Trump’s Test“NATO support for Ukraine, in case Trump wins the election and tries to reduce US support.
At the summit, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg asked NATO leaders to commit to providing Ukraine with $43 billion worth of equipment per year, for an indefinite period. Echoing George Orwell’s doublethink that “war is peace,” Stoltenberg said, “The paradox is that the more we plan and the more we commit (to war), the sooner Ukraine can have peace.”
The summit will also discuss how to move Ukraine closer to NATO membership, a move that ensures the continuation of the war, since Ukrainian neutrality is Russia’s main war goal.
As Ian Davis of NATO Watch said: reportedNATO’s rhetoric echoes the same phrases he heard throughout the twenty years of war in Afghanistan: “The Taliban (now Russia) cannot wait for us.” But this vague hope that the other side will eventually give up is not a strategy.
There is no evidence that Ukraine will be any different from Afghanistan. The US and NATO are making the same assumptions, which will lead to the same outcome. The underlying assumption is that NATO’s higher GDP, its extravagant and corrupt military budgets, and its obsession with expensive weapons technology must somehow, as if by magic, lead Ukraine to victory over Russia.
When the US and NATO finally admitted defeat in Afghanistan, it was the Afghans who paid in blood for the West’s folly, while the US-NATO war machine simply moved on to its next “challenge,” having learned nothing and making political hay. abject denial.
Less than three years after the defeat in Afghanistan, US Defense Secretary Austin recently called NATO is “the most powerful and successful alliance in history.” It is a promising sign for Ukraine’s future that most Ukrainians are reluctant to throw their lives into the NATO trash cans.
In an article In an article titled “The New Theory of Ukrainian Victory Is the Same as the Old One,” Mark Episkopos of the Quincy Institute writes: “Western planning continues to be strategically retrograde. Aiding kyiv has become an end in itself, with no coherent strategy for ending the war.”
Episkopos concluded that “the key to effectively exercising (Western) influence is to finally abandon a zero-sum conception of victory…”
It should be added that this is a trap set by the United States and the United Kingdom, not only for Ukraine, but also for their NATO allies. By refusing to support Ukraine at the negotiating table in April 2022, and instead demanding this “zero-sum victory scenario” as a condition for NATO support, the United States and the United Kingdom have transformed what could have been a very short war into a protracted, potentially nuclear, war between NATO and Russia.
Turkish leaders and diplomats complained how their American and British allies have undermined their peace process, while France, Italy And Germany I wriggled around for a month or two, but soon got to the war camp.
When NATO leaders meet in Washington, what should they do, other than figure out how to comply with the Article 33(1) of the United Nations Charter, conducts a sobering examination of how this organization that claims to be a force for peace continues to escalate unwinnable wars and leave countries in ruins.
The fundamental question is whether NATO can ever be a force for peace or whether it can only be a dangerous and servile extension of the American war machine.
We believe that NATO is an anachronism in today’s multipolar world: an aggressive and expansionist military alliance whose inherent institutional myopia and narrow, self-serving threat assessments doom us all to endless war and eventual nuclear annihilation.
We suggest that the only way for NATO to become a genuine force for peace would be to declare that, by next year, it will take the same steps as its Warsaw Pact counterpart did in 1991, and finally dissolve what Secretary Austin would have been wiser to call “the most dangerous military alliance in history.”
However, the world’s population suffering under the yoke of militarism cannot afford to wait for NATO to give up and disappear on its own. Our fellow citizens and our political leaders must hear us all on the dangers posed by this irresponsible nuclear war machine, and we hope you will. Join us— in person or online — using the opportunity of this NATO summit to sound the alarm.
