The Duran – News in Review – Episode
70.
By
In a post examining the recent NATO
summit in Brussels, Zerohedge contributor, Conn Hallinan reports that the outcome of the July 11-12 NATO
meeting in Brussels got lost amid the media’s obsession with President Donald
Trump’s bombast, but the “Summit Declaration” makes for sober reading.
The media reported that the 28-page document “upgraded
military readiness,” and was “harshly critical of Russia,” but there was not
much detail beyond that.
But details matter,
because that is where the Devil hides.
One such detail is NATO’s “Readiness
Initiative” that will beef up naval, air and ground forces in “the eastern
portion of the Alliance.” NATO is moving to base troops in Latvia, Estonia
Lithuania, the Czech Republic and Poland. Since Georgia and Ukraine have been
invited to join the Alliance, some of those forces could end up deployed on
Moscow’s western and southern borders.
And that should give us pause.
The Duran’s Alex Christoforou and
International Affairs and Security Analyst, from Moscow, Mark Sleboda discuss
the dangerous game being played by NATO, that risks provoking Russia, and
pushing the world towards a nuclear confrontation.
“NATO: Time To Re-Examine An
Alliance,” Authored by Conn Hallinan via
Dispatches From The Edge blog:
A recent European Leadership’s
Network’s (ELN) study titled “Envisioning a Russia-NATO Conflict”
concludes, “The current Russia-NATO deterrence relationship is unstable and
dangerously so.” The ELN is an independent think tank of military, diplomatic
and political leaders that fosters “collaborative” solutions to defense and
security issues.
High on the study’s list of dangers
is “inadvertent conflict,” which ELN concludes “may be the most likely scenario
for a breakout” of hostilities. “The close proximity of Russian and NATO
forces” is a major concern, argues the study, “but also the fact that Russia
and NATO have been adapting their military postures towards early reaction,
thus making rapid escalation more likely to happen.”
With armed forces nose-to-nose, “a
passage from crisis to conflict might be sparked by the actions of regional
commanders or military commanders at local levels or come as a consequence of
an unexpected incident or accident.” According to the European Leadership
Council, there have been more than 60 such incidents in the last year.
The NATO document is, indeed, hard on
Russia, which it blasts for the “illegal and illegitimate annexation of
Crimea,” its “provocative military activities, including near NATO borders,”
and its “significant investments in the modernization of its strategic
[nuclear] forces.”
Unpacking all that
requires a little history, not the media’s strong suit.
The story goes back more than three
decades to the fall of the Berlin Wall and eventual re-unification of Germany. At the time, the Soviet Union had some 380,000
troops in what was then the German Democratic Republic. Those forces were there
as part of the treaty ending World War II, and the Soviets were concerned that
removing them could end up threatening the USSR’s borders. The Russians have
been invaded—at terrible cost—three times in a little more than a century.
So West German Chancellor Helmet
Kohl, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev
cut a deal. The Soviets agreed to withdraw troops from Eastern Europe as long
as NATO did not fill the vacuum, or recruit members of the Soviet-dominated
Warsaw Pact. Baker promised Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch east.”
The agreement was never written down,
but it was followed in practice. NATO stayed west of the Oder and Neisse
rivers, and Soviet troops returned to Russia. The Warsaw Pact was dissolved in
1991.
But President Bill Clinton blew that
all up in 1999 when the U.S. and NATO intervened in the civil war between Serbs
and Albanians over the Serbian province of Kosovo. Behind the new American
doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” NATO opened a massive 11-week bombing
campaign against Serbia.
From Moscow’s point of view the war
was unnecessary. The Serbs were willing to withdraw their troops and restore
Kosovo’s autonomous status. But NATO demanded a large occupation force that would be immune
from Serbian law, something the nationalist-minded Serbs would never agree to.
It was virtually the same provocative language the Austrian-Hungarian Empire
had presented to the Serbs in 1914, language that set off World War I.
In the end, NATO lopped off part of
Serbia to create Kosovo and re-drew the post World War II map of Europe,
exactly what the Alliance charges that Russia has done with its seizure of the
Crimea.
But NATO did not stop there. In 1999
the Alliance recruited former Warsaw Pact members Hungary, Poland and the Czech
Republic, adding Bulgaria and Romania four years later. By the end of 2004,
Moscow was confronted with NATO in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to the north,
Poland to the west, and Bulgaria and Turkey to the south. Since then, the
Alliance has added Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, and Montenegro. It has
invited Georgia, Ukraine, Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina to apply as well.
When the NATO document chastises
Russia for “provocative” military activities near the NATO border, it is
referring to maneuvers within its own border or one of its few allies, Belarus.
As author and foreign policy
analyst Anatol Lieven points out, “Even a child” can look
at a 1988 map of Europe and see “which side has advanced in which direction.”
NATO also accuses Russia of
“continuing a military buildup in Crimea,” without a hint that those actions
might be in response to what the Alliance document calls its “substantial
increase in NATO’s presence and maritime activity in the Black Sea.” Russia’s
largest naval port on the Black Sea is Sevastopol in the Crimea.
One does not expect even-handedness
in such a document, but there are disconnects in this one that are worrisome.
Yes, the Russians are modernizing
their nuclear forces, but the Obama administration was first out of that gate
in 2009 with its $1.5 trillion program to upgrade the U.S.’s nuclear weapons
systems. Both programs are a bad idea.
Some of the document’s language about
Russia is aimed at loosening purse strings at home. NATO members agreed to
cough up more money, but that decision preceded Trump’s Brussels tantrum on
spending.
There is some wishful thinking on
Afghanistan—“Our Resolute Support Mission is achieving success”—when in fact
things have seldom been worse. There are vague references to the Middle East
and North Africa, nothing specific, but a reminder that NATO is no longer
confining its mission to what it was supposedly set up to do: Keep the
Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.
The Americans are still in – one
should take Trump’s threat of withdrawal with a boulder size piece of salt –
there is no serious evidence the Russians ever planned to come in, and the
Germans have been up since they joined NATO in 1955. Indeed, it was the
addition of Germany that sparked the formation of the Warsaw Pact.
While Moscow is depicted
as an aggressive adversary, NATO surrounds Russia on three sides, has deployed
anti-missile systems in Poland, Romania, Spain, Turkey, and the Black Sea, and
has a 12 to 1 advantage in military spending. With opposing forces now
toe-to-toe, it would not take much to set off a chain reaction that could end
in a nuclear exchange.
Yet instead of inviting a dialogue,
the document boasts that the Alliance has “suspended all practical civilian and
military cooperation between NATO and Russia.”
The solution seems obvious.
First, a return to the 1998 military
deployment. While it is
unlikely that former members of the Warsaw Pact would drop their NATO
membership, a withdrawal of non-national troops from NATO members that border
Russia would cool things off. Second, the removal of anti-missile systems that
should never have been deployed in the first place. In turn, Russia
could remove the middle range Iskander missiles NATO is complaining about and
agree to talks aimed at reducing nuclear stockpiles.
But long range, it is finally time to
re-think alliances. NATO
was a child of the Cold War, when the West believed that the Soviets were a
threat. But Russia today is not the Soviet Union, and there is no way Moscow
would be stupid enough to attack a superior military force. It is
time NATO went the way of the Warsaw Pact and recognize that the old ways of
thinking are not only outdated but also dangerous.
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