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NATO's search for relevance

NATO was formed after World War 2 in order to defend itself against the Soviet Union and its apparent expansionist goals. In those days Communism was expansionistic, the goal being to communize the entire world and thereby create peace and prosperity—or so they believed.

Of course, no country was actually Communist. There are Communist parties, but no true Communist governments. There are only Socialist governments, and Socialism has always been the path toward the Communist ideal. The Soviet Union was the USSR: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Other “Communist” countries called themselves Democratic, because the Communist party officials were elected by party members.

After World War 2, eastern Europe was put under the hegemony of the Soviet Union as a reward for its role in defeating Germany. Europe was thus divided into east and west. More recently, a military general made the observation that NATO was formed to keep Russia out, America in, and Germany down.

With the political and economic collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Communism as an ideology was largely discredited. It could no longer expand its influence as before, and it was simply replaced by “normal” dictatorships. Even the so-called democracies continually moved toward centralization of power. The trend of most governments is to centralize power in an authoritarian government.

NATO’s original purpose (to defend Europe) expired in 1991 with the fall of the USSR. So in order to save the jobs of the military men, it had to reinvent itself as an aggressive power. Though it promised the USSR that it would not expand one inch eastward, President Clinton ignored those assurances and began to expand NATO eastward. This continued under President GW Bush.

Meanwhile, Russia, which replaced the USSR, remained chaotic during the 1990’s under Boris Yeltsin. Then Putin became Russia’s president, and he succeeded in restoring stability to Russia. The US and western Europe never forgave him for this and accused him of trying to “reestablish the Soviet Empire.” What they really meant was that he had stymied the American Empire from expanding east, using NATO. It was stated US policy since 1992 to maintain its status as the “sole superpower” at all costs. In practice this meant dismantling Russia even further, breaking it up into at least five separate nations, so that American oligarchs could take over its vast natural resources and thereby dominate the world.

Putin objected to this, of course, but to resist the US empire he had to stabilize the economy and also build up Russia’s military. The West then made clear its intention to make Ukraine part of NATO and to put nuclear missiles on the doorstep of Russia not far from Moscow itself. In 2008 Putin gave a speech, telling the West that this was a red line and was unacceptable to Russia—for the same reason that the US objected to Soviet missiles being set up in Cuba in 1961.

Under President Obama, the US backed the Maidan coup in Ukraine in 2014, replacing a democratically elected neutral leader with a pro-western government. The new government immediately began to persecute its Russian population. This caused some of Ukraine’s eastern provinces, populated mostly by ethnic Russians, to secede from Ukraine and declare their independence. This is how the Ukraine-Russia war started. If we scratch the surface, we see that this was actually a NATO-Russia war.

NATO began arming Ukraine for a future conflict and training Ukrainians into the largest army in Europe. Ukraine’s army began shelling Donetsk City indiscriminately, ultimately killing more than 14,000 civilians. Remarkably, Russia exercised restraint for another eight years until 2022.

Meanwhile, western propaganda claimed that Russia’s “unprovoked” attack on Ukraine in 2022 put all the blame on Russia. This propaganda prevailed until recently when Donald Trump finally began to admit that the war could have been avoided simply by Ukraine neutrality, rejecting Ukraine’s bid to join NATO. But it is difficult to stop the expansion of empire, especially when nations covet the natural resources and wealth of their neighbors.

Under Trump, America is also moving toward leaving NATO itself, which, of course, would reduce NATO’s budget in half and make it fully irrelevant. In addition, Trump announced that he was ending all military and financial support for Ukraine. European leaders met yesterday to pledge billions of euros, but where will they get this money? Its economy is in shambles, while Russia’s economy is booming.

Likewise, Europe has already sent most of its military equipment to Ukraine, where it has been destroyed. Trump is demanding that European countries expand their military budget to 5 percent, which they cannot afford to do. Europe is putting forth a brave face, but it admits that its so-called peace plan will not work without US backing. They have no cards to play.

NATO should have been abandoned in 1991, and the west should have welcomed Russia into Europe as a friend. But instead, the west continued to treat Russia as an enemy and to threaten them with an expansion of NATO. Russia did not start this conflict. Russia simply responded to the threats coming from the West. Hopefully, President Trump will succeed in reversing this disastrous policy quickly.