Yves here. While NATO plans to further escalate Collective West conflicts that it is too overstretched to win, it’s not as if the hawks have not repeatedly tried to use these gatherings to scheme against the public at large. With warmongers Biden and Macron both looking wobbly. this gathering may be on too uncertain a political footing for any lasting commitments to be made. Either way, this NATO summit bears watching.
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books in November 2022. Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq
Anti-NATO protest in Chicago, 2012. Photo credit: Julie Dermansky.
After NATO’s catastrophic, illegal invasions of Yugoslavia, Libya and Afghanistan, on July 9th NATO plans to invade Washington DC. The good news is that it only plans to occupy Washington for three days. The British will not burn down the U.S. Capitol as they did in 1814, and the Germans are still meekly pretending that they don’t know who blew up their Nord Stream gas pipelines. So expect smiling photo-ops and an overblown orgy of mutual congratulation.
The details of NATO’s agenda for the Washington summit were revealed at a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in Prague at the end of May. NATO will drag its members into the U.S. Cold War with China by accusing it of supplying dual-use weapons technology to Russia, and it will unveil new NATO initiatives to spend our tax dollars on a mysterious “drone wall” in the Baltics and an expensive-sounding “integrated air defense system” across Europe.
But the main feature 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 Russia would be tantamount to surrender.
On the face of it, that should be a hard sell. The one thing that most Americans agree on about the war in Ukraine is that they support a negotiated peace. When asked in a November 2023 Economist/YouGov poll “Would you support or oppose Ukraine and Russia agreeing to a ceasefire now?,” 68% said “support,” and only 8% said “oppose,” while 24% said they were not sure.
However, while President Biden and NATO leaders hold endless debates over different ways to escalate the war, they have repeatedly rejected peace negotiations, notably in April 2022, November 2022 and January 2024, even as their failed war plans leave Ukraine in an ever worsening negotiating position.
The endgame of this non-strategy is that Ukraine will only be allowed to negotiate with Russia once it is facing total defeat and has nothing left to negotiate with – exactly the surrender NATO says it wants to avoid.
As other countries have pointed out at the UN General Assembly, the U.S. and NATO’s rejection of negotiation and diplomacy in favor of a long war they hope will eventually “weaken” Russia is a flagrant violation of the “Pacific Settlement of Disputes” that all UN members are legally committed to under Chapter VI of the UN Charter. As it says in Article 33(1),
“The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.”
But NATO’s leaders are not coming to Washington to work out how they can comply with their international obligations and negotiate peace in Ukraine. On the contrary. At a June meeting in preparation for the Summit, NATO defense ministers approved a plan to put NATO’s military support to Ukraine “on a firmer footing for years to come.”
The effort will be headquartered at a U.S. military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, and involve almost 700 staff. It has been described as a way to “Trump proof” NATO backing for Ukraine, in case Trump wins the election and tries to draw down U.S. support.
At the Summit, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg wants NATO leaders to commit to providing Ukraine with $43 billion worth of equipment each year, indefinitely. Echoing George Orwell’s doublethink that “war is peace”, Stoltenberg said, “The paradox is that the longer we plan, and the longer we commit [to war], the sooner Ukraine can have peace.”
The Summit will also discuss how to bring Ukraine closer to NATO membership, a move that guarantees the war will continue, since Ukrainian neutrality is Russia’s principal war aim.
As Ian Davis of NATO Watch reported, NATO’s rhetoric echoes the same lines he heard throughout twenty years of war in Afghanistan: “The Taliban (now Russia) can’t wait us out.” But this vague hope that the other side will eventually give up is not a strategy.
There is no evidence that Ukraine will be different from Afghanistan. The U.S. and NATO are making the same assumptions, which will lead to the same result. The underlying assumption is that NATO’s greater GDP, extravagant and corrupt military budgets and fetish for expensive weapons technology must somehow, magically, lead Ukraine to victory over Russia.
When the U.S. and NATO finally admitted defeat in Afghanistan, it was the Afghans who had paid in blood for the West’s folly, while the US-NATO war machine simply moved on to its next “challenge,” learning nothing and making political hay out of abject denial.
Less than three years after the rout in Afghanistan, US Defense Secretary Austin recently called NATO “the most powerful and successful alliance in history.” It is a promising sign for the future of Ukraine that most Ukrainians are reluctant to throw away their lives in NATO’s dumpster-fire.
In an article titled “The New Theory of Ukrainian Victory Is the Same as the Old,” the Quincy Institute’s Mark Episkopos wrote, “Western planning continues to be strategically backwards. Aiding Kyiv has become an end in itself, divorced from a coherent strategy for bringing the war to a close”.
Episkopos concluded that “the key to wielding [the West’s] influence effectively is to finally abandon a zero-sum framing of victory…”
We would add that this was a trap set by the United States and the United Kingdom, not just for Ukraine, but for their NATO allies too. By refusing to support Ukraine at the negotiating table in April 2022, and instead demanding this “zero-sum framing of victory” as the condition for NATO’s support, the U.S. and U.K. escalated what could have been a very short war into a protracted, potentially nuclear, war between NATO and Russia.
Turkish leaders and diplomats complained at how their American and British allies undermined their peacemaking, while France, Italy and Germany squirmed for a month or two but soon surrendered to the war camp.
When NATO leaders meet in Washington, what they should be doing, apart from figuring out how to comply with Article 33(1) of the UN Charter, is conducting a clear-eyed review of how this organization that claims to be a force for peace keeps escalating unwinnable wars and leaving countries in ruins.
The fundamental question is whether NATO can ever be a force for peace or whether it can never be anything but a dangerous, subservient extension of the U.S. war machine.
We believe that NATO is an anachronism in today’s multipolar world: an aggressive, expansionist military alliance whose inherent institutional myopia and blinkered, self-serving threat assessments condemn us all to endless war and potential nuclear annihilation.
We suggest that the only way NATO could be a real force for peace would be to declare that, by this time next year, it will take the same steps that its counterpart, the Warsaw Pact, took 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 that is suffering under the yoke of militarism cannot afford to wait for NATO to give up and go away of its own accord. Our fellow citizens and political leaders need to hear from us all about the dangers posed by this unaccountable, nuclear-armed war machine, and we hope you will join us—in person or online—in using the occasion of this NATO summit to sound the alarm loudly.
At least they have kept their humor!
Stephen Bryen in his latest begins:
https://weapons.substack.com/p/ukraine-war-will-end-in-surrender
“The Ukraine war will end in a surrender, not in a negotiated deal. That is my sense of where the war is headed and why the parties cannot negotiate a settlement.”
And ends:
“A surrender by Ukraine’s army and an agreement with a replacement government would make continued NATO involvement in Ukraine impossible. That could open the door, finally, to a security dialog between NATO and Russia once NATO digests what happened and why. Unfortunately, loading NATO with has-been political leaders like Marc Rutte, does not bode well for the future of the alliance. The key message for NATO if the Russians win in Ukraine, as seems more and more likely, is that NATO has to stop its expansion and look for a more stable arrangement with Russia in Europe.”
Hm. Very optimistic.
Some rumours say US has started to dispatch medium range missiles back to European bases. But I wanna check with the professional sources if this is in fact true.
Zelenski is as legitimate in Kiev and the stream of US puppets in Saigon from 1963 to 1975.
Unlikely that US would permit a new regime!
Optimistic indeed. The ‘more stable’ arrangement will be NATO massively rearming and building up a new reverse iron curtain. That is the dream, a new huge slice of GDP directly to their sponsors in the arms lobby. I think, contrary to Yves’ summary, that NATO has an apres moi le deluge mood on and will try to nail down as many long-term
griftscommitments as possible.NATO is being led by a pack of idiots, fools, imbeciles and psychopaths gambling on Russia backing off. Russia will not back off on what it perceives is an existential threat from NATO expansion – and Russia is winning! There is absolutely nothing to add to what colonels Wilkerson, Davis, Mcgregor, and Ritter have already told us as experienced experts in war about this hopeless ongoing slaughter or where it could lead. Any hope for any Ukranian success was lost in the massive defeat of the counteroffensive last year. Time for humble pie all round and the tricky business of negotiating a lasting peace.
I’m tempted to wonder whether there might be a coherent (albeit evil) inner logic to what superficially appears to be mere stupidity and incompetence (sort of like the apparent incompetence of the leaders of the D Party in US). It has been said that “War is the health of the state”.
Perhaps the calamity of project Ukraine, even in failure, serves the agendas of the people who are directing it.
Same is true of fiscal, biomedical, net-zero, and food-chain policies. These are bringing ruin to the West, but the outcome sure looks more like a feature than a bug from where I’m sitting. Ultimately, the question is whether the planning arm of the ruling establishment is as advanced as the propaganda/public perception management sector. On the one hand, the Ukraine war (and especially food and energy sanctions) look like the implementation of the Great Reset agenda, but the goalpost moving in terms of red lines and Ukrainian “victory” suggest that there is no plan and that the permanent rulership of the West maintains control of the cognitive infrastructure so as to reinforce that everything is awesome and any indicators to the contrary “have all the earmarks of Russian disinformation.”
I’d have to agree considering “Move fast and break things” is the corporate model of US multinationals.
It seems there is a difference between what these scoundrels can do within the borders of the us, they’ve taken all the money and given it to themselves, and have convinced themselves they can act internationally with the same impunity.
Adding that 0% interest for 15 odd years resulted in stuffed corporate coffers which were imo intended to be used to buy the rest of the world.
Globalists gotta globalize, and it doesn’t seem to be working that well right now.
I think you are dead-wrong. The people leading this war effort are not stupid or psychotic–they are part of a System that rewards war all times. Washington was built up to carry out war and a system of war-making is a requirement not an option. Washington cannot survive without an external “enemy” of some kind. The war can be hot or cold but it must include funding for the Pentagon and the various covert operation specialists across the bureaucracy. In this war-making regime nearly everyone in government and their legions of contractors profits from war. In Washington all decisions are based on the balance of political forces and all those forces support a permanent war agenda–“the people,” as everyone with functioning brains who knows the scene in Washington, count for nothing because the political forces in Washington control the Narrative whether it’s “news” or entertainment. Most Americans, even those who suspect the worst like MAGA types have no f-ing idea of what actually goes down in Washington or the deep level of corruption that makes change impossible at this time.
To those of us who were around Washington after the end of the long Cold War we remember the panic within the Washington area in quickly trying to create a new enemy–they eventually managed to find enemies but that’s another story.
I read your comment and my conclusion is the same as that of St Jacques: they are psychotic idiots for the very same reasons you add plus several others. The “idiot” part is very well documented in the article: people unable to understand what strategy means or even define objectives/goals to start with. The paranoid/psychotic part doesn’t need more explanations.
There are some good points and, if possible, let’s assume the war in Ukraine did not happen. Then why is it a problem if Europe wants to enhance its military capability and security?
I think one of the dumbest political slogans created was ‘defund the police.’ Despite police abuses, people care about security; as do nations.
The Europeans must know the US is not in the same position of power that it was in 1991. Moreover, the US plan to include Ukraine in NATO, weaken and isolate Russia, dominate Europe politically, and limit China’s belt and road and thereby its influence in Europe, is not really in Europe’s interest but America’s interest.
Yet, the war in Ukraine exists and Europe finds itself in no position to negotiate a settlement because the US won’t allow it.
If Europe wants greater control over its foreign policy and be on an equal footing with the US, it needs its own security architecture. Eventually, the US might be viewed as a partner but to be kept at arms length.
As for the Ukrainians, they should have learned from Hansel and Gretel. Though you’re poor and hungry, and that American gingerbread house looks inviting, once you take a bite and enter, you’ll soon be in serious trouble.
Easy-peasy: a sustainable security can be achieved if Europe can keep “UK down, Russia content and USA out”. The rest can and will sort itself out.
The “easy peasy” part depends on how politically clever and shrewd the Europeans can be in order to accomplish their goals without pissing off the US. During a transition period, the US can be quite spiteful, and willing to carry out a few more Nord Stream type missions to make its displeasure known.
To start with, they don’t have goals, or at least goals that can be achieved, limited by their neoliberal mindsets. They have a few vaque ideas but not methodology other than marking boxes in their wish lists.
You want to defund the police because, if not checked, the police will a) creep their mandate and scope (which is how most police forces today have come to exist), b) consume the majority of your budget and always use security as a pretext to grab more, in other words blackmail, c) are not doing their jobs, are making things worse, d) as an entity they exist to create conflict to justify their own existence, not resolve conflict. Same reasons you’d want to defund NATO, you say people care about security but the fact is NATO does not bring them security.
Your intentions are good but politically nobody at the federal or state level, certainly not a majority which you need to pass such legislation, will be elected on a “defund the police” promise
US police are not there to protect the people and provide security. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonzales
Essentially, the job of the police is to prosecute criminals, not to prevent crime.
While everything you say is true, backers of Defund the Police always had to explain what they meant (if they really even knew themselves).
If you have to explain your slogan, you need a new slogan.
It also didn’t help that the slogan was identified with Identitarian grifters and thieves like Ibrim X. Kendi and Patrice Cullours.
The slogan makes sense especially if you’re in any number of dozens of cities or major metropolises where the central debate in city hall and the local newspapers often centers on why the police take such a disproportionate percentage of the city budget, often over 50%, and how police spending is out of control, grows every year.
If you are not living in these metropolises, or even aware of the debate, then yes, you would have no context for “defund the police”, a context easily provided with a bit of digging.
I’m not clear on how Ibrahim X Kendi has anything to do with the defunding the police debate, to my knowledge he has not said anything about police funding. Nor do I understand why he might be called a thief, he has never been accused of taking funds, he’s an academic.
His works are a bit higher level than discussions about police funding – he discusses societal/systemic racism and his key insight is that even black people can be racist or unknowingly hold biases. Something I would think anti-DEI folk would be delighted about.
Are you thinking perhaps of someone else? Because I’m turning up nothing in my searches.
I don’t know how a slogan that is already in the dustbin of history can effectively be said to make sense. In fact, the political naïveté/cluelessness behind Defund has brought about the exact opposite: strenthened tough-on-crime narratives and more heavily funded and militarized cops.
Kendi is an inseparable part of the Defund zeitgeist – his antiracism center at BU received the bulk of its funding during the political spasms that followed George Floyd’s murder – and he’s the grifter. Cullours is the thief.
Norman Finkelstein’s “I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To Ii” is a devastating scholarly takedown of Kendi’s faux scholarship and faux radicalism. There are YouTube videos of him making his arguments, along with similar arguments made by Adolph Reed on the topic. Let’s just say Kendi does not come off well.
I think one thing is being missed here- the total obliteration of any left-oriented or even moderate liberal governments in the EU, replaced by America-backing “puppets”. They were, in my guess, engineered into their positions with financial incentives and the promise that wealth and more power would come to them if they followed the line of Russian evil and its potential dismemberment – the American line.
Far from an error, this policy was purposely enacted with that specific goal in mind. Of course, the US would not countenance European improvement without first taking them to the shower and rinsing them of any actual gain. That is happening, but as Upton Sinclair said,It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. Thus, entrapment.
“Moreover, the US plan to include Ukraine in NATO, weaken and isolate Russia, dominate Europe politically, and limit China’s belt and road and thereby its influence in Europe, is not really in Europe’s interest but America’s interest.” The USA wants to be in charge, but that does not help the “ordinary Americans”. Causing constant destruction and getting rid of any rivals by making them enemies is a very limited aim.
“Ordinary Americans” did not complain about the imperial policies, as long as they were getting some of that trickle-down from the loot. As a matter of fact, they were volunteering in order to commit war crimes overseas, in the name of freedom and democracy. Only when they get personally affected, they notice that ‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark’. If USA could continue to “be in charge” and plunder Russia/China/etc, “ordinary Americans” would be fine with it. They would be fine and dandy with it. They would celebrate USA being the greatest country in the World, just like they used to.
WarPork summit might be more apt, as NATO, is pretty clearly the world’s largest pork barrel.And the leadership wants to make it even bigger, e.g., opening a NATO office in Tokyo. Because one hemisphere of trouble isn’t enough.
NATO is on course to lose in Ukraine, but it will probably take a politician like Trump to really end the madness. Not that Trump is planning to do to NATO what he did to the TPP, though I can’t help but wonder how many more people would vote for him if this became a campaign promise.
I think everyone who is playing the geo-political game these days know that Ukraine is lost and that that loss will lead to victory on a grander scale. Already, the Euro-elites who are wedded to “globalism” (which is another term of the Washington Empire) will use the eventual defeat in Ukraine to unify the Euro-continent using the usual Orwellian methods honed by Washington. Their plan is to continue to crack-down on dissent, create one-crisis after another and to herd the Euro-sheep into conceptual cages built of fear, isolation, alienation, and an escapist regime of entertainment, wokism, and, above all, drugs to insure general compliance.
Normal human interaction will continue to be discouraged as we are herded into virtual realities which will be increasingly normalized.
Russia has given up the hope of a negotiated settlement with the US/NATO on Atlantic/European security basis and has turned to producing a Eurasian security block centered on SCO.
Consequently it sees no solving of the Ukrainian situation except resolving it by force.
This is the very worrying consequence of the US/NATO attitude to non-negotiations.
That NATO Summit is going to be a ball of fun when it starts off. France’s Macron will turn up but be recognized as only a lame duck. And America’s Joe Biden will be seen as the walking dead who apparently is only good between 10am to 4pm. Countries like Germany too will have their own problems after the recent EU elections and knowing – though not officially recognizing it – that they lost a lot of support because of their stance over the Ukraine. In fact, I would guess that there will be shouting matches breaking out between those NATO countries as what to do next. You might have Poland and the Baltic States wanting to walk it to the Russians while other countries will recognize that Project Ukraine is over and done with. Time to minimize the losses. Certainly there will be those like Stoltenberg that want to lock in the status of the Ukraine as a washing machine where tens of billions will be sent annually. And this is what Trump-proofing is really all about. This will be countered by the leaders of those nations that have actual real jobs with budgets to manage who will tell him to shove it. And as they argue, the Russians are advancing taking village after village and inflicting 2,000 casualties of the Ukrainians each and every day. So after 3 days they will release a bland statement and there will be announcements of weapons for the Ukraine and defending democracy against autocracy or some such. In short, it is going to be as big a bust as the Swiss Conference.
Just thinking aloud. With the new powers handed to him by the Supreme Court, Trump could certainly order the assassination of Zelensky to move the ball down the field. Or just do it himself.
ideally, in the middle of fifth avenue.
Ha! I lost my coffee over that LOL.
Don’t forget Rishi ;-)
Rishi will be the lamest of the lame ducks. Maybe the UK can send a head of lettuce in his place.
UK has elections in 2 days or so… and Rishi is set to loose bigly
US/NATO “is too overstretched to win”. True!
True, mainly because the MIC is enamored with super solutions to vague ideas of a war/fight, wars not like any the world actually sees.
The MIC pay “cost plus” (no risk!!! and 6% profit no matter) for “engineering”, that runs out of baseline cost so they build things that are not reliable, low quality manufacture, imported parts, outsources production and too little money to figure out how to keep the wonder weapons operating in training much less war!
In short “overstretch” because it is profitable to establish weapons unsuited to a grinding war, and beyond supply lines!
On to “integrated air and missile defense” (IAMD) for all Europe. The US Navy has IAMD to keep its billions of dollar floating “crap games” (Bob Hope) safe to bomb mud huts! So the USS Ike had to run north of Jedda because Houthis!
A semblance of IAMD exists for Japan it includes US Navy loaning several Aegis destroyers, while Japan don’t trust US suppliers to establish land based long range warning radar!
IAMD for Europe is more unsuitable but profitable military capability.
The US’ MIC is making money and enjoying robust business development! At least $43 billion a year in new orders! As far as the eye can see!
MIC winning!
The MIC is rapidly leading to destroying the US economy and the livelihood of most of the 90%. The arms that they spend money on are not going help the country in a real war.
And if we get into a “real war” it’ll be because we started it.
Any solid data when and why this transformation of the US MIC took place?
If I go with Martyanov US gear did meet quality standards in the past for many decades.
Until…?
There was that (in)famous 1993 “Last Supper Speech” by then US SoD Les Aspin, threatening to end defense spending since the Cold War had been “won”. A few years later there were 5 instead of 51 companies on the defense market left. But was this the major cause? Or was is not?
p.s. Which doesn´t mean to say things always worked. Excess spending and failures are intrinsic to the military. I am thinking e.g. of the Senate Hearing about US planes and R&D during the war by Hughes Aircraft:
From the Howard Hughes biopic “The Aviator” (2004), when Hughes is being investigated by the Senate (I hope the info was properly researched by screenwriter John Logan) Hughes says:
“(…)More than 60 other airplanes ordered from such firms as Boeing and Lockheed and Douglas and Northrop never saw action either. In all, more than 800 million dollars was spent during the war on planes that never flew. More than 6 billion on other weapons that were never delivered.(…)”.
Question is, how do such numbers fare in perspective to our present.
So NATO has become the anti-UN–devoted to war while the UN is supposed to be devoted to keeping the peace. The UN was after all created by Roosevelt as a way of preventing another WW2 in which so many millions died. But while our ruling culture still seems to be obsessed with WW2 it prefers to forget about those millions, particularly if they were Russian.
Roosevelt sent his own sons into the war and his wife toured the battlefronts. Hunter to the front lines? It might make a difference.
Makes you wonder who NATO really represents. Do they represent the interests of their member nations or do they really represent the interests of the MIC corporations. At the moment those NATO countries are not doing so well but those MIC corporations are making out great with decades of orders on their books.
There’s nothing particularly exciting here. NATO summits are held regularly and this one commemorates the 75th anniversary of the founding of the organisation in 1949. Nothing of substance will be decided: the communiqué will almost certainly have been written by now and issues of importance will have been discussed elsewhere. It’s largely a PR stunt, as the leaders congratulate themselves and each other on how brave and steadfast they are, and how valuable NATO is, and how we must continue to support Ukraine etc. I suspect that many privately feel differently, but this is not the venue to raise doubts publicly. I also suspect, though, there will be a number of meetings of senior officials in the margins (that’s one of the important benefits of this kind of summit) where the first tentative ideas will be exchanged about how the hell to get out of this one. Bilateral meetings will take up a lot of the time as well: major NATO leaders may easily have ten or a dozen lined up.
NATO continues to exist, as I’ve explained several times, because there is a need for a forum to talk about western defence and security, and there is no agreement, and no possibility of an agreement on what should replace NATO. So we’re stuck with an organisation which everyone recognises is flawed but no-one knows how to replace. In addition, of course, it serves the divergnt political purposes of a number of nations, especially the smaller ones, and it’s hard to see another way of doing it.
You learn something every day though. I had never realised that NATO had “invaded” Yugoslavia, although I think I might have noticed. I assume the authors are talking about the NATO-led Implementation Force and Stabilisation Force in Bosnia, which took over from the UN in 1995 and stayed there till 2004, without, as I recall, a single casualty on either side.
I would say that they are talking about the Kosovo war where NATO went in and bombed Serbia causing between 1,200 and 5,700 civilian casualties. To this day NATO has a grip on this region and they have a huge NATO base – Camp Bondsteel – in Kosovo itslef which they carved off from Serbia-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_War
Did I mention the children’s memorial in Belgrade to all those children killed by NATO?
https://www.behance.net/gallery/57404491/In-Belgrade-We-were-just-children
Not that long ago this dill pickle from the EU suggested that it be torn down and a memorial erected there to Madeline Allbright instead.
“… where NATO went in and bombed Serbia…”
Including the Chinese Embassy!
You assume wrongly, since you did not click the apparent link in question: the authors are talking about the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. While technically not an “invasion”, hardly worthy of such childish semantic plays, even from an ardent NATO apologist.
Ah, like the German invasion of Britain in 1940, or the Japanese invasion of Hawaii in 1941. In other words not remotely an invasion. Yes, it’s obviously about Kosovo which was, to put it mildly, a dubious episode. But there are so many valid criticisms of NATO that it always annoys me when people resort to invalid ones, because it suggests they don’t really understand the situation.
What are a few of your principal valid criticisms of NATO?
Where to start? Too big, too rigid, too dominated by US thinking, too unimaginative, desperately trying to find a role for itself, too convinced of its own moral superiority, all talk and no capability … I could go on.
It is very, very hard indeed to defend the military arm of international oligarchy. With their eyes always roving to the next victim. Now ending up canibalizing its own assets and wealth for profit.
They understand the situation more thay you NATO shills on a high horse ever will. All of the mess in Yugoslavia was started by you (i.e. NATO/USA/EU), so that you can come in to “make peace” and occupy the whole area. Your repeated attempts at gaslighting here are beyond reprehensible.
Late to reply to this comment but regardless. The pointy of an invasion is to seize control of a region. And that is what NATO did with the only real occupation troops being Camp Bondsteel plus those endless contingents running around this region. What you say is like saying that there is no American Empire because there are no occupation troops in each country totally ignoring the financial constraints that the US has on each country. An example of that is Germany where the US blew up a major part of their infrastructure but Germany and the other NATO countries had to pretend that they did not know who did it or how. Now that is control that.
Yet I believe that the writers should have been much more rigorous. The supposed “invasion of Yugoslavia” was a big written mistake in this article even if one could imagine they were referring to the bombings in Serbia. From 30.000 ft if I recall correctly.
The whole balkanization thing is essentially “invasion of Yugoslavia”, and part of NATO conquest of the Eastern Europe, with the end goal being Russia. I bet you people don’t call the current NATO vs Russia war as “invasion of Russia” because of reasons of much more rigorous nature.
Are you sure about “without a single casualty on either side”? Which planet are you talking about?
The one where IFOR and SFOR were deployed in Bosnia from the end of 1995 until 2004, when an EU force took over. To the best of my recollection, there was no fighting between those forces and any of the factions in the country. You may know better.
A planet of narratives and gaslighting.
I’m pretty sure I watched NATO bomb the bejesus out of Serbia ( Yugoslavia) and slaughter a lot of innocent people in setting up their fake state of Kosovo. Did I dream this? I think not.
Of course there was a land invasion attempt alongside the bombings. It failed. NATO hides and denies it, because it makes them look like incompetent aggressor. How can a couple of hundred guys stop the strongest force in the human history, at some godforsaken place with name no one can pronounce? Košare does sound like cauchemar, so it could all be a dream after all, or Putin’s propaganda. Probably both. It must be the almighty Putin making NATO look like bad guys, retroactively.
From Wikipedia: “The breakup of Yugoslavia was a process in which the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was broken up into constituent republics, and over the course of which the Yugoslav wars started. The process generally began with the death of Josip Broz Tito on 4 May 1980 and formally ended when the last two remaining republics (SR Serbia and SR Montenegro) proclaimed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on 27 April 1992. At that time the Yugoslav wars were still ongoing, and FR Yugoslavia continued to exist until 2003, when it was renamed and reformed as the state union of Serbia and Montenegro. This union lasted until 5 June 2006 when Montenegro proclaimed independence. The former Yugoslav autonomous province of Kosovo subsequently proclaimed independence from Serbia in February 2008.”
Thus, in 1999, when NATO bombed Serbians for 80 days, it was still Yugoslavia. And then NATO troops landed in Kosovo and removed it from Serbian component of the still existing Yugoslavian Federation.
Of course, we have the figleaf of UN seal of approval, with Yeltsin’s Russia, at the lowest of the low, approving, and China abstaining. The unipolar moment that Americans remember so fondly:
24 March Start of NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, part of the Kosovo War.
9 June Signing of the Kumanovo Agreement, a ceasefire with NATO followed by a phased withdrawal of Yugoslav security forces from Kosovo.
10 June Adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244, authorizing an international civil and military presence in Yugoslavia and establishing the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_1244
So yeah, formally NATO just bombed Yugoslavia, didn’t really invaded it with troops, only with bombs and only the air space, not the land, but it was bombing followed by a capitulation followed by an occupation. One can say that the French didn’t invade Ruhr after 1918, because Germans capitulated and accepted the terms.
Perhaps a miracle will occur: a strategy of retrenchment (aka an advancement to the rear for consolidation). Now you can spit out your coffee !!