73rd anniv of NATO foundation a reminder of US long-term control of Europe’s security

[beijingwalker]

73rd anniv of NATO foundation a reminder of US long-term control of Europe’s security
Global Times

By Chen Qingqing and Xu Yelu
Published: Apr 05, 2022 07:38 PM

NATO Expansion Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

As the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) celebrates the 73rd anniversary of its 1949 establishment, a new poll conducted by the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) showed that the majority of Russian people hold a negative attitude toward the bloc that is widely considered as the product of the Cold War. As the real initiator and driving force behind the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, the NATO is destroying Europe, some Russian media said, while Chinese experts noted that the only way for Europe to reach its goal of having strategic autonomy is to shake off the long-term US control in terms of security.

The bloc said on its website on Monday (local time) that April 4 marks the 73rd anniversary of NATO, and since its foundation, it has guaranteed the security and safety of allied citizens in Europe and North America. And to mark the anniversary, capitals across the alliance illuminated buildings in NATO blue and raised the NATO flags.

However, about 60 percent of Russians hold a negative view toward the military-political bloc, and Russian citizens predominantly believe that NATO is a military structure aimed at taking aggressive actions against Russia and its allies, and most Russians are aware of its military operations in Yugoslavia, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, as the VTsIOM poll showed on Monday.

The evolution of the NATO over the past 73 years is the history of how the US manipulated and controlled Europe to maintain its hegemony in the continent. From confronting the former Soviet Union ruthlessly to strategically expelling Russia today, NATO helped shape the current security framework in Europe, led by the US, causing division and confrontation in Europe, Li Haidong, a professor from the Institute of International Relations at the China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

"It's the main product underscoring the US interests, and the Ukraine crisis shows that it's highly difficult for Europe to strike a balance between NATO and Russia," Li said.

For Europeans, the anniversary of the bloc's founding is rather a shame and even a threat, Russian online newspaper Vzglyad said in an article on Monday. Seventy-three years ago, the entry of European countries into NATO looked logical, as Western Europe considered itself extremely vulnerable to the former Soviet Union and to the potential restoration of German power, but now the need for military protection has greatly subsided, as the basic goals of NATO is to keep the US inside, the Russian media said.

Although there has been a divided attitude inside Europe toward NATO, there have been aggressive expansions of NATO in the past decades that caused concrete security threats to Russia and other non-NATO countries in the region.

Former German chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday defended her 2008 decision to block Ukraine from immediately joining NATO, rejecting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's criticism, the AFP reported.

The Ukrainian president also accused the European leaders of seeking to appease Russia with their stance at that time, the AFP said, but Merkel in a short statement issued by her spokeswoman said she "stands by her decisions in relation to the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest."

Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, NATO has lost its traditional enemy and has been seeking a transformation from a purely military bloc to a politically secure one, Wang Yiwei, director of the Institute of International Affairs at the Renmin University of China, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

The military is purely about fighting wars, but in areas like security and non-traditional security, there is also a crucial political function, and the political function is to maintain the transatlantic political ties, like the G7, to defend Western values, he said.

"In the name of making Europe more secure, NATO's 73-year history actually has been dominated by the US, and NATO's presence has largely undermined Europe's ability to equip itself militarily," Wang said.

While Europe keeps calling for strategic autonomy, as long as the NATO stands there, the "brains and muscles" of the military and political bloc are in the hands of the Americans, as their weapons are also from the US, experts said. They noted that the Russia-Ukraine conflict is actually a trap the US has set for Europe: the US military-industrial complex promotes NATO's eastward expansion to make money, then hijacks European security, and creates the Russia-Ukraine conflict to undermine Russia.

As a latest example, the US State Department has approved the potential sales of up to eight F-16 aircraft and related equipment to Bulgaria, in a deal valued at $1.673 billion, Reuters reported on Monday, citing the US Defense Department.

In Russia, an exhibition entitled NATO: Chronicle of Cruelty coincided with the NATO's 73rd anniversary, which will last for three weeks, and the First Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Labor, Social Policy and Veterans Affairs Elena Tsunaeva said it is necessary to translate it into several languages to make it accessible to foreign audiences. And it would be possible to send this exhibition to countries like Serbia to make local people remember NATO's attacks on their country, Russian media Vzglyad said.

In the wake of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Europe's status will further decline, which is a dilemma for itself. If there is no relatively powerful country to break the US' monopoly, Europe will gradually break apart and further divide, Wang noted.

"For Europe, the balance must be achieved by placing Europe's strategic autonomy and security in the hands of the Europeans themselves, free of American control," he said.

73rd anniv of NATO foundation a reminder of US long-term control of Europe’s security - Global Times

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[beijingwalker]

Obsession with NATO expansion: a deeply ideological move inevitable in provoking conflicts
Global Times
By James Smith
Published: Apr 02, 2022 02:40 PM

Cause of war Cartoon: Liu Rui/GT

When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the Warsaw Pact, it brought an end to decades of division on the European continent. The moment was proclaimed as a historical watershed. The US and its allies took it as the ultimate victory and vindication of their own ideology, which would usher in a permanent and irreversible global order that they would dominate. As Francis Fukuyama notoriously styled it, the moment commenced "the end of history" — great power struggles would be a thing of the past, and liberal democracy was the final, evolutionary and definitive form of human government.

Feeling confident in this environment, Western foreign policy as a whole from 1991 to 2014 focused on seeking to wrap up and consolidate this new political and security order. With no major state adversary existing at this period, the West focused on expanding its influence in smaller countries through a series of targeted regime change wars, which the "war on terror" doctrine also tied into. Opening up with George H.W. Bush's "New World Order" proclamation in intervening in the Gulf War against Iraq, the West pursued intervention in Somalia, former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and numerous other countries, embodying the "world police" title.

Hungry for more power, the US and its allies made the decision to keep the NATO alliance, as opposed to dissolving it following the Cold War. Although NATO was initially a defensive alliance against the Soviet Union, the ideological triumphalism which followed the events of 1991 saw it orient itself into an offensive proponent of consolidating the "New World Order" and these aforementioned regime changes. Thus, even though there was no major state adversary, the US subsequently violated its promises to post-Cold War Russia that the alliance would not be enlarged. In fact, the West subsequently began to expand NATO eastward, citing the self-determination of the countries involved as an ideologically irrefutable choice, a position that remains to this today.

The post-Cold War Russia was not initially an enemy of the West, and sought to integrate itself into it. However, the country found that having made peace and goodwill with the West in the late days of the USSR, ceding influence over Western Europe and gutting its own economy in favor of Western capitalist dominion would in fact be a mistake which would leave Moscow inherently worse off. The 1990s in Russia were characterized by poor living standards for ordinary people, where new mega wealthy "oligarchs" exploited the new environment and of course for what? For the West not to see Russia as an equal partner in a new consensus of peace, but to effect just continue in a bid to strategically subjugate the country anyway. The expansion of NATO combined with Western intervention in Yugoslavia were both critical turning points which promulgated a new Russian distrust toward the intentions of the West.

NATO and the EU's attempts to subsequently encroach Russia's own periphery would prove to be the decisive straws which "broke the camel's back" and provoked conflict. It is a logical feature of international relations theory, as reiterated by leading scholar John Mearsheimer, that attempting to ensnare and encircle one country with a hostile military alliance is a straight route to conflict. The West makes no apology for it, believing that it is their ideological right and destiny to do so, as the "end of history" logic goes. Western expansion soon provoked in the Euromaidan crisis of 2013 in Ukraine, sparking a tidal wave of anti-Russian nationalism which then opened up a geopolitical struggle over the future of Ukraine. The West in turn failed to acknowledge how the ultra-nationalist assault on Russian identity and language in the country has also been humiliating to Moscow.

The US and its allies in their hubris refused to compromise, setting off a chain reaction of events leading to the present day. Russia's reactions to this context are branded as aggression and zero-sum moral evil. However, they are in the strategic sense necessary for Moscow to safeguard its own national security and offset military and political domination by an adversarial military alliance.

This whole scenario was ultimately preventable. But Western governments and media continue to gravely mislead the public about its causes. They're pushing the never-ending ideological crusade that Western liberal democracy, must without any questions and at all costs for that matter, dominate the entire earth. It's an attitude the Western world has held since 1991, and it is on that note ironically that such an attitude become a self-fulfilling prophecy in instigating the largest conflict in Europe since the World War II. An opportunity to build a consolidated peace and unity on the continent was jeopardized by ideological and strategic puritanism. This is, as what Mearsheimer titled in his signature book, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.

Obsession with NATO expansion: a deeply ideological move inevitable in provoking conflicts - Global Times

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[beijingwalker]

NATO seeks Asia-Pacific support to thwart Russia-China alliance​

Foreign ministers want united front to discourage Beijing's war assistance

April 6, 2022 03:00 JST

BRUSSELS -- NATO foreign ministers will meet with their counterparts from the Asia-Pacific this week, seeking to gain their cooperation in deepening the economic and diplomatic isolation of Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.

NATO seeks Asia-Pacific support to thwart Russia-China alliance

Foreign ministers want united front to discourage Beijing's war assistance

asia.nikkei.com