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U.S. Trashes NATO Founding Act: Rushes Weapons to Russia’s Borders
By moving troops to Russia's border NATO and the US violate key treaties negotiated with Russia to end the Cold War.
The
NATO Founding Act was agreed to between the U.S. and Russia in 1997 in
order to provide to Russia’s leader Boris Yeltsin some modicum of
assurance that America wouldn’t invade his country.
When his predecessor Mikhail Gorbachev
had ended the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact military alliance in
1991, the representatives of U.S. President GHW Bush told him that NATO
wouldn’t move “one inch to the east” (toward Russia), but as soon as
Gorbachev committed himself to end the Cold War and to be now the leader
only of Russia (no longer of any Soviet Union), Bush told his agents,
regarding what they had all promised to Gorbachev (Bush’s promise which
had been conveyed through them), “To hell with that! We prevailed, they didn’t.”
In other words: Bush’s prior instructions to them were merely his lies
to Gorbachev, his lies to say that the U.S. wouldn’t try to conquer
Russia (move its forces eastward to Russia’s borders); but, now, since
Gorbachev was committed and had already agreed that East Germany was to
be reunited with and an extension of West Germany (and the process for
doing that had begun), Bush pulled that rug of lies out from under the
end of the Cold War — it didn’t really end (though Gorbachev had been
deceived to think it had) — and then began the long process after that
time, to surround Russia by NATO troops and missiles and then (as Obama
with even greater intensity has been aiming to do) ultimately to swallow
it up, like it swallowed Ukraine in February 2014, right on Russia’s doorstep.
Yeltsin was mortified that Bush’s
successor Bill Clinton was in the process of trashing that promise which
Bush’s agents had given to Gorbachev, and that Clinton was allowing
into NATO the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (three countries that
formally joined NATO two years later, in 1999); so, this NATO Founding Act was
the only ‘assurance’ Russia had, to indicate that the U.S. government
wasn’t going to place the Russian government into an intolerable
position of nuclear war: Russia’s being surrounded by NATO nuclear
missiles on and near Russia’s borders. What the NATO Founding Act said
was that, for the “foreseeable” future, NATO would engage in no
“additional permanent stationing of substantial ground combat forces,” a
very vague commitment, which didn’t even specify where the commitment
would apply — how near to Russia’s borders, etc. — but it’s all that the
West would sign to under Bill Clinton, except for another vague
commitment: “to strengthen stability by further developing measures to
prevent any potentially threatening build-up of conventional forces in
agreed regions of Europe, to include Central and Eastern Europe.” In any
event, it’s all dead now: the U.S. and its NATO partners have boldly
violated even those vague terms. America has virtually torn up the
document.
On 13 June 2016, the U.S. threw into
history’s trash bin the NATO Founding Act, and did it unilaterally,
leaving Russia totally out in the cold. NATO quietly announced that it
would command a large force on Russia’s periphery and that “NATO will command the units both in peacetime and moment of crisis”.
Though no one was using the Founding Act’s language, this clearly will
be “additional permanent stationing of substantial ground combat
forces.” It also ends all the nice language in the NATO Founding Act —
e.g.: “NATO and Russia do not consider each other as adversaries. They
share the goal of overcoming the vestiges of earlier confrontation and
competition and of strengthening mutual trust and cooperation.” All
gone.
On 25 February 2016, the U.S. General
Philip Breedlove, who was the Supreme Commander of NATO and the one
person who possessed the power to order a NATO invasion of Russia, had
told the U.S. Congress, that: “Russia
has chosen to be an adversary and poses a long-term existential threat
to the United States and to our European allies and partners.” It wasn’t quite a declaration of war against Russia (only the U.S. President could do that), but close.
Leading up to that, the White House had announced
on 2 February 2016, a quadrupling of U.S. funding for its European
Reassurance Initiative (ERI), which funds NATO’s Operation Atlantic
Resolve, which is rushing tens of thousands of troops and advanced
American weaponry to and near Russia’s borders. President Obama said
that in order to address “Russia’s aggression against Ukraine almost two
years ago, … today my Administration announced a four-fold increase in
ERI funding for Fiscal Year 2017. An ERI funding level of $3.4 billion
will enable the United States to strengthen our robust military posture
in Europe and improve our ability to uphold our Article 5 commitments to
NATO members.” He was asserting that in order to supposedly defend
Ukraine against “Russia’s aggression” (though Ukraine isn’t a NATO
member and so isn’t subject to the the NATO Treaty’s Article V military
protection clause), the United States was quadrupling its forces
elsewhere on Russia’s borders, so that if Russia invaded a NATO member
country on Russia’s borders (which post-Soviet Russia has never done and
which would be insane for Russia to do), a blitz U.S. invasion of
Russia would be the response, in accord with NATO’s Article V. But since
Russia would never do a thing like that, what was Obama’s real motive?
Perhaps it was and is to invade Russia regardless. But what could be the
pretext for doing that?
On 15 June 2016, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said, as if Ukraine already were a NATO member:
“We stand firm in our support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Allies do not, and will not recognise the illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea. And we will continue to call on Russia to stop its destabilisation of Ukraine. Russia needs to stop supporting the militants, and withdraw its forces and military equipment from Ukrainian territory.”
He was saying that the residents of
Crimea shouldn’t have any say in the matter of whether Crimea should be
restored to Russia (of which it had been a part until the Soviet
dictator transferred it from Russia to Ukraine in 1954 — Stoltenberg was
saying that that dictator’s action must never be reversed, no matter if
more than 90% of Crimeans want it to be reversed; he was saying that
the current Ukrainian government owns them, and they have no say over
who rules them).
Obviously, if Ukraine’s application for
membership in NATO turns out to be accepted, then at that time, NATO (in
other words, the U.S.) will reiterate its demand for Russia to reverse
its having accepted the overwhelming desire of the Crimean people to
have their Russian nationality restored to them, and if Russia fails to
comply with NATO’s (i.e., with the American government’s) demand, then
there will be a nuclear war, in order to force the issue.
The U.S. government, or at least its
present personnel, are apparently willing to go to nuclear war in order
to force the people of Crimea to be ruled by the Ukrainian coup-regime that the U.S. had installed in Ukraine in February 2014 and which was wanting to kill them if it could not conquer them.
Of course, one cannot predict whether the
people who control the U.S. government will go all the way in that
matter, but right now, this is a nuclear showdown in the making, and
apparently the only people who are seriously worried about it are
Russians. Now, why would that be? Why would Westerners be so nonchalant
about such a matter? Why would they not be furious against the
governments that are reigning over them and threatening nuclear war in
order to coerce Crimeans to be Ukrainians? Could it be that Westerners
don’t realize how dangerous this situation is? Could it be that the
Western ‘news’ media haven’t been reporting the situation honestly to
them? Could it be that democracy is actually gone from the Western
countries? Could it be?
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of Christ’s Ventriloquists: The Event that Created Christianity.
Originally posted at strategic-culture.org
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