What
Is the Point of NATO Expansion? - (PART 7)
by Gary
Leupp
So while
NATO has expanded in membership, it has showing a growing proclivity
to go to war, from Central Asia to North Africa. One must wonder,
what is the point?
The putative
point in 1949 was the defense of “Western Europe” against some
posited Soviet invasion. That rationale is still used; when NATO
supporters today speak in favor of the inclusion of Lithuania, for
example, they may state that, if Lithuania had remained outside the
alliance—the Russians would surely have invaded by now on the
pretext of defending ethnic Russians’ rights, etc.
There is in
fact precious little evidence for Russian ambitions, or Putin’s own
ambitions, to recreate the tsarist empire or Soviet Union. (Putin
complained just a few days ago, “We don’t want the USSR back
but no one believes us.” He’s also opined that people who
feel no nostalgia for the Soviet Union—as most citizens of the
former USSR young enough to remember it say they do—have no heart,
while those who want to restore it have no brains.)
As NATO
expanded inexorably between 1999 and 2009, Russia responded not with
threats but with calm indignation.
Putin’s
remarks about the dissolution of the Soviet Union being a
“geopolitical tragedy,” and his occasional words
addressing the language and other rights of Russians in former SSRs,
do not constitute militarist threats. As always the neocons
cherry-pick a phrase here and there as they try to depict Putin as
(yet) “another Hitler.” In fact the Russians have,
relatively speaking, been voices of reason in recent years, Alarmed
at the consequences of U.S. actions in the Middle East, they have
sought to restrain U.S. imperialism while challenging Islamist
terrorism.
In August
2013 Obama threatened to attack Syria, ostensibly to punish the
regime for using chemical weapons against its people. (The original
accusation has been discredited by Seymour Hersh among others.) Deft
intervention by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and the
refusal of the British House of Commons to support an attack
(insuring it would not, like the Iraq War, win general NATO
endorsement), and domestic opposition all helped avert another U.S.
war in the Middle East.
But it’s
as though hawks in the State Department, resentful at Russia’s
success in protecting its Syrian ally from Gadhafy’s fate, and
miffed at its continued ability to maintain air and naval facilities
on the Syrian coast, were redoubling their efforts to provoke Russia.
How better to do this than by interfering in Ukraine, which had not
only been part of the Soviet Union but part of the Russian state from
1654 and indeed was the core of the original Kievan Rus in the tenth
century?
NATO had
been courting Ukraine since 1994—five years before the alliance
expanded to include Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Kiev signed
the NATO Membership Action Plan in 2008 when Viktor Yushchenko was
president, but this was placed on hold when Viktor Yanukovych was
elected in 2010. Enjoying the solid support of the Russian-speaking
east, Yanukovich won what international observers called a free and
fair election.
Yanukovich
did not want Ukraine to join NATO: he wanted a neutral Ukraine
maintaining the traditional close relationship between the Ukraine
and Russia. This infuriated Victoria Nuland, the head of the Eurasia
desk at the State Department, who has made it her life’s project to
pull Ukraine into NATO. This would be NATO’s ultimate prize in
eastern Europe: a country of 44 million well-educated people, the
size of France, strategically located on the Black Sea historically
dominated by the Russian Black Sea Fleet. An ethnically divided
country, with a generally pro-Russian and Russian-speaking east, and
a more western-oriented Ukrainian-speaking west with an unusually
vigorous and fiercely anti-Russian neofascist movement—just there
waiting to be used.
Nuland, a
former Cheney aide whose neocon worldview drew Hillary Clinton’s
favorable attention, resulting in her promotion, is the wife of
neocon pundit and Iraq War cheerleader Robert Kagan. (Kagan was a
founding member of the notorious Project for a New American Century
“think tank”.) The couple represents two wings of incessant
neocon plotting: those who work to destroy Russia, and those who work
to destroy the Middle East, consciously using lies to confuse the
masses about their real goals.
At the
National Press Club in December 2013, Nuland boasted that the U.S.
(through such “NGOs” as the National Endowment for Democracy) had
spent $ 5 billion in Ukraine in order to support Ukraine’s
“European aspirations.” This deliberately vague formulation is
supposed to refer to U.S. support for Kiev’s admission into the
European Union. The case the U.S. built against Yanukovich was not
that he rejected NATO membership; that is never mentioned at all. She
built the case on Yanukovich’s supposed betrayal of his people’s
pro-EU aspirations in having first initialed, and then rejected, an
association agreement with the trading bloc, fearing it would mean a
Greek-style austerity regime imposed on the country from without.
From
November 2013 crowds gathered in Kiev’s Maidan to protest (among
other things) Yanukovich’s change of heart about EU membership. The
U.S. State Department embraced their cause. One might ask why, when
the EU constitutes a competing trading bloc, the U.S. should be so
interested in promoting any country’s membership in it. What
difference does it make to you and me whether Ukraine has closer
economic ties to Russia than to the EU?
The dirty
little secret here is that the U.S. goal has merely been to use the
cause of “joining Europe” to draw Ukraine into NATO, which could
be depicted as the next natural step in Ukraine’s geopolitical
realignment.
Building on
popular contempt for Yanukovich for his corruption, but also working
with politicians known to favor NATO admission and the expulsion of
Russian naval forces from the Crimean base they’ve had since the
1780s, and also including neo-fascist forces who hate Russia but also
loath the EU, Nuland and her team including the ubiquitous John
McCain popped up at the Maidan passing out cookies and encouraging
the crowd to bring down the president.
It worked,
of course. On Feb. 22, within a day of signing a European-mediated
agreement for government reforms and new election, and thinking the
situation defused, Yanukovich was forced to flee for his life. The
neofascist forces of Svoboda and the Left [corr. Right] Sector served
as storm troops toppling the regime. Nuland’s Machiavellian
maneuverings had triumphed; a neocon Jew had cleverly deployed open
anti-Semites to bring down a regime and plant a pro-NATO one in its
place.
It seemed as
though, after 14 years of expansion, NATO might soon be able to
welcome a huge new member into its ranks, complete the encirclement
of Russia and, booting out the Russian fleet, turn the Black Sea into
a NATO lake.
Alas for the
neocons and “liberal interventionists”—the new regime of
Nuland’s chosen Arseniy Yatsenyuk and his Svoboda Party allies
immediately alienated the eastern Russian-speaking population, which
remains up in arms making the country ungovernable, even as its
economy collapses; and the notion of expelling the Russians from
Sevastopol has become unimaginable.
But what do
NATO planners want? Where is all the expansion and reckless
provocation heading?
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