In an unguarded moment, NATO’s secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg let the cat out of the bag when he described the rise of China as both a challenge and “an opportunity”. What he was admitting unintentionally is that a confrontational policy toward China gives the military alliance some badly needed new purpose.

Stoltenberg was giving an exclusive interview to Deutsche Welle to mark the first ministerial NATO summit attended by the Biden administration. The two-day summit held on March 23-24 at NATO headquarters in Brussels involved in-person participation of U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken as well as other foreign ministers of the 30-nation military alliance.

The NATO meeting comes as the United States and its European allies are ramping up a coordinated policy of sanctions against China and Russia over alleged human rights issues. This week saw an unprecedented coordination by the U.S., Canada, Britain and the European Union in implementing new sanctions against Beijing and Moscow. It is no coincidence that this provocative development comes after high-profile international meetings, both in-person and via videoconferencing, by the Biden administration calling for allies to adopt a more adversarial and unified position toward China and Russia.

The Biden administration has changed tack from the predecessor Trump “America First” policy to vigorously advocate for a “revitalized” transatlantic relationship. Washington views a more unified U.S.-Europe axis as a more effective strategic way to challenge China and Russia. And NATO is providing a renewed coordinating vehicle.

But in seeking unity, the Biden administration is by necessity having to push a much more aggressive policy toward China and Russia, portraying them as greater threats. This means the American military alliance takes on greater responsibility for spearheading Washington’s policy. A NATO joint statement this week affirmed the alliance’s unity in the face of Russian “aggression”. Moscow slammed the statement, saying that Russia threatened no nation, and that NATO was trying to justify its existence.

Senior Russian lawmaker Leonid Slutsky said that NATO’s claims about being a defensive alliance are a “blatant lie”, pointing to wars and interventions it has launched in former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

America’s top diplomat Antony Blinken this week claimed that China’s rise and Russia’s attempts to destabilize the West were “threats” that required NATO to come together. Blinken added disingenuously that the U.S. won’t force its allies into making an “us or them choice” with China. That’s exactly what the U.S. is doing.

Jens Stoltenberg and other European leaders have been swooning over the “new chapter” in transatlantic relations under the Biden administration. After four years of dealing with vulgar-mouth Donald Trump and his relentless hectoring over military budgets, some European leaders are sighing with relief at Biden’s seemingly dulcet assurances that “America is back”.

Of course people like Stoltenberg, a former Norwegian prime minister who has been the civilian head of NATO since 2014, are reliant on pushing a stronger alliance for their comfy livelihoods and no doubt for future sinecures at corporate-funded think-tanks. Stoltenberg is constantly striving to find a new vision and mission for NATO, an organization founded over 70 years ago at the start of the Cold War, and which has been expanding ever since despite the official end of the Cold War three decades ago. The buzz phrase he uses is to make the alliance “future-proof” – that is to find a permanent pretext for the U.S.-led military organization to continue its existence regardless of real-world security needs.

In his interview with Deutsche Welle this week, Stoltenberg commented on the rise of China. He said, inferring something menacing: “China is coming closer to us, investing in our critical infrastructure.”

Well maybe that’s because China is the world’s biggest trading partner with the European Union and a major foreign direct investor in European nations which have become bankrupt from decades of neoliberal capitalism and austerity.

Stoltenberg went on: “There’s no way we can avoid addressing the security consequences for our regional alliance of the rise of China and the shift in the global balance of power.”

And then the usually cautious, wooden Stoltenberg let it slip: China, he said, provided “a unique opportunity to open a new chapter in the relationship between North America — the United States — and Europe.”

Voila! So the real strategic value of China being presented as a “threat” or an “adversary” is to give a new purpose to the U.S.-led NATO bloc which subordinates Europe to Washington’s geopolitical objective of hegemony. The emphasis here is on China “being presented as a threat” and not what the real relationship actually is, that is, one of a vital economic partner. (Same for Russia and its vast energy partnership with Europe.)

The United States in pursuit of global dominance by its corporations and its capitalist order must, by definition, thwart a multipolar global political economy which the rise of China and Russia embody.

The fiendish political problem, however, is that Washington and its European surrogates cannot justify such a stance based on the normal and natural relations that exist. For in doing that, they would be seen as obnoxious, unwarranted aggressors. It is imperative therefore to conflate China and Russia as “security threats” to the presumed Western “rules-based order”.

Never mind that the Western “rules-based order” has seen NATO powers trashing rules and order by invading countries all around the world, waging criminal wars and subversions, killing millions of people and unleashing terrorism and other security threats stemming from collapsing nations and mass migration.

Forget about China, or Russia, being an alleged threat. They are in actual fact an “opportunity” for NATO and U.S. imperialism, which the alliance ultimately serves, to find an excuse for their criminal existence and conduct. Just ask the secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg (who, as the jokes goes, is more secretary than he is general).

Why was the storming of the Capitol “Shocking and Unacceptable” to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg when the violent coup toppling democracy in Ukraine with the open shameless support of the United States and the European Union was not?

“Shocking scenes in Washington, DC,” Stoltenberg tweeted on January 6. “The outcome of this democratic election must be respected.”

Yet hardly more than a month later, Stoltenberg personally welcomed with open arms at NATO headquarters in Brussels the prime minister of Ukraine, head of a government and political system that was established in 2014 with full NATO, European Union and United States support by toppling the genuinely democratic government of President Viktor Yanukovych.

Eager to stoke up thermonuclear tensions between East and West, and not caring at all if nuclear weapons fall on London, New York and Washington as a result, let alone Moscow, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyha proudly declared on February 9 that two new NATO naval bases would open on the Black Sea before the end of this year.

Yet the Black Sea has historically been a crucial defensive a region against invasion for Russia for the past quarter of a millennium since before the American Declaration of Independence in 1776.

The shocking Maidan coup in Kiev in 2014 was accompanied by a wave of killings and out of control mob violence that dwarfed the tiny, embarrassing protest that spilled over into the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and that has now been cynically rewritten in the liberal totalitarian Newspeak of the 21st Century West as an Assault of Huns and Nazi White Supremacist Hoards on All That is Holy and True.

The Democratic Party leaders of Congress – always eager to make further exceptional asses of themselves, now mindlessly record the riot as an “Insurrection.”

By contrast, in the 2014 Kiev real insurrection, President Yanukovych and his family fled Kiev in genuinely fear of their lives. Veteran U.S. Senator John McCain and serving Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland openly prowled the streets of Kiev loudly calling for revolution and the immediate and violent toppling of the constitutional government. Nuland handed out cookies to assure the rioters and revolutionaries that the U.S. government supported them. President Barack Obama and his then-vice president, one Joseph Biden, Jr. kept her in office.

On May 2, 2014, Ukrainian nationalists locked protesters in Odessa’s House of Trade Unions before setting the building on fire. Almost 50 people died and around 250 others were injured in clashes between demonstrators and radicals and the fire, according to the UN figures. No heartfelt tributes in the United States Congress for them! –

Later that same year, Stoltenberg, the former prime minister of Norway, was propelled to be Secretary-General NATO. His only previous experience in a mi any kind of security crisis was letting scores of innocent teenagers in his own ruling Labor Party to be massacred by a single crazed gunman on a supposedly safe island retreat near Oslo on July 22, 2011.

Since then, this ridiculous little “Napoleon of the North” has reveled in the empty pomp and glory of being applauded at a Joint Session of Congress and being acclaimed as a favorite puppet – sorry “statesman” by successive U.S. presidents.

Now, Stoltenberg appears especially focused on pushing the United States and Russia torwards a catastrophic collision over the Black Sea region by maniacally

“I think we have to understand that the Black Sea is of strategic importance for NATO and the NATO allies — our littoral states, Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania. And then we have two close and highly valued partners in the region, Ukraine and Georgia,” he proudly proclaimed on February 9.

Not to be outdone, U.S. General Tod Wolters, NATO supreme allied commander (SACEUR), head of U.S. European Command and the latest American four star commander to pull Stoltenberg’s strings added substance to Stoltenberg’s regularly worthless rhetoric.

“Recently … we have strengthened our maritime posture with superb support from Georgia and Ukraine,” Wolters said.

Deeds do follow words, just as the great 19th century German poet Heinrich Heine warned us. The U.S. Sixth Fleet destroyers Porter and Donald Cook have been operating with allies and with Ukraine’s navy in the Black Sea since January. On February 8, the day before Stoltenberg greeted Shmyha in Brussels, both warships, along with a P-8A reconnaissance plane, joined with two Turkish frigates and F-16 fighters in an integrated surface, air and subsurface warfare drill.

Yet as Stoltenberg relentless pushes the United States and NATO towards a crazy head-on clash with Russia, in the only serious life-or-death security crisis he ever had to face, the Napoleon of the North and his then-government proved utterly worthless.

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik, a hate crazed young Norwegian neo-Nazi, singlehandedly paralyzed the national security services by setting off a bomb near the prime minister’s house in Oslo that killed eight people.

Amid the confusion, Breivik then traveled out to a youth camp of Stoltenberg’s own ruling Labor Party on a nearby island where he massacred 69 people, almost all of them teens or in their early 20s. There was not a single armed security guard on the island. It was the worst mass killing in Norwegian history.

Stoltenberg had been prime minister for seven years: The appalling state of the security services and of security for the summer camp for the children of his own followers were his responsibility as national chief executive and party leader. He was even due to give a speech at the camp the next day and was preparing it while the young people were being slaughtered. He was never held responsible for his shameful bungles.

The idea that such a man could be raised up only two years later to lead the largest and most wide-reaching military alliance in European history is mindboggling. Nothing Stoltenberg has done in his years running NATO has done anything to unboggle the idea.

Once head of NATO, Stoltenberg underwent a predictable transformation: The lifelong anti-war dove who had protested the Vietnam War in his youth, overnight became an armchair war hawk.

Today, Stoltenberg is all for sucking both Ukraine and Georgia – weak, unstable and violent states lastingly destabilized by U.S. and Western coups – into his (supposedly) mighty NATO.

Stoltenberg’s raving ego and vanity have just been fed by the witless ovations of Congress and his successive American handlers, much as U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, a century ago reveled in the adulation of the crowds of Europe as his own mad, megalomaniacal policies sold them down the river for 30 more years of war, poverty, fear, conquest and death.

In this thermonuclear 21st century, the potential consequences and (literal radioactive) fallout from Stoltenberg’s ridiculous, appalling NATO policies and infantile wet dreams will be infinitely worse.

Despite repeated and long-standing warnings by Russia, the US-led NATO military alliance has indicated it is moving ever closer to accepting Ukraine as a new member. This is an incredibly incendiary step towards war that could escalate into a nuclear conflagration. And, risibly, this reckless initiative is being driven by an alliance which proclaims to be about upholding peace and security.

This week NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg hosted Ukrainian prime minister Denys Shymhal at the organization’s headquarters in Brussels. At a joint press conference, both men were upbeat about Ukraine joining NATO. Stoltenberg admitted that the former Soviet Republic has been eyed for membership of the alliance since 2008, a timescale which puts more recent conflict over the past nearly seven years in perspective. He also confirmed that NATO forces have been building up their presence in the Black Sea in coordination with Ukrainian counterparts. In recent weeks, three US warships have been training with Ukrainian naval vessels in order to counter what Stoltenberg says is “Russian aggression”.

Officially, Ukraine is designated as an “Enhanced Opportunities Partner” by NATO. Which makes one wonder, ironically, what kind of “opportunities” are being contemplated?

For all intents and purposes, Ukraine is already virtually a member of NATO. It has participated in overseas joint military operations and, as noted, it receives military aid, training and logistical support.

But if Ukraine were to be formally admitted to the NATO alliance then that opens up a legalized and inevitable path to war. Under the organization’s rules, any individual member nation is entitled to invoke a general defense clause which obliges other NATO members to support militarily. Since the governing authorities in Kiev continually claim that Russia is an aggressor – a view shared by NATO – then the potential for a generalized war with Russia is a wide open danger if Ukraine were to officially join the alliance.

Undoubtedly, NATO leaders are aware of this potential catastrophe and are also well aware of Russia’s deep concerns. That would explain their cautious delay in admitting Ukraine to the alliance. Germany and France in particular are understood to be against adding the country to NATO’s membership out of fear that it would provoke Russia.

It is interesting to speculate why Stoltenberg – a former Norwegian premier and nominal civilian head of NATO – this week appeared to give new impetus to Ukraine’s ambitions. Could it be related to the change of administration in the United States? Senior members of the Biden administration have publicly stated during Senate hearings a willingness to increase military support for the Kiev government in its conflict with pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine. American and European envoys at the UN Security Council this week reiterated strident accusations against Russia claiming that Moscow was responsible for prolonging the conflict in Ukraine. Russia’s envoy Vassily Nebenzia countered that it was the Kiev regime and its Western allies who have not implemented the previously agreed Minsk peace accord signed in 2015.

But surely even the most diehard NATO jingoists must realize that admitting Ukraine to the ranks would a be dangerous bridge too far. The same too for Georgia, another former Soviet Republic, which is also in the queue for joining the military alliance. Both countries are already in political conflict with Russia because of NATO expansionism, not as they or NATO would have it, because of “Russian aggression”. NATO pushed Georgia into a brief war with Russia in 2008 over the disputed territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Then in 2014, a NATO-backed coup d’état in Kiev against an elected president led to the ongoing low-intensity war in Eastern Ukraine. That coup also led to Crimea voting in a referendum to secede and join the Russian Federation which the West continually refers to disparagingly as “annexation”.

Professional, well-paid shills like Jens Stoltenberg like to spin the deluded yarn that NATO expansion is a “success” for democracy and the rule of law. Since the end of the Cold War in 1991 following the demise of the Soviet Union, NATO did not pack up and dissolve. In the ensuing 30 years it has doubled its membership from 16 to the present 30 constituent nations. This was in spite of earlier vows by American leaders that they would not permit NATO enlargement beyond the old frontiers of the Cold War and Warsaw Pact. The most recent additions include Montenegro and North Macedonia. Bosnia and Herzegovina are being considered under Membership Action Plans, and Ukraine and Georgia presumably after that.

NATO’s relentless expansion towards Russia’s borders, including the stationing of missile systems, in conjunction with baseless provocative, rhetoric accusing Moscow of aggression are patently posing an existential threat to Russian security. Yet NATO apologists talk blithely and in Orwellian fashion about promoting security, defense and rule of law.

Lest we forget, Russia came close to annihilation – within living memory – from military aggression by Nazi Germany and its eastern European satellites when up to 27 million Soviet people were killed in the Second World War (1939-45).

NATO’s own purported rules forbid the organization from admitting countries which are involved in border disputes or internal conflicts. That clearly should forbid Ukraine and Georgia. Yet the US-led NATO is turning a blind eye to its own rules, distorting its interventions in these countries as actions of defense against “Russian aggression”.

It would be ludicrous if it were not so gravely serious. NATO “justifies” the expansion to Ukraine and Georgia “because” Russia has forces in the Black Sea and the Barents Sea. Those regions are integral to Russia’s sovereign territory. This is while the United States from a distance of over 6,000 kilometers away stations B-1 strategic bombers for the first time in the Barents and sends increasing numbers of warships to the Black Sea in violation of maritime treaties. What next? Russia is accused of occupying Moscow?

The precedents and historical pattern show that the American imperial catspaw known officially as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is incapable of intelligent reasoning and dialogue. It is a machine geared for confrontation. Russia may therefore have to consider using another form of language in conveying its wholly legitimate security concerns.

For the present trajectory is a road to perdition.

The storming of the Capitol earlier in January elicited several reactions, perhaps none as hypocritical as that of NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. “Democracy must always prevail over violence, and I’m confident that the democratic institutions of the United States will handle this challenge,” Stoltenberg remarked.

Democracy must prevail over violence, except when violence must prevail to purportedly bring about democracy, as NATO has demonstrated repeatedly, whenever the War on Terror or the Arab Spring narratives have determined the necessity of foreign intervention. A military alliance that uses violence to prevent violence is what NATO is about, briefly. Under a collective agreement to use force, NATO has manipulated the meaning of democratic.

Which is why Stoltenberg’s comments in relation to the happenings at the Capitol, deemed “shocking and unacceptable”, cannot be taken seriously in terms of the alliance’s record of creating failed states which require perpetual foreign presence – all in the name of democracy.

Early in his tenure, the former U.S. President Donald Trump declared NATO “obsolete”, causing a rift between the U.S. and its European allies. With the Biden Administration, Stoltenberg will seek the U.S.’s return to full cooperation – a feat that should not prove too difficult to achieve, given U.S. President Joe Biden’s communicated priorities: “Day One, if I will I’m going to be on the phone with our NATO allies saying, ‘We’re back.”

Highlighting Trump’s contempt of democracy is an easy feat. Trump’s policies, as despicable as they were, on issues such as migration, Palestine and Latin America, to name a few, exposed the dynamics of U.S. politics. The scenes at the Capitol, described as shocking, exposed a fragment of the U.S.’s political violence, as well as the oblivion which U.S. society is shrouded in. A taste of violence on one’s homeland is shocking – U.S. violence on other sovereign countries has been normalised as an alleged expression of democracy.

Stoltenberg’s most recent address speaks of the importance of European and U.S. unity against “adversaries”. A NATO narrative of adversaries singled out the Cold War as a premise to highlight a distinction in diplomacy and the constructed enemies. Today, Stoltenberg states, “there is a more blurred line. We need to deal with multiple threats. Coming from state and non-state actors.” The underlying message is a call for a globalised NATO which, in turn leads to a globalisation of war. If NATO manages this strategy, it will also have cemented its impunity when an enemy is identified in the next chapter of building “a community of democracies”.

Particularly when NATO singles out a country for not respecting human rights and “our values”, the alliance needs to take a look at itself and what it represents – bombing countries in the name of democracies, and crying foul when slivers of that same violence manifests itself at home. NATO does not stand for international law, anymore than the UN stands for human rights. Keeping the alliance “safe” at the expense of ruining other independent countries – many of which have not posed any global threat, and which became havens for terror after NATO intervention – is not democratic.

The Capitol riots are a result of Trump’s encouraging violence as legitimate protest, similarly to how NATO’s narrative undermines democracy through foreign intervention. Stoltenberg’s comments usher in a new era of cooperation with Biden – one that is familiar and dependable in terms of cohesion. Trump’s shunning of the alliance was construed by NATO as a rift and, in terms of the U.S. being seen as having strayed from international consensus, the attack on the Capitol perhaps provided an opportunity for NATO to highlight its alleged commitment to democracy. But how democratic is an alliance that uses aggression in rhetoric and in action, to maintain supremacy? How democratic is NATO when it construes military power and weaponry as tools of violence only when the countries do not form part of the alliance?

NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told Politico he considers that growing challenges are being posed by China and that in consequence “To protect Europe, we need the transatlantic bond, we need North America, the U.S. and Canada… we all realize that the global balance of power is changing in a fundamental way. The rise of China is really changing the security environment we face.” He warned that the Chinese government was “investing heavily in new capabilities, including nuclear weapons, missiles, new technologies.”

The absurdity of his warning about nuclear weapons, alone, is enough to destroy his entire argument, which is based solely on finding reasons to try to justify the posture and even expansion of the U.S.-NATO military grouping which, although for the past years has focused on trying to intimidate Russia, is now seeking fresh fields to justify its continuing existence. Stoltenberg obviously doesn’t know that the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute 1920 Yearbook records the U.S. as having 1750 deployed nuclear warheads, and in 2019 “ended the practice of publicly disclosing the size of the U.S. stockpile” which is estimated at some 4,050. In contrast, as SIPRI recently noted, “China maintains an estimated total stockpile of about 260 nuclear warheads, a number which has remained relatively stable but is slowly increasing.”

But Stoltenberg refuses to acknowledge that in the somewhat unlikely event of major conflict the U.S. could reduce China to a sizzling radioactive desert, and rhapsodised that “If anything, the size of China — the military size, the economic size, their achievements in technology — all of that makes NATO even more important. No single ally, not even the United States, can address this alone.” He ignores the stark fact, as pointed out by Jeffrey St Clair in Counterpunch on December 11, that the United States spends more on its military forces than China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, and Brazil combined.

He wants to expand NATO’s influence around the globe by “reaching out” to other countries to challenge China and specifically mentions Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. He proposes creation of “a community of like-minded democracies” opposed to the Chinese Communist government. He’s not quite a latter day Senator McCarthy, he of the fanatical anti-Communist campaign in the 1950s, but has joined with such as U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo who declared in August, while on a tour of countries around Russia, that “What’s happening now isn’t Cold War 2.0. The challenge of resisting the Chinese Communist Party threat is in some ways worse.”

On December 4 the BBC noted the assertion of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, that China is “the greatest threat to democracy and freedom” since World War Two, and his use of that time frame is intriguing because, as reported by the China Global Television Network on 4 September 2020, “The Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression that lasted from 1931 to 1945 forever changed China and China-Japan relations.”

The stage is being set for further confrontation with China, and Stoltenberg wants NATO to gear up to join the anti-China band whose membership, inevitably, includes Japan.

Western countries ignore the fact that the Second World War had enormously wide and long-lasting effects on China and that for the Chinese people it began when Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931. Full-scale war broke out in 1937 and lasted until the Allied victory in 1945, during which time China suffered an estimated 14-20 million dead. It is not surprising that China remains wary of Japanese intentions, and the alliance of Tokyo with what Stoltenberg calls “a community of like-minded democracies” to confront China, is far from reassuring to Beijing.

The U.S.-sponsored Japanese Constitution of 1947 states flatly that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.” Although most laudable, this state of affairs could not last, and as noted by the BBC “after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the United States, fearing Communist expansion in Asia, pushed Tokyo to rearm. To fight off “Red China”, the U.S. established the Japan Self-Defence Forces, [in 1954] a military that to this day has not fired a single shot in anger.” But now it is evident that the U.S.-NATO alliance wants Japan, along with other Asia-Pacific nations, to band together against China and be prepared to fire shots in anger as part of a sort of super-NATO which is eager to use the threat of force as means of settling international disputes.

Once the ludicrous and regrettably pathetic post election pantomime in Washington has played out, the incoming Biden Administration will be able to get down to serious planning for the future, in which policy concerning Russia and China will be the most important international factor. Biden has chosen Antony Blinken as the new secretary of state, and while it is unlikely he’ll be as arrogantly war-drum-beating as his predecessor, Pompeo, who has devoted much time and money to jetting round the world on a total of 47 trips involving countless countries but of course omitting Russia and China, it appears that Blinken may continue a tough line, albeit short of full-frontal confrontation. In July he declared that “we need to rally our allies and partners, instead of alienating them, to deal with some of the challenges that China poses,” but it is possible that he and Biden will seek opportunities for cooperation rather than promoting the Stoltenberg project to create a mammoth anti-China military alliance.

It may be too much to hope that NATO may wither and die if it can’t expand eastwards, but at least the dangerous aspirations of Secretary General Stoltenberg are likely to be discouraged by the Biden administration. In spite of that, however, the Pentagon will probably continue its provocative electronic warfare flights and ludicrous “freedom of navigation” fandangos in the South China Sea, and we can expect gathering against China to continue.

In March 2014 the ethnically Russian province of Crimea declared itself to be separate from Ukraine. There was a referendum on sovereignty by its 2.4 million inhabitants, and there was not a single case of bloodshed in the entire process. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was asked by the government of Crimea to send representatives to monitor the referendum but refused to do so, and the development was strongly condemned by the United States. 90 percent of the inhabitants of Crimea are Russian-speaking, Russian-cultured and Russian-educated, and they voted to “dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another” in order to rejoin Russia. It would be strange if they did wish accession to a country that not only welcomes their kinship, empathy and loyalty but is economically benevolent concerning their future.

Nevertheless, the surge of propaganda continues, and the most recent waves have been created by an intriguing policy paper titled NATO 2030; United for a New Era, which makes it clear that the U.S.-Nato military alliance is now intent on “Strengthening NATO’s political role and relevant instruments to address current and future threats and challenges to Alliance security emanating from all strategic directions.”

This wide-ranging objective opens the gates for Nato to meddle even more deeply in the affairs of nations that have nothing to do with the North Atlantic and continue its confrontation of Russia by intensifying the military build-up around its borders and escalating provocative operations by land, sea and air.

There is prominent assertion in the “United for a New Era” paper that “NATO stands as history’s most successful alliance” which deserves comment and mirth. This is the military grouping that is now stumbling and fumbling its way out of Afghanistan where it has achieved precisely nothing in the way of establishing stability. On November 17 Secretary General Stoltenberg tried to put the best face on the shambles of Nato’s humiliating retreat by declaring “We now face a difficult decision. We have been in Afghanistan for almost 20 years, and no NATO ally wants to stay any longer than necessary. But at the same time, the price for leaving too soon or in an uncoordinated way could be very high.” What he didn’t say was that President Trump had not spoken with him or any Nato member about his decision to initiate precipitous withdrawal of U.S. troops and that the country is, as noted by the Council on Foreign Relations, in a state of civil war that is “worsening”. The place is approaching anarchy, with, for example, The New York Times recording that in the period 22-26 November, “At least 19 pro-government forces and 33 civilians were killed in Afghanistan in the past week. The deadliest attack took place in Bamiyan, considered one of the most secure provinces in Afghanistan, killing 18 people and wounding 59 others in blasts in the provincial capital. In Kabul, the capital, 10 civilians were killed and 51 others were wounded when 23 rockets were fired by a small truck. The rockets hit different areas all over the city.”

And Stoltenberg boasts that Nato is “history’s most successful alliance encompassing nearly a billion people and half of global GDP”. But after twenty years in Afghanistan it can’t stop a few bands of raggy-baggy guerrillas from firing rockets at the nation’s capital city.

Later in the 67-page Nato 2030 there is a reference to Libya. And it is notable that it mentions the country only once in the entire document, stating that “Instability in Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan continues to generate illegal migration that is felt acutely throughout Europe, but especially by those Allies bordering the Mediterranean.” While this is certainly true, there is no mention made of how and why Libya became unstable, and what part Nato played in destroying the country and thus generating the massive suffering now being experienced by countless innocent people in the region.

On March 19, 2011 the United States and other Nato nations (Germany refused to join the jamboree) began their blitz of aircraft and missile strikes against the government of Muammar Gaddafi. In the seven months until Gaddafi’s revolting murder on October 20 there were 9,658 air attacks on the country which then dissolved into civil war. It may be recollected that a pair of ninnies, Ivo Daalder, the U.S. Permanent Representative on the NATO Council from 2009 to 2013, and Admiral James G Stavridis, the U.S. Supreme Allied Commander Europe (the military commander of NATO) in the same period, informed the Atlantic Council and the world in February 2012 that “NATO’s operation in Libya has rightly been hailed as a model intervention. The alliance responded rapidly to a deteriorating situation that threatened hundreds of thousands of civilians rebelling against an oppressive regime. It succeeded in protecting those civilians and, ultimately, in providing the time and space necessary for local forces to overthrow Muammar al-Qaddafi” (which interpretation of his assassination is some what at variance with the giggling observation by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that “We came; we saw; he died”).

According to the independent online media organization Fanack, the situation in Libya at the moment is that “ . . . the country is disintegrating. Libya is becoming a mosaic of stateless regions, city-states, and tribe-controlled areas. The country is also a base for the smuggling of weapons and human beings, narcotic traffickers, and other outlaws . . . For the European Union, Libya, once attractive for its abundance of natural resources, is now a major concern because of the possibility of attacks on European ships or coastal cities, the risk of infiltration into the continent’s countries, and the prospect of massive waves of refugees — Arabs and Africans alike — making their way through Libya to the south of Europe and beyond.”

Thank you “history’s most successful alliance” for reducing a country to a state of anarchic mayhem. What can we expect next in the Nato playbook?

Russia and China, of course.

The Nato 2030 travesty alleges that “After the end of the Cold War, NATO attempted to build a meaningful partnership with Russia” without mentioning that in 1999 Nato added Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to help surround Russia. Then in 2004 came Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. To increase the net-drawing round Russia’s borders, Albania and Croatia were added in 2009 and lastly came the jokes of Montenegro in 2017 and North Macedonia in March this year. Stability, anyone?

The world has been warned that although the U.S.-Nato military conglomerate has been an incompetent and calamitously destabilising force in its military fandangos, it is searching for threats and challenges to justify its existence. It won’t find them — because they don’t exist — but that won’t stop it looking and blustering, and thus creating even more instability around the globe while Nato stands “United for a New Era.”

After helping blow up the Middle East and North Africa, dividing the Balkans into zones of war and tension, turning Ukraine upside down using armadas of neo Nazis, and encircling Russia with a ballistic missile shield, the leaders of this Cold War relic have decided that the best way to deal with instability of the world is… more NATO.

In a June 8th online event co-sponsored by the Atlantic Council, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced the launch of a planning project to reform NATO called NATO 2030. Stoltenberg told his audience that in order to deal with Russia and China’s strategic partnership which is transforming the global balance of power, “we must resist the temptation of national solutions and we must live up to our values: freedom, democracy and the rule of law. To do this, we must stay strong militarily, be more united politically and take a broader approach globally.”

In the mind of Stoltenberg, this means expanding NATO’s membership into the Pacific with a high priority on the absorption of Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea into NATO’s dysfunctional family. It also means extending NATO’s jurisdiction beyond a military alliance to include a wider political and environmental dimension (the war on climate change is apparently just as serious as the war on terrorism and should thus be incorporated into NATO’s operating system).

Analyzing China’s intentions through the most Hobbesian dark age lens on the market, Stoltenberg stated “they are investing heavily in modern military capabilities, including missiles that can reach all NATO allied countries. They are coming closer to us in cyberspace. We see them in the Arctic, in Africa… and they are working more and more together with Russia.”

In spite of NATO’s Cold War thinking, Russia and China have continuously presented olive branches to the west over the years- offering to cooperate on such matters as counter-terrorism, space exploration, asteroid defense, and global infrastructure projects in the Arctic and broader Belt and Road Initiative. In all instances, these offers have been met with a nearly unanimous cold shoulder by the western military industrial complex ruling NATO and the Atlantic alliance.

The Engine of War Heats Up

As Stoltenberg spoke these words, the 49th Baltic Operations running from June 1-16th were underway as the largest NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea featuring “30 ships and submarines, and 30 aircraft, conducting air defence, anti-submarine warfare, maritime interdiction and mine countermeasure operations.” In response Moscow reinforced its armored forces facing Europe.

Meanwhile in China’s backyard, three aircraft carriers all arrived in the Pacific (the USS Theodore Roosevelt, USS Ronald Reagan and USS Nimitz) with a senate Armed Services Committee approval of $6 billion in funds for the Pacific Defense Initiative which Defense News stated will “send a strong signal to the Chinese Communist Party that America is deeply committed to defending our interests in the Indo-Pacific”. The committee also approved a U.S. Airforce operating location in the Indo-Pacific for F-35A jets in order to “prioritize the protection of the air bases that might be under attack from current or emerging cruise missiles and advanced hypersonic missiles, specifically from China.”

Another inflammatory precursor for confrontation came from a House Republican Study Committee report co-authored by Secretary of State Pompeo calling for sanctioning China’s leadership, listing Russia as a state sponsor of terror and authorizing the use of military force against anyone on a Foreign Terrorist Organization list. When one holds in mind that large sections of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard happen to be on this list, it is not hard to see how quickly nations doing business with Iran can be considered “state sponsors of terror”, justifying a use of military force from America.

With this level of explicit antagonism and duplicity, it is no wonder that China’s foreign ministry announced on June 10th that it would not participate in joint three-way arms talks between the USA and Russia. If America demonstrated a coherent intention to shift its foreign policy doctrine towards a genuine pro-cooperation perspective, then it is undoubtably the case that China would enthusiastically embrace such proposals. But until then, China is obviously unwilling to loose any part of its already small nuclear deterrent of 300 warheads (compared to Russia and the USA, who each own 6000).

The Resistance to the Warhawks

I have said it many times before, but there is currently not one but two opposing American military doctrines at war with each other and no assessment of American foreign policy is complete without a sensitivity to that fact.

On the one hand, there is the sociopathic doctrine which I outlined summarily above, but on the other hand, there exists a genuine intention to stop the “forever wars”, pull out of the Middle East, disengage with NATO and realign with a multipolar system of sovereign nation states.

This more positive America expressed itself in Trump’s June 7th counter-attack on former Secretary of Defense Gen. James Mattis who had fueled the American Maidan now unfolding by stating his belife that solutions can happen without the President. Trump had fired Mattis earlier over the Cold Warrior’s commitment to endless military enmeshment in Syria, Turkey, Afghanistan and Iraq. In this Oval Office interview, the President called out the Military industrial complex which Mattis represents saying “The military-industrial complex is unbelievably powerful… You have no idea. Some legit, and some non-legit.”

Another aspect of Trump’s resistance to the neo-cons running the Pentagon and CIA is reflected in the June 11 joint U.S.-Iraq statement after the Strategic Dialogues summit of American and Iraqi delegates which committed to a continued reduction of troops in Iraq stating:

“Over the coming months, the U.S. would continue reducing forces from Iraq and discuss with the government of Iraq the status of remaining forces as both countries turn their focus towards developing a bilateral security relationship based on strong mutual interests”.

This statement coincides with Trump’s May 2020 call to accelerate U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan which has seen a fall from 12000 troops in February to under 9000 as of this writing.

Most enraging to the NATO-philes of London, Brussels and Washington was Trump’s surprising call to pull 9500 American troops out of Germany hours before Stoltenberg gave his loony NATO 2030 speech with Johann Wadephul (Deputy head of the CDU) saying “these plans demonstrate once again that the Trump administration neglects a central element of leadership: the involvement of alliance partners in the decision-making process”. In his next breath, Wadephul made his anti-Eurasian delusion transparent saying “Europe gains from the Alliance being unified. Only Russia and China gain from strife.”

Just a few months earlier, the President showed his disdain for the NATO bureaucracy by unilaterally pulling 3000 American military personnel out of the Trident Juncture exercise held annually every March.

In Defense of President Trump

In spite of all of his problems, Trump’s resistance to the dark age/neocon faction which has been running a virtually independent military-industrial-intelligence complex since FDR’s death in 1945 demonstrates a high degree of courage unseen in American presidents for many decades.

Most importantly, this flawed President represents a type of America which is genuinely compatible with the pro-nation state paradigm now being led by Russia and China.

Trump’s recent attempt to reform the G7 into a G11 (incorporating Russia, India, South Korea and Australia) is a nice step in that direction but his exclusion of China has made it an unworkable idea.

To solve this problem, American University in Moscow President Edward Lozansky stated in his recent Washington Times column that adding China to the list making it a G12 would be a saving grace to the idea and one of the best flanking maneuvers possible during this moment of crisis. Lozansky’s concept is so important that I wish to end with a larger citation from his article:

“Both Russia and China got the message a long time ago that they need to stay together to withstand the efforts to destroy them in sequence… The G-7 indeed is an obsolete group and it definitely needs a fresh blood. Therefore, a G-12 meeting in New York in late September during the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly would be a perfect place and timing since Mr. Trump had already announced that he is willing to hold a G-5 summit with the leaders of Russia, China, Britain and France — the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — to discuss nuclear security issues. China so far is reluctant to join these talks, arguing that its smaller nuclear force is defensive and poses no threat. However, for the discussion in the G-12 format Mr. Putin might be able to convince his pal Xi to accept Mr. Trump’s invitation. This would be a huge achievement for the world’s peace and at the same time allow Mr. Trump to score lots of political points not only from his electoral base but from undecided and even from his opponents who want to save their families from nuclear holocaust.”

Unless world citizens who genuinely wish to avoid the danger of a nuclear holocaust learn how to embrace the idea of a G-12, and let the NATO/Cold War paradigm rot in the obsolete trash bin of history where it rightfully belongs, then I think it is safe to say that the future will not be something to look forward to.

For the next installment, we will take a look at the British Imperial origins of NATO and the American deep state in order to help shed greater light on the nature of the “two Americas” which I noted above, have been at war with each other since 1776.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

“And the LORD said unto Satan, From whence comest thou? And Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”

And so it is with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. A veteran prime minister of Norway for eight years and political head and chief mouthpiece for the Atlantic Alliance for the past half-decade, he started the month of April addressing a Joint Session of both chambers of Congress in Washington, an honor given to no previous head of the alliance in the past 70 years,.

Not content to rest on these laurels he went on later in the month to publci boast how NATO “increased its naval presence in the Black Sea, with NATO’s maritime groups taking part in exercises and also conducting several port visits” including to Georgia and Ukraine. He called on Russia to “respect international law” so as to “make the waters of the Black Sea more secure”, according to a CaucasusWatch.de report.

And to prepare for his epochal address to Congress, Stoltenberg ended the month of March attending military exercises in Georgia, a very small, extremely unstable state embraced and supported by both the US government and NATO despite its record of violent conflicts and oppression of minorities since achieving independence following the end of the Soviet Union.

Georgia’s military strength is derisory. It has an armed land force of only 37,000 men. The effective combat strength of the Georgian Air Force is a dozen old Sukhoi combat jets. The idea that bringing Georgia into NATO could somehow increase the deterrent and military strength of the alliance is a ridiculous joke. It would simply further weaken the already alarmingly-overstretched US armed forces at a time when Washington is losing the only serious land military power apart from tiself in all of NATO, Turkey. Georgia is no Turkey: Comparable to Estonia, maybe. But Stoltenberg cannot tell the difference between any of them.

Stoltenberg’s two immediate deputies are vastly more experienced and formidable figures, both US military/strategic diplomats Alexander Vershbow and Rose Gottemoeller. His own background showed no serious engagement whatsoever with strategic issues, as one might expect from a small, usually peaceful and secure nation like Norway. The illusion of being one of the powerful and mighty of the world has clearly bred in him extremely dangerous, albeitabsurd delusions.

Indeed, in the only serious life-or-death security crisis Stoltenberg has ever had to face, he and his government proved utterly worthless.

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik, a hate crazed young Norwegian neo-Nazi, singlehandedly paralyzed the national security services by setting off a bomb near the prime minister’s house in Oslo that killed eight people. Amid the confusion, Breivik then traveled out to a youth camp of Stoltenberg’s own ruling Labour Party on a nearby island where he massacred 69 people, almost all of them teens or in their early 20s.

There was not a single armed security guard on the island. It was the worst mass killing in Norwegian history. Stoltenberg had been prime minister for seven years:  The appalling state of the security services and of security for the summer camp for the children of his own followers were his responsibility as national chief executive and party leader. He was even due to give a speech at the camp the next day and was preparing it while the young people were being slaughtered. He was never held responsible for his shameful bungles.

The idea that such a man could raise dup only two years later to lead the largest and most wide-reaching military alliance in European history boggles the mind.

Once head of NATO, Stoltenberg underwent a predictable transformation: The lifelong anti-war dove who had protested the Vietnam War in his youth, overnight became an armchair war hawk.

Today, Stoltenberg is all for sucking both Ukraine and Georgia – weak, unstable and violent states lastingly destabilized by US and Western coups – into his (supposedly) mighty NATO.

Stoltenberg’s raving ego and vanity have just been fed by the witless ovations of the US Congress, much as US President Woodrow Wilson, a century ago reveled in the adulation of the crowds of Europe as his own mad, megalomaniacal policies sold them down the river for 30 more years of war, poverty, fear, conquest and death.

Today, Stoltenberg’s capacity to wreak catastrophe is even greater. With him on the job, a lot more people than Job will suffer at the hands of Satan.

A crucial position that could be used to work for lasting peace and mutual understanding between East and West has fallen instead into the hands of one of T S Eliot’s Hollow Men: A ludicrous and contemptible phony whose witless posturing threatens to incinerate the human race.