Nato

Paul Jay Paul Jay video interview with Lawrence Wilkinson February 3, 2022 When it comes to international affairs and peace, it’s never been more important than today to find and follow truly free and intellectual alternatives to the Western mainstream media. You cannot understand the world we live in through their more or less constructed narratives, homogenisation, omissions and -increasingly often – pure propaganda and lies. One such must-follow source is TheAnalysis.News by Paul Jay and Sharemini Peries. Please read about it and its noble aims here. And subscribe to its Newsletter. The Analysis.News recently brought us a 40 minutes conversation between Paul Jay and Larry Wilkerson which explores the dangerous madness, the immense risks, the human vanity and military/nuclear interest dominance behind the world’s risk crisis, here with a focus on the tension between NATO and Russia concerning Ukraine (and more). We highly recommend this conversation – for media...

David SwansonTFF Associate January 27, 2021 Have yall learned absolutely nothing? The U.S. government’s internal memos said that the only way to get Iraq to use its weapons if it even had any would be to attack it. The U.S. government’s public statements were that Iraq certainly had weapons and therefore must be attacked. The U.S. government itself had every single one of the weapons in question, and knew Iraq used to have some of them because the U.S. had provided them. Originally posted on Let’s Try Democracy on January 25, 2022 This was not a question of faulty information. This was not a question of political ideology. This was a question of absofuckinglute insanity. The U.S. government’s internal memos right now, if we see them years from now, will be found to have said that expanding NATO and putting troops and weapons into Eastern Europe including Ukraine has provoked...

Public opening session between Lavrov and Blinken on Friday. (Ruptly screenshot.) The toolbox is empty. Russia knows this. Biden knows this. Blinken knows this. CNN knows this. The only ones who aren’t aware of this are the American people, says Scott Ritter. Scott Ritter January 26, 2022 Originally published by Consortiumnews on January 22, 2022 U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in a hastily scheduled, 90-minute summit in Geneva yesterday, after which both sides lauded the meeting as worthwhile because it kept the door open for a diplomatic resolution to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. What “keeping the door open” entails, however, represents two completely different realities. For Blinken, the important thing appears to be process, continuing a dialogue which, by its very essence, creates the impression of progress, with progress being measured in increments of time, as opposed to results. A results-oriented outcome was...

Ted Snider January 20, 2022 Since its assurances not to move “one inch” outside Germany, the alliance has moved 600 miles closer to Russia. Originally posted on Responsible Statecraft on December 4, 2021 It is possible to actually measure Washington’s dishonesty. How big is it? It’s about 600 miles. In 1990, according to declassified documents, Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch” east of Germany. Thirty years ago, that was Russia’s red line. On December 2, that red line moved from one inch to 600 miles as Vladimir Putin said he would now seek a promise that NATO would not expand further east to Ukraine. Since these assurances, NATO has wandered its way through Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and Poland. Six hundred miles of broken pledges have brought the U.S. and...

By Ted Snider January 19, 2022 On January 10, American and Russian officials met to discuss Putin’s proposal on mutual security guarantees. Western media and political analysts have cast Putin’s demands that NATO not expand further east to Ukraine and that NATO not establish military bases in former Soviet states nor use them to carry out military activity as bold and impossible. Here are six crucial pieces of background that the western media will not tell you. Originally published at Antiwar.com The NATO Promise Putin’s demands are only bold if it is bold to ask NATO to keep its promises; his demands are only impossible if it is impossible for NATO to keep its promises. On February 9, 1990, Secretary of State James Baker assured Gorbachev that if NATO got Germany – a huge concession – NATO would not expand one inch east of Germany. The next day, West German Foreign...

But there’s already a solution. Anatol Lieven January 19, 2022 Amid the public storm in America over the fall of Kabul, it is important not to lose sight of other looming crises around the world – some of them potentially much more dangerous than Afghanistan. For if the US political elites were so surprised by the speed of the Afghan state’s collapse, that was largely because the US media stopped paying attention to developments on the ground in Afghanistan once most US forces withdrew and Americans stopped dying there in large numbers. Originally published at The Nation in November 2021 Of these potential crises, one of the most menacing is the armed standoff between the Ukrainian military and Russian-supported separatist forces in eastern Ukraine. Limited numbers of Russian troops (lightly disguised as “volunteers”) are stationed in the Donbas region, and Russia has deployed large forces in southern Russia to defend...

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO’s chief Jens Stoltenberg January 13, 2022 Jan Oberg To deceive, telling half-truths, or a complete lie is nothing new in politics, particularly security in politics. But until some 20-30 years ago, I would – perhaps naively – see it as an exception. Tragically – and perhaps to many readers’ surprise – it is now the rule. At least in U.S. and NATO circles, and that is particularly regrettably since The West professes to be a democratic system with specific values and even a moral leader to The Rest. Lying systematically about facts – historical facts – and other countries and cultures should be incompatible with The West’s perception of itself. But, today, it isn’t. Lies are widespread in so-called security politics when some militarist project doesn’t make any (common) sense to intelligent people, when the real motives have to be covered up and...

Clinton and Yeltsin in Naples, July 10, 1994.  Dormant Vesuvius is in the background.  (Eruption wouldn’t happen until Budapest).  Source:  Inosmi.ru Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner Slavic Studies Panel Addresses “Who Promised What to Whom on NATO Expansion?” By Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton (Compiled and edited) January 7, 2022 Washington, D.C., November 24, 2021 – The biggest train wreck on the track to NATO expansion in the 1990s – Boris Yeltsin’s “cold peace” blow up at Bill Clinton in Budapest in December 1994 – was the result of “combustible” domestic politics in both the U.S. and Russia, and contradictions in the Clinton attempt to have his cake both ways, expanding NATO and partnering with Russia at the same time, according to newly declassified U.S. documents published today by the National Security Archive....

By Gordon M. Hahn December 15, 2021 It is now quite clear, as I have stated for decades, that NATO expansion is the main cause of U.S.-Russian and WesternRussian tensions, and the Russian Angst over said expansion is the cause of the Ukrainian crisis sparked in winter 2013-2014. It appears that Putin is escalating the stakes in the Ukrainian crisis in an effort to solve it and the overall problem of NATO expansion and European security. The positioning of Russian troops closer to the Ukrainian border – not on the border as is being reported – is an attempt to concentrate the minds of the West and bring the main driver of the Ukrainian crisis on the Western side – the U.S. – into the Minsk 2 process directly or otherwise. His highlighting the issue has the important side benefit of putting the issue in a central place before Western...

Neta C. Crawford Listen to this article here September 24, 2021 The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in late 2001 to destroy al-Qaida, remove the Taliban from power and remake the nation. On Aug. 30, 2021, the U.S. completed a pullout of troops from Afghanistan, providing an uncertain punctuation mark to two decades of conflict. For the past 11 years I have closely followed the post-9/11 conflicts for the Costs of War Project, an initiative that brings together more than 50 scholars, physicians and legal and human rights experts to provide an account of the human, economic, budgetary and political costs and consequences of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Originally published by The Conversation Of course, by themselves figures can never give a complete picture of what happened and what it means, but they can help put this war in perspective. The 20 numbers highlighted below, some drawn from figures released on Sept. 1, 2021,...

U.S. Army NATO, the United States and its vassal-states in Afghanistan Håkan Wiberg †2010 Former TFF Board member and Associate 9 september, 2021 AS FAR BACK as it is possible to trace the history of what is now Afghanistan, it has alternately been invaded — by among others the Median, Persian, Mongol, British and U.S. empires — and served as the base of expanding regional powers. The history of modern Afghanistan begins in 1747, with the coronation of Ahmed Abdali of the Durrani clan. Re-published online at Nordic News Network British expansion in India soon presented Afghanistan with a new threat — which became a reality in 1839 with the first large-scale British invasion. Shortly thereafter came the Russian expansion into Central Asia, leading to the “Great Game” between the two empires for control of the region. Afghanistan was drawn into minor clashes and some major wars with both of...

Gordon Hahn on Guadalajara Geopolitics Institute August 10, 2021  Professor Gordon Hahn is interviewed by Hrvoje Morić of Geopolitics & Empire Gordon Hahn discusses what he calls the New East-West Cold War or Russia-West Tinderbox, which can potentially escalate into a WWIII scenario. He examines the key drivers between the Russia-West divide which is primarily EU/NATO expansion (e.g. Belarus, Ukraine, Donbass), a situation that will continue to fester and could explode at any moment unless it is resolved. He comments on China’s rise as a global hegemon and believes Russia and China will make Afghan inroads as the U.S. withdraws and the Taliban likely come to power. Finally, he looks at the “authoritarian-ization” or “Putin-ization” of America, where neo-liberals, leftists, and big tech have melded with the military-industrial-complex and oligarchic globalists who are pushing the U.S. toward a one-party state. Beyond that, these forces are pushing for some form of...