Instead of exploiting this crisis to expand even further, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davie say the military alliance should suspend all new or pending membership applications until the current crisis has been resolved.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, left, and Spain’s Prime Minster Pedro Sánchez on Tuesday in Madrid. (NATO)
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies
Common Dreams
As NATO holds its summit in Madrid on Tuesday through Thursday this week, the war in Ukraine is taking center stage.
During a pre-Summit June 22 talk with Politico, NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg bragged about how well-prepared NATO was for this fight because, he said: “This was an invasion that was predicted, foreseen by our intelligence services.”
Stoltenberg was talking about Western intelligence predictions in the months leading up to the Feb. 24 invasion, when Russia insisted it was not going to attack. Stoltenberg, however, could well have been talking about predictions that went back not just months before the invasion, but decades.
Stoltenberg could have looked all the way back to when the U.S.S.R. was dissolving, and highlighted a 1990 State Department memo warning that creating an “anti-Soviet coalition” of NATO countries along the U.S.S.R’s border “would be perceived very negatively by the Soviets.”
Stoltenberg could have reflected on the consequences of all the broken promises by Western officials that NATO would not expand eastward. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous assurance to Soviet President Gorbachev was just one example.
Declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted by the National Security Archive reveal multiple assurances by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and 1991.
The NATO secretary general could have recalled the 1997 letter by 50 prominent foreign policy experts, calling President Bill Clinton’s plans to enlarge NATO a policy error of “historic proportions” that would “unsettle European stability.” But Clinton had already made a commitment to invite Poland into the club, reportedly out of concern that saying “no” to Poland would lose him critical Polish-American votes in the Midwest in the 1996 election.
‘Tragic Mistake’
George Kennan, former ambassador to the Soviet Union, testifying in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1966. (Library of Congress)
Stoltenberg could have remembered the prediction made by George Kennan, the intellectual father of U.S. containment policy during the Cold War, when NATO moved ahead and incorporated Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary in 1998.
In a New York Times interview, Kennan called NATO expansion a “tragic mistake” that marked the beginning of a new Cold War, and warned that the Russians would “gradually react quite adversely.”
After seven more Eastern European countries joined NATO in 2004, including the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which had actually been part of the former Soviet Union, the hostility increased further.
Stoltenberg could have just considered the words of President Vladimir Putin himself, who said on many occasions that NATO enlargement represented “a serious provocation.” In 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, Putin asked, “What happened to the assurances our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?”
But it was the 2008 NATO Summit, when NATO ignored Russia’s vehement opposition and promised that Ukraine would join NATO, that really set off alarm bells.
William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Moscow, sent an urgent memo to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” he wrote. “In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
Instead of comprehending the danger of crossing “the brightest of all redlines,” President George W. Bush persisted and pushed through internal opposition within NATO to proclaim, in 2008, that Ukraine would indeed be granted membership, but at an unspecified date.
Stoltenberg could well have traced the present conflict back to that NATO Summit – a Summit that took place well before the 2014 Euromaidan coup or Russia’s seizure of Crimea or the failure of the Minsk Agreements to end the civil war in the Donbass.
30 Years of Warnings
Vladimir Putin at an April 4, 2008, press-conference following the meeting of the Russia-NATO Council. (Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
This was indeed a war foretold. Thirty years of warnings and predictions turned out to be all too accurate. But they all went unheeded by an institution that measured its success only in terms of its own endless expansion instead of by the security it promised but repeatedly failed to deliver, most of all to the victims of its own aggression in Serbia, Afghanistan and Libya.
Now Russia has launched a brutal, illegal war that has uprooted millions of innocent Ukrainians from their homes, killed and injured thousands of civilians and is taking the lives of more than a hundred Ukrainian soldiers every day. NATO is determined to keep sending massive amounts of weapons to fuel the war, while millions around the world suffer from the growing economic fallout of the conflict.
We can’t go back and undo Russia’s catastrophic decision to invade Ukraine or NATO’s historic blunders. But Western leaders can make wiser strategic decisions going forward. Those should include a commitment to allow Ukraine to become a neutral, non-NATO state, something that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself agreed to in principle early on in the war.
And, instead of exploiting this crisis to expand even further, NATO should suspend all new or pending membership applications until the current crisis has been resolved. That is what a genuine mutual security organization would do, in sharp contrast to the opportunistic behavior of this aggressive military alliance.
But we’ll make our own prediction based on NATO’s past behavior. Instead of calling for compromises on all sides to end the bloodshed, this dangerous Alliance will instead promise an endless supply of weapons to help Ukraine “win” an unwinnable war, and will continue to seek out and seize every chance to engorge itself at the expense of human life and global security.
NATO members should realize that the only permanent solution to the hostility generated by this exclusive, divisive alliance is to dismantle NATO and replace it with an inclusive framework that provides security to all of Europe’s countries and people, without threatening Russia or blindly following the United States in its insatiable and anachronistic, hegemonic ambitions.
Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace, is the author of the 2018 book, Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Her previous books include: Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection (2016); Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control (2013); Don’t Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart (1989) and, with Jodie Evans, Stop the Next War Now (Inner Ocean Action Guide) (2005).
Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
This article is from Common Dreams
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
I agree with several others commenting on this article by Benjamin and Davies. – It’s good in many ways, but not their remarks that Russia waging an “illegal, brutal war.” Russia is not attacking civilians, it’s attacking military structures and defending ethnic Russians who have been shelled, bombed and deprived of much, including speaking the Russian language for 8 years, by the Kiev regime, set up after the US-orchestrated coup in 2014.
Given the fact that Ukraine refused to abide by the Minsk Agreement and was not forced to do so by France or Germany or America, Russia had little alternative than to defend the lives of millions of ethnic Russians, living in the Donbass region with a large Ukraine army massing near the Donbass in February this year. This has been documented in several reports including OSCE. Should Russia have just let the Ukraine regime set about finally fulfilingltheir wish to exterminate the region of all Russians in an unopposed large-scale attack? Would that have been ok? By all accounts the people of Russia would have been appalled at this, not just President Putin and his government.
Isn’t it time for those like Benjamin and Davies to speak up about the truly brutal, illegal wars perpetrated by US and NATO over the past 20 years in several mainly Muslim countries, and they’ve got away without being lambasted and sanctioned for their barbarous wars. And they’ve ferociously opposed the ICCs efforts to investigate millions of witness statements about their war crimes. And US is still illegally in Iraq and Syria, destroying lives, stealing resources, causing hunger and misery.
It’s bizarre to be accusing and massively sanctioning Russia as being brutal in the Ukraine war which was caused by US and NATO’s treacherous, illegal activities and policies. And when they are the very countries that have brought a still continuing genocide to the suffering people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, etc…. when will this all be acknowledged? When will there be empathy for the considerable suffering of Russia over years of sanctions, insults and nuclear threats with NATO exercises often on their borders, And this really should concern us all. Because if just takes an accident or mistake for nuclear war to become reality.
NATO has made it clear that Ukraine is either a US/NATO proxy against Russia, or it will cease to exist as Russia will be left with no recourse but to continue to seize more lands and defeat the Ukrainian military. Russia clearly acted pre emptively but unlike the US in Iraq, I think Russia had just cause and will prevail militarily. Aside from the devastation of war which is always brutal, the saddest aspect is the way in which so many so called progressives and socialists in the US continue to justify their support for sending more weapons to Ukraine.
NATO expands because the tribes of MIC and the rich control US political parties and their warmonger tyrants.
There is no consideration at all of the interests of the member states, only the interests of the controllers.
The US lost its remnant of democracy after WWI: Truman and Eisenhower suspected, and Kennedy lost the game.
An established military and secret agencies quickly and inevitably destroy democracy.
A good article.
Russia, of course, believes that she is justified in her intervention by preempting a Ukrainian attack on the DPR and LPR. In any war, people believe they are in the right!
If we happen to agree with the NATO view of the world (which I don’t) then what has happened is a disaster for NATO in the long run. Despite all the alleged awesome intelligence, Russia was not deterred. She is also winning against an army that NATO countries trained and equipped. What is the point of an aggressive military alliance that cannot deter attack? And then has weapons that do not seem to work too well against a military (Russia) that knows what it is doing? The G7 over the past few days resembled a bunch of circus clowns trying to convince themselves that they can miraculously prevail. It was excruciating.
NATO will collapse over the next decade or so. Pointless entity and this crisis has demonstrated that.
I can’t agree and am even outraged by this statement “Now Russia has launched a brutal, illegal war that has uprooted millions of innocent Ukrainians from their homes, killed and injured thousands of civilians and is taking the lives of more than a hundred Ukrainian soldiers every day.”
But were the actions of Ukraine since 2014 with the support of America absolutely legal? Why do you accuse Russia of an illegal war and are silent about the reason for these military actions, which cannot be called a war.
Spike’s comment is fully endorsed by me. “Brutal”? Russia has carefully avoided civilian deaths and infrastructure. “Illegal” as if the USA cares at all for international law, only their individual “rules-based order” . The rest of the sentence describes what the Zelensky régime, helped by the USA, UK, EU and the lies their media report, are doing, while Russia concentrates on military targets and goes slowly to avoid civilians.
“This was an invasion that was predicted, foreseen by our intelligence services.”
You mean you goaded Russia to launch its SMO with your refusal to follow the UN sponsored Minsk plan for 8 years, plus placed your “advisers” to stir up the Russophobia and Nazi influence ever since 2014.
I was with the Authors (Medea and Nicolas) 100% until I stumbled upon this paragraph: “Now Russia has launched a brutal, illegal war that has uprooted millions of innocent Ukrainians from their homes, killed and injured thousands of civilians and is taking the lives of more than a hundred Ukrainian soldiers every day…”
I saw this article in Common Dreams and passed it up because I was sure that it would contain this kind of “both sides are wrong” sentiment that many on the “left” try to present as their “anti-war” bona-fides while remaining close to the Democratic Party.
Putin did not start the current conflict in Ukraine, the Obama/Biden Administration did with the Euromaidan coup in 2014, which ousted the elected president of Ukraine and replaced the government with a bunch of pro fascists, anti-Russia, US conspirators. The authors mentioned the 2014 event only in passing, but not a word about the role of the US or the Obama/Biden administration in the coup.
They also failed to mention a word about the fact that this “coup” government almost immediately began to attack civilians, and wages a war, against the Russian speaking people of the Eastern Donbass region, killing between 13000 and 14000 people over 8 years.
Medea and Nicolas also overlooked the fact that this is a war between Russia and the US/NATO who are using young men of Ukraine as a proxy military force.
My question to the authors is at what point does a nation (Russia) facing an existential threat from 21 combined nation states organized into a military bloc, have a right to take defensive military action? Clausewitz’s dictum about war and politics is in full display today, as it has been since President Bill Clinton enlarge NATO in 1997. The US/NATO’s politics truly is WAR carried on by other means, and the US/NATO is determined to do in slow motion what Hitler tried to do to the Soviet Union quickly with his blitzkrieg.
Why is it so hard for some “anti-war” activist to call out the real culprits pushing war? Is it because they are aligned with the Democratic Party? Medea Benjamin, for good reasons, had no problem calling out the Republican administration for its war based on lies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Biden and NATO could have prevented this conflict in Ukraine, but instead they pushed it, financed it, and armed it. It is time to call them what they are: The perpetrators of a brutal, illegal war that has uprooted millions of innocent Ukrainians from their homes, killed and injured thousands of civilians and is taking the lives of more than a hundred Ukrainian soldiers every day.
Mr. Ed Nelson, Thank You. You have articulated so well exactly what I feel and think. I watch Patrick Lancaster on You Tube. His reports are so real and honest and make me disgusted, in contrast, when I hear what seem to me lies on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now.; Oh, what a falling off is there. What’s up with Democracy Now? I heard some heresay that they took money from George Soros and are thereby doing his bidding on Ukraine. Is there any veracity to that? People have a right to know if it’s true or not. Democracy Now has come to be extremely pro US Imperialist on Ukraine it seems to me. I don’t bother going to Counterpunch anymore for the same reason:Pro- US Ukraine reporting. If I want to hear that kind of report I can listen to mainstream media. I don’t need to hear it from people who pretend to be progressive. I listen to the two Greek Alexes: Mercouris and Christoforou and their “the Duran” on You-Tube, Andrei Martyanov and Earl Gray also, I also like Jacob Dreizin and Gonzalo Lira on Ukraine only because they tell the truth about Ukraine, but not so much their views on other social and domestic issues like vaccines, Gay rights and racial education. I don’t agree with those two on issues besides Ukraine. Then, of course the Grayzone is always good. There is also Indian Punchline by M.K. Badrakumar with very good articles to read and, of course, Consortiumnews.
No historical analysis matters to the hegemony. They are what they are,besides not one of them listens to any article that points out their faults. The controlled media feed a narrative, that will not change.
The unipolar world knows that to control the world,they have to control Russia. Putin kicked them out, and since then the plan was enacted to submit Russia.
Some who see the real truth point out the obvious. It is white racism at the root. Conquer the Slavs and the take out the yellow man. Unfortunately for some, you can’t beat Russia and you certainly can’t beat China.
“Instead of exploiting this crisis to expand even further, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davie says the military alliance should suspend all new or pending membership applications until the current crisis has been resolved. ”
That depends on purposes which some hold to be self-evident.
How is it that this Stoltenberg imbecile is anywhere near centers of power? “Foreign policy” is run by fools and chumps who think they’re farsighted geniuses.
Just one small nit RE your conclusion that ‘We can’t go back and undo Russia’s catastrophic decision to invade Ukraine or NATO’s historic blunders. But Western leaders can make wiser strategic decisions going forward [, including] a commitment to allow Ukraine to become a neutral, non-NATO state.’ Putin’s Munich speech in 2007 really presaged your 2008 ‘start’ date: video, esp. at 28.00 ff. warned vs. NGOs ‘privately’ taking over inter-state functions, as they were privately funded by ‘certain’ states – allowed by OSCE, but contrary to its charter.
hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ58Yv6kP44&t=1s&ab_channel=RussianPerspective
‘Wiser strategic decisions going forward’ must include the abolition of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA cutout intended to obfuscate the real identities and substance of the NGOs funded. Take ‘Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, [whose coalition of] opposition politicians from the National League for Democracy’ has been banned in Myanmar. Surprise. These ‘politicians,’ aka ‘freedom fighters’ are hardly Nobel-worthy. Here are 3 recent video installments by an ex-USMC expert who analyses the NED spreadsheets, with other sources confirming what such ‘freedom’ groups are actually up to.
youtube.com/watch?v=VfxfIXyoutube.com/watch?v=9hIMhb
hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lH_rD8wBxo&t=4s
hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfxfIXGmY8o
Overall, a good article, but Russia’s actions in Ukraine are not an “illegal” war. The precedent for was, in fact set by NATO in the 90’s in the Serbia-Kosovo conflict. Kosovo had declared itself independent from Serbia, which had been conducting ethnic cleansing operations in Kosovo, and appeared to be getting ready to do more. At that point, several NATO nations recognized Kosovo’s independence, signed a mutual defense pact, and intervened against Serbia on Kosovo’s behalf.
Similarly, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which was monitoring the conflict between the breakaway areas of Donbass and Ukraine, noted, in late February, a marked increase in Ukrainian shelling of Donbass. In addition, the Ukrainian army, massed on the border between Donbass and Ukraine, appeared to be getting ready to move. Clearly, the outnumbered and outgunned, ethnically Russian Donbass populace was about to get slaughtered by “real Ukrainians.” At that point, Russia recognized the republics’ independence, signed a mutual defense pact, and intervened on their behalf to prevent that slaughter.
Of course, on a broader scale, any war is mass murder, and no war, or any smaller-scale mass murder, should ever be necessary. Alas, that’s not the world we live in. But standing by and allowing civilians to be murdered by an organized army is not “peace.” This is a world in which we have to make tough choices about who is going to get hurt, and how badly. I wish it were otherwise.
“Now Russia has launched a brutal, illegal war that has uprooted millions of innocent Ukrainians from their homes, killed and injured thousands of civilians and is taking the lives of more than a hundred Ukrainian soldiers every day.”
What are you saying here…..you seemed to have missed the point completely. Is this your words or others…. Russia didn’t ask for this war and Russia was invited to Crimea visa a resolution, over 90% voted for…..
How innocent are those Ukrainian soldiers? What do you know of Ukraine? You seem to blindly condemn Russia on the side of a nation that has spent it’s existence killing the innocent. Sorry but you touched a sore spot.
“You seem to blindly condemn…”
Only being fashion conscious as is “The American Way”.
I agree with you. I have no pity for those Ukrainian soldiers who were trained for eight years to kill Russians and decorated their bodies with Nazi symbols.