Photograph Source: Estonian Foreign Ministry – CC BY 2.0
The hyper-capitalist terror state that plots to rule the world keeps its fist in a mailed glove called NATO. But NATO is in trouble. As its massive, disastrous Ukraine adventure fails, a key member, Turkey, applied to, uh, essentially join the other side, namely BRICS. When Ankara does so, how will that work? One foot in the Washington-dominated axis and the other in the Moscow and Beijing camp? That could require some political acrobatics, but Turkey has performed thus before. We got a smaller show of that with the spring 2022 Istanbul negotiations to settle the Ukraine War, until Boris “To the Last Ukrainian” Johnson, doubtless at Joe “Proxy War” Biden’s behest, scuttled them.
Things got stupendously worse September 12, with Anthony “World War III” Blinken’s trip to Kiev, along with his British sidekick, foreign secretary David Lammy, to promise long-range, possibly precision missiles to Volodymyr Zelensky, to strike deep into Russia. At once Russian president Vladimir Putin took to the airwaves to announce that this would put NATO at war with Russia and that Moscow would adjust its plans accordingly. Never a good sign; one, in fact, that conjures images of bombed, radioactive American, Russian and European cities. But this was a reminder of Russia’s long-standing military policy: if existentially threatened, anything can happen. In short, one of the adults in the room had spoken. And Biden, with unexpected sanity, responded like an adult: no strikes deep into Russia. Let’s all hope to God, the west, Washington in particular, stops playing with fire – as one Kremlin bigwig accurately put it.
As for the Ukraine War itself, well, it’s a catastrophe for Kiev and for NATO. The stinging realization that Washington, the CIA in particular, bit off more than it can chew has commenced wounding the swelled heads of the more intelligent decision-makers in the imperial capital. Now, of course, Moscow is only interested in peace on the harshest terms for Ukraine, a change in posture, and not for the good for the west, thanks to the insane Ukrainian incursion into Russia. It is unlikely that Recep Erdogan and Naftali Bennett can ride to the rescue, as they attempted two and a half years ago. In those elapsed years, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have perished, tens of thousands of Russian ones have too, Europe has swung into an economic and political tailspin, Germany’s broke (Deutschland boasted 10,702 corporate insolvencies in the first quarter of 2024 alone, a scalding indictment of its Russophobic foreign policy), NATO’s cupboards are bare of weapons, and Washington is losing interest. Quite the time for Ankara to approach BRICS – perhaps the first rat leaving the waterlogged Titanic. Can Hungary and Slovakia be far behind?
Then there’s Poltava. On September 3, Russian forces attacked a military communications institute in Poltava, Ukraine. Also hit was a training center for specialists in electronic warfare and surveillance. On X, Peacemaker tweeted that Kiev reported 50 soldiers killed and 200 wounded. However, “military experts, including western ones, confirm the deaths of about six hundred people, including Czech, German and French ‘specialists.’ And Sweden is in complete shock at the loss of the entire leadership of the SAAB long-range radar detection and control systems in Poltava.”
The Russian Iskander missile strike killed “specialists trained by the Swedes to operate the AWACS surveillance system of reconnaissance aircraft…But in addition to UAV instructors, there were also top Swedish specialists in electronic warfare and radar systems.” (This was over and above killed British, Polish, German and French soldiers.) According to Peacemaker, “Kiev sent 15 trucks with dead bodies to Sweden.” This source also reported September 8 that “NATO specialists on the Periphery have become a priority target. High precision strikes have become a nightmare for foreign mercenaries and their equipment.” He cites four recent instances of such strikes and another on September 8, when “Russian missiles ‘repeated’ Poltava at Kharkov” – many soldiers killed and wounded.
In other words, elite NATO trainers and technicians are getting slaughtered in Ukraine. Which is just one more reason why they shouldn’t be there – the paramount one being, of course, that their mere presence could drag NATO and Russia into outright war and thus nuclear Armageddon. This is what European nations flirt with. Bad enough western mercenaries flock to Ukraine and thence into their coffins. But NATO can always claim they are not officially from the alliance, because they’re mercenaries. Trainers and technicians who man offensive western systems and target Russian soldiers and cities are another story. So far Moscow merely kills them. But what happens if they cross a real red line, as Putin has warned attacking deep inside Russia would be, the way the west witlessly crossed a Russian red line back in February 2022? Then we have a world war nobody wants. And don’t say Moscow doesn’t have red lines: the Kremlin appears unfazed by NATO provocations until suddenly it isn’t; it does nothing until, then, all at once it does something. Nitwits in the west and Ukraine found that out the hard way, when this war started.
Making matters worse for NATO were the early June European Parliament elections, followed by those in France and Germany: NATO and Ukraine war boosters lost big time. The EU parliament elections signaled that something was wrong for war-mongering elites. So upset by this vote was French president Emmanuel “French Boots in Ukraine” Macron, that he hubristically called snap elections, held June 30 and July 7. He lost. The anti-war left won. Then Macron was in a pickle. He stalled on appointing a prime minister, clearly loath to select one from the leftist winners. When he finally did, he ignored the left having won the most seats, broke with all precedent and chose a center rightist from a losing party.
Then came the September German state elections in Saxony and Thuringia. Far-right, antiwar Alternative for Germany beat all expectations, as did the anti-NATO, economically very far-left and socially conservative Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). This new party got 12 percent and 15 seats, which means the popularity of the war-like policies of Social Democrat, in name only, leader Olaf Scholz has tanked. Not surprisingly, on September 11, Scholz, facing his self-created electoral abyss, started making noises about peace with Russia. But as at least two commentators observed, this is “too little, too late.” It wasn’t even that: Scholz almost immediately back-pedaled.
Wagenknecht is a former communist, so it’s no surprise her party’s economic platform is proudly socialist. Less predictable is BSW’s social conservatism and its committed anti-war position. But BSW has gained ground quickly, because clearly there is a huge popular appetite for its combo of left and right policies. BSW won 6.2 percent of the vote, but snagged double digits in the east. Not bad for a brand-new party.
“For now,” wrote Thomas Fazi in Unherd August 31, “Wagenknecht has ruled out forming regional coalition governments with the AfD, as well as with any party that supports arms deliveries to Ukraine (which means most mainstream parties). But her mere presence on the ballot will further erode support for the ruling coalition.” Fazi notes that she “has managed to establish BSW as one of the country’s major political forces in a matter of months.”
It’s also worth nothing that once Wagenknecht abandoned her previous party, Die Linke (the Left), which she represented in the Bundestag from 2009 to 2023, its support collapsed. In creating her new party, she avoided the term “left,” because, she says, it’s associated more with pronouns and racism than with remedying social inequality. Her policies, especially her opposition to the Ukraine War, soundly resonate with voters. If her base keeps expanding, this bodes poorly for Scholz’s Social Democrats, so heavily invested in the proxy war against Russia. And that bodes poorly for NATO.
Obviously, the western decision to bring Ukraine into NATO was a catastrophic, colossal blunder. As Kiev loses, out-manned and out-gunned by Moscow, this can only focus the very legitimate criticism on NATO that it has essentially done nothing besides make very bloody trouble since the end of the cold war (vide NATO crimes in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Libya). Numerous American diplomatic and security state luminaries vociferously cautioned against NATO expansion after 1991. They were ignored. American presidents, in their supreme arrogance, starting with Bill “Bomb Belgrade” Clinton, broke Washington’s promise to Mikhail Gorbachev and expanded NATO right up to Russia’s doorstep. Evidently, they thought they could do so with impunity. They were wrong. Their gamble not only risks WWIII, it destroyed a country, Ukraine. Time to mothball NATO, so it can never cause such a catastrophe and endanger the entire world again.
The post The World Would Be Better off Without NATO, Revisited appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eve Ottenberg.