#3 Is it NATO’s Fault?

Europe and the USA were warned by their own people...

• Image by Jean-Louis Servais

­”Putin is more dangerous than he's ever been... What he has opened with this invasion is unthinkable. I think he did not expect to lose in Ukraine, and therefore he will not lose. He will grind the country down to a fine, fine ash. And it doesn’t matter how many Russian soldiers die in the process, how many Ukrainian soldiers and civilians die in the process, he will not be humiliated by people he calls 'little Russians'."

Those strong words are taken from an interview with Julia Ioffe. She’s an American journalist and anti-Putinist who was born in Russia. In 2014, she predicted that Russia would invade Eastern Ukraine after its annexation of Crimea. Her fear has been realised.

The alarm has been rung for decades by well-known voices such as Henry Kissinger, Noam Chomsky, Peter Hitchens, Steve Walt, Bill Bradley, Michael McCgwire and Jack F Matlock Jnr. In the essay of his podcast, I‘ve included a link to objections from each of them.

Before I share more messengers of disaster, I must detail their common point of worry, which is the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).

NATO Isn’t What it Says it Is

Wikipedia describes NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, as:

“An intergovernmental military alliance among 28 European countries and 2 North American countries. Established in the aftermath of World War II, the organization implements the North Atlantic Treaty, signed 4 April 1949. NATO constitutes a system of collective security, whereby its independent member states agree to mutual defence in response to an attack by any external party. It was established during the Cold War in response to the threat posed by the Soviet Union.”

NATO’s real mission is blatantly not what it describes. It remained after the dismantling of the Soviet Union, increased its member countries up until Russia’s border, and runs programs with many non-member states.

It has used its military in countries not attacking it, with one of the most contentious being their 2012 assistance in the removal of Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi. That action, which included 9,500 air strikes, arguably caused the civil war and has strengthened an anti-imperialistic stance by many African nations.

An attack against one member of NATO is considered an attack against all, and thus, after the 9/11 airplane bombing of the World Trade Towers, NATO invaded Afghanistan. That became an unjustifiable twenty-year occupation that has caused the current humanitarian disaster, made forgotten by the war in Ukraine.

Russia was worried and outraged as NATO and its missiles occupied ex-Soviet countries, including the Baltic States which border Russia. NATO’s dangling of possible membership to Georgia and Ukraine, also on the border, resulted in Russia invading them.

Georgia lost an area called South Ossetia, which Russia recognised as an independent state. Although unacknowledged by most countries, it has its own administration, and a shifting border between it and rest of Georgia. Undoubtedly, it’s only the presence of the Russian military that ensures the uncomfortable status quo.

And the Ukrainian war continues…

The West Was Warned

Boris Nemtsov, a Russian and an ex-politician turned activist, was a loud critic and corruption exposer of Vladimir Putin. He was arrested three times. In 2015, he was in Moscow to arrange protests against Russia's invasion of Crimea which he had described as, "This is not our war, this is not your war, this is not the war of 20-year-old paratroopers sent out there. This is Vladimir Putin's war."

In the interview with Forbes Magazine, he warned of Putin's intentions: "Putin is paranoid and is preparing for a great war. That's why spending on arms and defence are holy to him and will remain like that. Apart from that, he will cut on everything: health care, education. All but army and special services."

Whilst in the company of his Ukrainian girlfriend, Nemtsov was assassinated in 2015, on a bridge beside the Kremlin, a location that seemed to be a symbolic warning to other activists. As direct and indirect objection to the current invasion, Russians have been laying flowers where he was killed.

However, the bigger reason for worry is not Putin as the Media’s current madman caricature, but Russian response to the USA-led military expansion of the NATO.

Declassified documents from the end of the Cold War show that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was repeatedly reassured by Western leaders and negotiators that NATO would not expand. A transcript of a meeting between Gorbachev and US Secretary of State James Baker is a good intro to the topic. Baker states that:

"Neither the President nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes taking place... not an inch of NATO's present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction."

As example of history returning to bite, Joe Biden, in 1998, said:

“If my friends are saying anyone who votes for expanding NATO to include Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, are tying this noose around a Russian neck, this iron ring, well, then I don’t quite get it."

George Kennan, the U.S.A.’s respected post-WW2 strategist, and most responsible for the containment of Russia during the Cold War, was pained by that vote. He told the New York Times:

“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves… This has been my life, and it pains me to see it so screwed up in the end.”

John Mearsheimer’s criticism, delivered to Oxford in 2015, has become the most famous warning. The YouTube video, ‘Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault’, has gained half a million to one million views per day, and now counts over 23 million. He’s jumped from alternate media into the mainstream.

His warning was stark:

“What is the implication for Ukraine. This is the most important part of my talk. People in the West think there is a deep-seated immoral dimension to my position because I’m blaming the West and not Putin. But I think that the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.”

A member of the audience asks him if anyone in Washington is listening to him. He answers “No.”

Consider how absurd the political system has become to not give a logical ear to Mearsheimer, a political scientist. That means that he studies how political systems originate and develop. He’s won awards and is one of the most cited in his field. He's long been a rock star in the world we don't know. If you look him up, you will be astounded.

As early as 1993, Mearsheimer's article for Foreign Affairs article argued that it was "strategically unwise" for Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons that the Soviets had left behind. The deterrent was needed to lessen the possibility of war and the rise of "excessive nationalism". They never listened. The right-wing has risen in the Ukraine and war is now. I'll detail that nationalism in the next episode.

Mearsheimer was also correct in that USA's expansion of NATO eastward, and its growing relations with Ukraine, would result in Putin's aggression to the Ukraine.

Ensuring that the USA’s lack of awareness was impossible, Russia tweeted the link to Mearsheimer’s 2014 article for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Russia never needed to create fake news because Mearsheimer, had also titled the article with 'Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault'.

Depending on your view, the CFR are either the foremost thinktank in the West or one of the secret hands guiding American imperialism. Their august membership includes ex-Presidents, their advisers and diplomats, ex-CIA and Department of Defence officials, Federal Reserve bankers and CEOs from companies such as PayPal and Alphabet (aka Google), directors of Media houses and journalists etc. Their funders have included the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation. An interesting tangent is that they were Cyril Ramaphosa's first foreign destination after becoming South Africa's President.

Mearsheimer subtitled his article with 'The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin'. It's 12 pages are an essential read, as is the much longer Youtube video I mentioned, but I further reduce his words here:

"The United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine - beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004 - were critical elements, too... For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president - which he rightly labelled a ‘coup’- was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a U.S. naval base...

During NATO's 1995 bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs, for example, Russian President Boris Yeltsin said, "This is the first sign of what could happen when NATO comes right up to the Russian Federation's borders... The flame of war could burst out across the whole of Europe...

The U.S. diplomat George Kennan articulated, in a 1998 interview, shortly after the U.S. Senate approved the first round of NATO expansion:

'I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake…’

At its April 2008 summit in Bucharest, NATO considered admitting Georgia and Ukraine. That did not happen, but NATO declared ‘These countries will become members of NATO...’

Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008 should have dispelled any remaining doubts about Putin’s determination to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO... yet NATO never publicly abandoned its goal of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance. And NATO's expansion continued marching forward, with Albania and Croatia becoming members in 2009...

The West’s triple package of policies, NATO’s enlargement, and democracy promotion added fuel to a fire waiting to ignite. The spark came in November 2013, when President Yanukovych rejected a major economic deal that he had been negotiating with the European Union (EU) and decided to accept a $15 billion Russian counteroffer instead." That led to a revolution. The result was a "new government in Kiev" that "was pro-Western and anti-Russian to the core, and it contained four high-ranking members who could legitimately be labelled neo-fascists. Although the full extent of U.S. involvement has not yet come to light, it is clear that Washington backed the coup... For Putin, the time to act against Ukraine and the West had arrived. Shortly after February 22, he ordered Russian forces to take Crimea from Ukraine...

Even if it wanted to, Russia lacks the capability to easily conquer and annex eastern Ukraine, much less the entire country... even if Russia did boast a powerful military machine and an impressive economy, it would still probably prove unable to successfully occupy Ukraine. One need only consider the Soviet and U.S. experiences in Afghanistan, the U.S. experiences in Vietnam and Iraq, and the Russian experience in Chechnya to be reminded that military occupations usually end badly...

"Western leaders have also clung to the provocative policies that precipitated the [Crimea] crisis in the first place. In April [2014], U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden met with Ukrainian legislators and told them, 'This is a second opportunity to make good on the original promise made by the Orange Revolution.' John Brennan, the director of the CIA, did not help things when, that same month, he visited Kiev on a trip the White House said was aimed at improving security cooperation with the Ukrainian government. The EU meanwhile, has continued to push its Eastern Partnership...”

Our international, supposedly democratic leaders may keep us uneducated but have always been aware of Mearsheimer and his well-educated kind. The USA was long forewarned of the crisis they were creating. That implies that poking the Bear was their strategy.

The US-backed Revolution & Victoria Nuland

In 2013, Ukraine’s Euromaidan (pro-Europe) protests saturated the Media. For me, the culmination was in 2015 with ‘Winter on Fire’, one of the favourite documentaries, a powerful testimony to human spirit and collectivity. I cried and cheered watching it. That memory has been tarred. I now know that heroes can also be puppets.

In 2014, as result of the protests, Ukraine’s Russian-leaning government, headed by Viktor Yanukovych, was overthrown. Despite his immense corruption, he had been democratically elected in 2010. The extreme citizen bravery shown during Euromaidan was degraded into a coup by foreign interference.

Robert Parry, the award-winning journalist blacklisted after his articles on the Iran-Contra affair, wrote that:

“…the U.S. government has spread around hundreds of millions of dollars to finance ‘journalism’ organizations, train political activists and support ‘non-governmental organizations’ that promote US policy goals inside targeted countries.

For instance, before the Feb. 22, 2014 coup in Ukraine, there were scores of such operations in the country financed by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), whose budget from Congress exceeds $100 million a year.  But NED, which has been run by neocon Carl Gershman since its founding in 1983, is only part of the picture. You have other propaganda fronts operating under the umbrella of the State Department and USAID…

USAID, working with billionaire George Soros’s Open Society, also funds the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, which engages in ‘investigative journalism’ that usually goes after governments that have fallen into disfavour with the United States and then are singled out for accusations of corruption…

The larger danger from this perversion of journalism is that it sets the stage for ‘regime changes’ that destabilize whole countries, thwart real democracy, and engender civil warfare. Today’s neoconservative dream of mounting a ‘regime change’ in Moscow is particularly dangerous to the future of both Russia and the world.”

Putin having a point about the USA’s nefarious involvement in the Ukraine is best exampled by Victoria Nuland. She was the USA’s main liaison to Ukraine during that period and remains their go-to figure. Awkwardly, her husband was a primary figure pushing for the invasion of Iraq.

For my convenience, I’m going to liberally extract excerpts from Wikipedia. You can go there to find supporting links.

• “From 1993 to 1996, during Bill Clinton's presidency, Nuland was deputy director for former Soviet Union affairs.

• From 2003 to 2005, Nuland served as the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney,” a period that included the Iraq War.

• From 2005 to 2008, during President George W. Bush's second term, Nuland served as U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Brussels, where she concentrated on mobilizing European support for the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.

• In the summer of 2011, Nuland became special envoy for Conventional Armed Forces in Europe and then became State Department spokesperson.”

• In May 2013, Nuland became “Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. She managed diplomatic relations with 50 countries in Europe and Eurasia, as well as with NATO, the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.”

Her credentials suggest that she is, foremost, an American agent against Russia, rather than a helper of Ukraine whose corrupt government she publicly complained about.

So that American interference is abundantly clear, I’m quoting Wiki’s summary again:

“On February 4, 2014, a recording of a phone call between Nuland and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, on January 28, 2014, was published on YouTube.

In their phone conversation, Nuland and Pyatt discussed who should join a unity government that they had agreed to with the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Nuland notified Pyatt that after the review of the three opposition candidates for the post of Prime Minister of Ukraine, the US State Department had selected Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

Nuland told Pyatt that the next step should be to set up a telephone conversation between her and the three Ukrainian candidates. Pyatt agreed: ‘I think you reaching out directly to him helps with the personality management among the three and it gives you also a chance to move fast on all this stuff and put us behind it’.

They also discussed that the EU would not commit to mediate, with Nuland adding ‘Fuck the EU.’”

I have included a link to the BBC where the transcript of that telephone exchange can be read in full.

Nuland’s dissatisfaction was the result of the EU favouring a different candidate but, overall, the EU and the USA are on the same side. So, it wasn’t ironic that President Yanukovych had incurred American displeasure by rejecting an EU trade deal that favoured the EU. Instead, he’d accepted a bailout from Russia.

During that turbulent period which toppled Yanukovych, Nuland established loan guarantees to Ukraine, and promoted the delivery of defensive weapons.

As planned, Yatsenyuk became Prime Minister of Ukraine on February 27, 2014, and the EU deal, to Ukraine’s loss, was approved. And the result is the 14,000 dead from the civil war in Eastern Ukraine.

The US has sent billions of dollars of weaponry to Ukraine. The assured winner, as always, is the US military industrial complex.  

Recently, the Daily Express referred to a 2015 interview with Putin who pointed out that the USA's military budget was greater than the rest of the world combined, that the "aggregate military spending of NATO countries is ten times higher than that of the Russian Federation," and that whilst Russia had hardly any overseas military bases, America had many. "[Putin] argued that Russia had demilitarised both domestically and abroad, but that NATO was forever increasing its presence and encircling Russia, and that it was the US and NATO that the world ought to fear."

Ukraine isn’t an angel. The Media has feathered Ukraine’s image instead of acknowledging that it retained its Soviet characteristic as militaristic. It has its own military industrial complex, employing approximately 1 million people. Ukroboronprom, a state entity, acts as a conglomerate. It makes aircrafts, ships and firearms.

Ukraine was the 4th biggest supporter of arms, with Saudi Arabia and Turkey among its customers. But Russia’s occupation of Crimea and its civil war in the east, made it focus internally. It’s remarkable resistance to the Russian invasion isn’t based on guts alone.

A must-read 2021 article in Salon painted a stark warning when President Biden nominated Nuland as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs:

“Who is Victoria Nuland? A really bad idea as a key player in Biden's foreign policy team. A Cold War true believer who sabotaged Obama's foreign policy, Nuland is a huge risk at the State Department… She calls for ‘permanent bases along NATO's eastern border.’ We have pored over a map of Europe, but we can't find a country called NATO with any borders at all.”

The warning of Salon and others was ignored. Nuland, the neo-liberal insider, got the job. Disingenuously, she’s now a primary dealmaker in this mess. For example, on 22 March 2022, she met the Indian delegation whom the US hopes to sway away from Russia. As mentioned in the previous episode, ‘Does South Africa love Russia more than Ukraine?’, India is engaged in an incredible balancing act.

Nuland’s balancing act is less admirable.

A Western Media propaganda campaign has ironically sought to discredit Ukraine's biological labs as fake news. However, Victoria Nuland, the American state official most connected to Ukraine, has admitted that they exist.

Glenn Greenwald is an investigative reporter most famous for interview with Edward Snowden, as featured in the ‘Citizen 4’ documentary. He recently published an important article from which, may he forgive me, I liberally quote:

"The neocon official long, in charge of U.S. policy in Ukraine, testified on Monday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and strongly suggested that such claims are, at least in part, true.

Senator Marco Rubio, hoping to debunk growing claims that there are chemical weapons labs in Ukraine, smugly asked Nuland: 'Does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?'

Rubio undoubtedly expected a flat denial by Nuland, thus providing 'proof' that such speculation is dastardly Fake News emanating from the Kremlin, the CCP and QAnon.

Instead, Nuland did something completely uncharacteristic for her: for some reason, she told a version of the truth. Her answer visibly stunned Rubio, who–as soon as he realized the damage she was doing to the U.S. messaging campaign, demanded that she instead affirm that if a biological attack were to occur, everyone should be '100% sure' that it was Russia who did it. Grateful for the life raft, Nuland told Rubio he was right.

But Rubio’s clean-up act came too late. When asked whether Ukraine possesses 'chemical or biological weapons,' Nuland did not deny this: at all. She instead–with palpable pen-twirling discomfort and in halting speech, a glaring contrast to her normally cocky style, acknowledged: “Uh, Ukraine has, uh, biological research facilities.”

Any hope to depict such “facilities” as benign or banal was immediately destroyed by the warning she quickly added: 'We are now in fact quite concerned that Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to, uh, gain control of [those labs], so we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach.'

What is in those Ukrainian biological labs that make them so worrisome and dangerous? And has Ukraine, not exactly known for being a great power with advanced biological research, had the assistance of any other countries in developing those dangerous substances?

.... It was Nuland herself, while working for Hillary Clinton and John Kerry’s State Department under President Obama, who was heavily involved in what some call the 2014 revolution and others call the 'coup' that resulted in a change of government in Ukraine from a Moscow-friendly regime to one far more favorable to the EU and the West. All of this took place as the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid $50,000 per month not to the son of a Ukrainian official but to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter: a reflection of who wielded real power inside Ukraine."

Whataboutism

Looking through the eyes of an opponent is the foundation of fair criticism.

The USA and Russia were long involved in a Cold War. Unlike the USA, an ocean away, the US fought its proxy war on Russia’s border.

Instead of disbanding after the Cold War ended, NATO expanded up until the new border of a smaller Russia.

The USA, although not a European country, has always been, in effect, the leader of NATO. It participated with Poland, Hungary, and Romania in nuclear war drills which means pointing nuclear warheads at Russia, a mere 10-15min flight away.

Putin has long expressed that NATO’s expansion is a threat to Russia’s security, and thus unacceptable. An example of this is his speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference.

During Putin’s reign, between 2002 and 2020, the US renounced the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and the Open Skies Treaty.

Russian fear is understandable.

Hypotheticals are useful towards understanding. It’s what been tagged as “whataboutism” on social media.

Asking if the USA would be upset if a Russia/China military alliance pointed missiles at them from Canada and Mexico is appropriate. Media backlash to the example, or similar examples, is propaganda.

But we don’t need a hypothetical to know what would happen. We had the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The Soviet Union deployed ballistic missiles to Cuba in response to American deployments of missiles in Turkey and Italy. The result was almost World War 3 (WW3). Thankfully, President John F. Kennedy ignored his hawkish advisors, choosing to communicate with Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev.

Diplomacy worked. And it might also have worked for Ukraine if Biden had met Putin.

The Semantics of War

There’s been so much talk about America and NATO should not do so as to avoid WW3, but it’s all the bollocks of semantics.

For example, let me use the United Kingdom (UK), the USA’s greatest Toadwart. On 24 March 2022, it revealed that it’ll provide Ukraine with 6,000 missiles. That includes 3,000 anti-tank weapons joining 4,000 already sent. I expect that they’ll have been subsidised by the British taxpayer.

Undoubtedly, an American, French, German, Polish or British missile used by a Ukrainian soldier does more damage than an American soldier with a rifle. And the UK’s decision to pay Ukrainian soldiers will, in effect, turn them into mercenaries for NATO.

And destroying Russia’s economy is an act of war.

Who Benefits from the Russian/Ukrainian War?

The West deliberately chose to walk in the opposite direction of peace whilst labelling Russia as the villain in the scenario they had painted. Consequently, Ukraine is being destroyed and the global economy destabilised.

The logical sum of facts is that the USA, using NATO as its proxy, enacted a strategy of aggravation that has produced a result. It’s the law of humans that there’s benefit in the suffering of others. American contractors and weapons manufacturers must be smiling as Ukrainians are dying.

Of course, there’s more money to be made if the Russian people topple Putin but what if they don’t, or if don’t do it quickly? We’d have what we have now, Putin fighting for survival, absolutely willing to escalate.

My fear became true when the invasion reached Mariupol.

I’m Mike Hampton, This was essay #3 in the series ‘Putin Isn't the Only Monster in Ukraine’. In essay #4, I’ll explain why, no matter what happens, Ukraine has lost the war.