George Szamuely, Global Research, September 3, 2022 — NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg recently addressed the Workers Youth League (AUF) summer camp in Utøya, Norway. The AUF is Norway’s largest political youth organization and is affiliated with the Norwegian Labor Party. The AUF summer camp is of course famous for being the scene of the horrific terrorist attack perpetrated by neo-Nazi Anders Breivik in 2011.Stoltenberg said little of note. Nonetheless, his speech was a remarkable demonstration of how little NATO has learned from the dramatic events of this year. A serious military conflict is taking place on the European continent, a conflict that NATO had played a substantial role in triggering through its unwavering insistence on scooping up as many countries in Europe, Central Asia and beyond into its military system, without any regard for the security concerns of others.
The war in Ukraine is moreover the second major conflict to break out on the European continent within the last 25 years. Both of these conflicts are inextricably linked to two NATO commitments: first, to limitless expansion and, second, to the elimination of Russia’s presence and influence from Western Europe once and for all. The war in Ukraine was triggered by the first commitment; the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia by the second.
Bombing of Yugoslavia down the memory hole
Stoltenberg is of course cheerfully oblivious to any of this. At one point during his speech, he even had the insolence to say of the fighting in Ukraine:
We are seeing acts of war, attacks on civilians and destruction not seen since World War II. We cannot be indifferent to this.
Not “seen since World War II”? Stoltenberg, like most official front-men for NATOLand, has evidently forgotten the 11-week bombing campaign that NATO waged against Yugoslavia, the first bombing attacks on major European cities since Hitler.
Some of NATO’s atrocities include:
- a daytime attack on a passenger train crossing the railway bridge over the Južna Morava river at Grdelica gorge, killing 14;
- the attack on the column of displaced civilians over a 12-mile stretch of road between Djakoviča and Decani in western Kosovo, killing 73;
- the attack on the Belgrade headquarters of Radio Television of Serbia, killing 16;
- the attack on a residential area in the southern town of Surdulica in southeastern Serbia, killing 16;
- the destruction of a passenger bus on Lužane bridge in Kosovo, killing at least 23;
- the daytime cluster bombing of the market in Niš, killing 15;
- the bombing of the Kosovo Albanian village of Koriša, killing 87;
- the attack on the Dragiša Mišović hospital in Belgrade, killing three;
- the attack on the bridge in Varvarin in south-central Serbia, killing three;
- the bombing of a sanatorium and a nearby old people’s home in Surdilica, killing 17;
- the attack on an apartment building in Novi Pazar in southwest Serbia, killing 10.
The list can easily be extended. The point is that NATO continues to live in its own delusional world in which a 30-country-strong military alliance, armed with nuclear weapons, is purely “defensive” and wouldn’t in a million years dream of hurting a fly.
Countries “can choose their own path”
The Invasion of Libya
NATO also used military force in 2011 when it launched an “unprovoked” bombing attack on Libya in order to get rid of independent-minded Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi—long a thorn in the side of the West.
There was some ludicrous talk at the time emanating from NATO and NATO governments that only a prolonged bombing campaign could save the residents of Benghazi from “genocide.”
A subsequent U.K. House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee report, “Libya: Examination of Intervention and Collapse and the U.K.’s Future Policy Options,” ridiculed the assertions NATO made in order to justify its attack:
Despite his rhetoric, the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence. The Gaddafi regime had retaken towns from the rebels without attacking civilians in early February 2011….More widely, Muammar Gaddafi’s 40-year record of appalling human rights abuses did not include large-scale attacks on Libyan civilians.
Stoltenberg, protected by an obsequious NATO press corps, can rest easy that he will never be confronted with such unpleasant facts. The rest of Stoltenberg’s claims were standard Western cliches. “World order we believe in”? Who’s the “we”? The “we” obviously don’t include most of the countries of the world, the ones who have pointedly refused to join in the Western sanctions campaign against Russia.
As for countries’ right to choose “their own path,” that in NATO parlance only applies to countries that choose the path laid down by NATO. Serbia certainly didn’t enjoy that right in the 1990s. The most truthful explanation for NATO’s extraordinary hostility toward Yugoslavia during that decade, a hostility that culminated in a brutal bombing campaign, came straight from the horse’s mouth. John Norris, former communications director to Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state during the Clinton administration, wrote in his book, Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo (2005):
It was Yugoslavia’s resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform—not the plight of Kosovar Albanians—that best explains NATO’s war. Milošević had been a burr in the side of the transatlantic community for so long that the United States felt that he would only respond to military pressure. Slobodan Milošević’s repeated transgressions ran directly counter to the vision of a Europe “whole and free,” and challenged the very value of NATO’s continued existence….It was precisely because Milošević had been so adroit at outmaneuvering the West that NATO came to view the ever-escalating use of force as its only option….NATO went to war in Kosovo because its political and diplomatic leaders had [sic] enough of Milošević and saw his actions disrupting plans to bring a wider stable of nations into the transatlantic community
There it is: nothing to do with Kosovo, and everything to do with resistance to NATO/E.U. takeover of every piece of real estate in Europe. The Serbia of today, incidentally, has no more of a right to choose its own path than the Serbia of the 1990s had. Serbian political leaders, including Serbian President Alexander Vučić, have repeatedly spoken out about the pressure they have been subjected to by the NATO powers in order to get them to agree to imposing sanctions against their longstanding friend and ally, Russia. Doubtless, had Qaddafi not been murdered during NATO’s 2011 bombing campaign, he too could today adumbrate in some detail on the issue of Libya’s right to choose its own path.
In any case, an unconditional right to join NATO—the right to choose one’s own path—has never been considered the fundamental determinant of national sovereignty. There is no article in the U.N. Charter that says that every U.N. member-state has the right to join any military alliance it wants without regard to the security concerns of other U.N. member-states. It is certainly not a right that the United States recognizes, as evidenced by its recent furious response to the news that the Solomon Islands (nowhere near physically to the United States) had signed a security agreement with China, which might lead to China’s building a military base on the islands.
NATO’s dangerous delusions
What’s particularly irksome about Stoltenberg is not his clichés, but his dangerous delusions, not to mention his deceitfulness. Consider again his statement about “attacks on civilians and destruction not seen since World War II.” According to Stoltenberg,
At the NATO summit in Madrid just over a month ago, all NATO countries agreed that we will support them [Ukraine] as long as necessary. We have a moral responsibility to support them. They are an independent country, with over 40 million people, who are unjustifiably subject to a brutal war of aggression. We are seeing acts of war, attacks on civilians and destruction not seen since World War II. We cannot be indifferent to this.
This statement makes it sound as if NATO got involved in Ukraine—rushed to help Ukraine—in response to Russia’s actions. NATO, Stoltenberg will have you believe, was minding its own business when Russia launched its attack, and NATO, in accordance with its “values” and humanitarian intent, had no choice but to get involved and help Ukraine defend itself from an “unprovoked”—the favored word of NATO propagandists—attack.
Not only is this untrue, but Stoltenberg himself has innumerable times admitted that this is untrue. NATO, Stoltenberg has insisted time and again, has been arming and training the armed forces of Ukraine since at least 2014.
On June 27, at a NATO pre-summit press conference in Madrid, Stoltenberg disclosed that
NATO and Allies have provided substantial support to Ukraine since Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. Including with military and financial aid. And training for tens of thousands of Ukrainian forces.
The following day, on June 28, during a Dialogue on Climate and Security at a NATO Public Forum, Stoltenberg boasted:
NATO Allies have supported Ukraine since 2014. We didn’t wake up in February 2022….The Ukrainian Armed Forces are much better equipped, much better trained, much larger, much better commanded in 2022 than in 2014. Not least because of the support, the training, the equipment they have received for many years from the NATO allied countries. It’s first and foremost the bravery, the courage of Ukrainians that have enabled to stand up against the brutal Russian invasion. But the support they have achieved from 2014 and onwards has of course, also been key.
“NATO Allies and NATO have been there since 2014—trained, equipped and supported the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Stoltenberg told the European Parliament on July 13.
The NATO-Ukraine scheme
In other words, Stoltenberg has without prodding confirmed what the Russians have been claiming for years. NATO was turning Ukraine into an armed, hostile military base on Russia’s border, at a time when not only Ukraine was supposed to be implementing the 2015 Minsk agreement, but key NATO powers Germany and France were supposed to be ensuring that Ukraine was indeed implementing that agreement. The Minsk agreements, signed by the Kiev government and the representatives of the people of the Donbass, provided for the gradual reintegration of the Donbass into Ukraine. As part of the step-by-step process of reintegration, the Ukraine constitution would be changed in order to grant certain areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk a “special status.”
None of that ever took place, as the Russians repeatedly pointed out. Indeed, former Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko, who signed the Minsk agreements on behalf of Ukraine, recently admitted that he never had the slightest intention of fulfilling the terms of the Minsk agreements. His goal in signing the agreement had been to buy time to enable Ukraine to build a “powerful military.” “What is the result of the Minsk agreement?” he asked. “We win eight years to create an army. We win eight years to restore economy.”
NATO, as Stoltenberg admits, happily played right along with the Ukraine government’s scheme of pretending to be interested in implementing Minsk while in reality preparing for war. Also playing along with this theater were the NATO powers—Germany, France and the United States in particularly—who were piously pretending to be anxious to implement Minsk while sternly condemning Russia (which was not a party to Minsk—like France and Germany, it was a guarantor) for its supposed failure to implement Minsk. Throughout those eight years, the same NATO powers continued to arm Ukraine, while tacitly and not so tacitly encouraging it to prepare to resolve the problem of the Donbass by force (in clear violation of Minsk). And, as NATO well knew, there was no way Russia would stand by passively in the event of an armed attack by the Kiev government against the ethic Russians of the Donbass. In other words, for eight years NATO prepared Ukraine for war against Russia, which it knew was coming.
Not only was NATO encouraging Ukraine to resolve its Donbass problem by force, NATO was seeking to get Ukraine into the alliance. NATO pursued this goal single-mindedly. The issue of whether whether Ukraine would become a de jure or a de facto NATO member was secondary. What mattered was the blow that Ukraine’s induction into NATO would inflict on Russia’s Great Power pretensions. NATO had clearly taken on board the thinking of former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski who, in his classic The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997) had explained the importance of Ukraine to any hope Russia might have to remain a Great Power:
Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state, more likely to be drawn into debilitating conflicts with aroused Central Asians, who would then be resentful of the loss of their recent independence and would be supported by their fellow Islamic states to the south. China would also be likely to oppose any restoration of Russian domination over Central Asia, given its increasing interest in the newly independent states there. However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as its access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.
That’s precisely why Ukraine was so important to NATO, and why NATO pledged that Ukraine (and Georgia) would become members at the 2008 Bucharest summit, and why NATO has repeated the pledge ever since, including even at the Madrid summit in June. The problem was that neither Ukraine nor Georgia remotely qualified for NATO membership—and NATO well knew it. The issue wasn’t corruption or lack of democracy—NATO has had plenty of experience over the years of overlooking such peccadilloes. The problem was that in order to qualify for NATO membership, an aspiring country had to have settled any and all outstanding conflicts on its territory—and exclusively by peaceful means. According to NATO’s own study on enlargement, published in 1995,
States which have ethnic disputes or external territorial disputes, including irredentist claims, or internal jurisdictional disputes must settle those disputes by peaceful means in accordance with OSCE principles. Resolution of such disputes would be a factor in determining whether to invite a state to join the Alliance.
According to NATO’s Membership Action Plan, any NATO aspirants had to commit
to settle their international disputes by peaceful means [and] to settle ethnic disputes or external territorial disputes including irredentist claims or internal jurisdictional disputes by peaceful means in accordance with OSCE principles and to pursue good neighbourly relations.
These were NATO’s own rules, and they obviously precluded Georgia from membership at the time NATO made its fateful declaration in Bucharest that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO.” Georgia was involved in two serious conflicts on its territory: in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Within four months of NATO’s Bucharest declaration, war broke out in Georgia as its president, Mikheil Saakashvili, buoyed by NATO’s pledge, sought to resolve his separatist problems with the two breakaway regions once and for all.
Ukraine had the same problem. From 2014 on, and the start of Kiev’s war against the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, Ukraine couldn’t possibly be said to have met NATO’s requirement that aspiring member-states must peacefully settle all territorial and ethnic disputes before their membership can be considered. Nonetheless, NATO continued to repeat, year in and year out, that Ukraine and Georgia will be members of NATO even though neither state was anywhere close to meeting NATO’s own proclaimed requirements.
NATO’s rules of the game
Stoltenberg is convinced, as are probably most NATO country leaders, that the rules of the game that NATO sets are rules that everybody else is obligated to accept and to follow. NATO, according to Western leaders, can deliver any amount of lethal military hardware to Ukraine, provide military training to Ukraine, provide intelligence to Ukraine for purposes of targeting Russians and their allies, be actively involved in all aspects of Ukraine’s military targeting decisions, and yet somehow not be a party to the conflict. NATO’s casuistry is as laughable as it is foolish.
In his summer camp address, Stoltenberg declared, “In this conflict, NATO has two tasks. Support Ukraine. And prevent the conflict from spreading into a full-scale war between NATO and Russia.” A simple-minded observer might conclude that the two tasks are mutually incompatible. The more you help Ukraine, the more likely does “a full-scale war between NATO and Russia” become. The more NATO identifies Ukraine’s cause as its own, the more likely it is that Russia will target NATO as a combatant. Not in the bizarro world that Stoltenberg inhabits:
The second task of NATO is to prevent the war from spreading. We do that both by not being a party to the war—we are not entering Ukraine with troops. We also do it by showing clearly that an attack on a NATO country will trigger a response from the whole of NATO.
So, here then is the NATO conceit: NATO is not a “party to the war” because NATO has no “troops” in Ukraine. Yes, it’s true that NATO countries have provided Ukraine with extraordinary quantities of weaponry worth billions of dollars: shoulder-fired MANPAD systems, Harpoon anti-ship missiles, anti-aircraft missiles, Stinger missiles, tanks, armored personnel carriers, attack helicopters, howitzers, multiple-launch rocket systems, High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, drones and anti-tank missiles, to name but a few. Yes, it’s also true that NATO countries, particularly the United States, have provided tactical intelligence to Ukraine enabling it to target and kill Russians. Not to worry though, Stoltenberg reassures us, because there are no NATO “troops” on the ground in Ukraine. So, NATO is essentially a bystander—not a combatant at all.
Stoltenberg’s sophistry
Stoltenberg has been engaging in this deceptive sophistry for months now, and thereby seriously misleading the public as to the serious risk NATO is running of provoking an armed confrontation with a nuclear superpower. Stoltenberg’s reasoning is delusional on many levels. First of all, we have to take his word for it that there are no NATO “troops” in Ukraine. We know that there are NATO military advisers and trainers in Ukraine. We don’t know how many, but the number is likely to be fairly substantial. The United States involvement in Vietnam also started with advisers and trainers—U.S. military personnel, in other words. The idea that the U.S. was not a party to the conflict in Vietnam until LBJ ordered full-scale military deployment would have been regarded as too absurd to say with a straight face back in the early 1960s.
Stoltenberg evidently expects everyone in the world—and particularly the Russians—to accept the rules of the game as he has defined them: Because there are supposedly no NATO “troops” on the ground in Ukraine, NATO is not a combatant in Ukraine. This rule, in Stoltenberg’s thinking, leads to a second rule: Since NATO is not a combatant in Ukraine, then any attack by Russia on a NATO power, peacefully and defensively, engaged in the delivery of military hardware to Ukraine, would be regarded by NATO as an act of unprovoked aggression against a member-state. And, of course, according to NATO’s self-proclaimed rules, an act of unprovoked aggression against one is an act of unprovoked aggression against all. One for all, and all for one!
This is the frightening and delusional logic that drives NATO toward the edge of the cliff. In helping Ukraine fight Russia, NATO argues, it is only helping Ukraine defend itself. This of course is wholly untrue. As we have seen, Stoltenberg has numerous times admitted that NATO has been actively involved in the financing, arming and training of Ukraine’s forces. At NATO’s Madrid summit, he touted NATO’s delivery of extraordinary quantities of arms to Ukraine as demonstration of the alliance’s long-standing commitment to the country:
All of this is making a difference on the battlefield every day. And since the invasion in February, Allies have stepped up even more. With billions of euros’ worth of military, financial, and humanitarian assistance.
In other words, what NATO has been doing since February of this year has been a continuation of what it had been doing since 2014. NATO did not join the fray in response in February; NATO has been there for at least eight years, pouring in weaponry, ignoring repeated Russian warnings about “red lines” and provoking the inevitable Russian retaliation against the ever-expanding hostile armed camp on its border.
NATO was anything but a disinterested observer that responded in shock in February with a desperate desire to do something to help a plucky little country. Yet NATO needs to maintain this absurd fiction in order to be able to maintain in public the line that Russia’s attack was “unprovoked.” As NATO will have it, Russia’s launch of what it called “special military operations” in Ukraine was an act of unprovoked aggression—ignoring of course the non-implementation of Minsk by Ukraine and NATO powers France and Germany; NATO’s repeated promises of membership to Ukraine; Ukraine’s brutal eight-year-long war against its own citizens in the Donbass; and NATO’s transformation of Ukraine into, effectively, an armed aircraft carrier directed at Russia. In much the same way, NATO will insist that a Russian attack on a NATO member-state actively engaged in arming Ukraine is also an act of unprovoked aggression.
As we know, according to the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, once a NATO member-state is the victim of an act of unprovoked aggression, then all of NATO goes into action— “One for all, and all for one!” goes the battle-cry. So Russia, Stoltenberg warns menacingly, had better watch out and not strike out at anyone in NATO. Otherwise, Russia will have a full-scale war with all 30 NATO member-states on its hands.