At no time, including the Cuban missile crisis, have we stood closer to the precipice of nuclear war.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the arms industry that depends on it for billions in profits, has become the most aggressive and dangerous military alliance on the planet. Created in 1949 to thwart Soviet expansion into Eastern and Central Europe, it has evolved into a global war machine in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America Africa and Asia.

NATO expanded its footprint, violating promises to Moscow, once the Cold War ended, to incorporate 14 countries in Eastern and Central Europe into the alliance. It will soon add Finland and Sweden. It bombed Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo. It launched wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, resulting in close to a million deaths and some 38 million people driven from their homes.

It is building a military footprint in Africa and Asia. It invited Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, the so-called Asia Pacific Four, to its recent summit in Madrid at the end of June. It has expanded its reach into the Southern Hemisphere, signing a military training partnership agreement with Colombia, in December 2021. It has backed Turkey, with NATO’s second largest military, which has illegally invaded and occupied parts of Syria as well as Iraq.

Turkish-backed militias are engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Syrian Kurds and other inhabitants of north and east Syria. The Turkish military has been accused of war crimes — including multiple airstrikes against a refugee camp and chemical weapons use —in northern Iraq. In exchange for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s permission for Finland and Sweden to join the alliance, the two Nordic countries have agreed to expand their domestic terror laws making it easier to crack down on Kurdish and other activists, lift their restrictions on selling arms to Turkey and deny support to the Kurdish-led movement for democratic autonomy in Syria.

It is quite a record for a military alliance that with the collapse of the Soviet Union was rendered obsolete and should have been dismantled. NATO and the militarists had no intention of embracing the “peace dividend,” fostering a world based on diplomacy, a respect of spheres of influence and mutual cooperation. It was determined to stay in business. Its business is war. That meant expanding its war machine far beyond the border of Europe and engaging in ceaseless antagonism toward China and Russia.

NATO sees the future, as detailed in its “NATO 2030: Unified for a New Era,” as a battle for hegemony with rival states, especially China, and calls for the preparation of prolonged global conflict. “China has an increasingly global strategic agenda, supported by its economic and military heft,” the NATO 2030 initiative warned.

“It has proven its willingness to use force against its neighbors, as well as economic coercion and intimidatory diplomacy well beyond the Indo-Pacific region. Over the coming decade, China will likely also challenge NATO’s ability to build collective resilience, safeguard critical infrastructure, address new and emerging technologies such as 5G and protect sensitive sectors of the economy including supply chains. Longer term, China is increasingly likely to project military power globally, including potentially in the Euro-Atlantic area.”

Spurned Cold War Strategy

The alliance has spurned the Cold War strategy that made sure Washington was closer to Moscow and Beijing than Moscow and Beijing were to each other. U.S. and NATO antagonism have turned Russia and China into close allies.

Russia, rich in natural resources, including energy, minerals and grains, and China, a manufacturing and technological behemoth, are a potent combination. NATO no longer distinguishes between the two, announcing in its most recent mission statement that the “deepening strategic partnership” between Russian and China has resulted in “mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order that run counter to our values and interests.”

On July 6, Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, and Ken McCallum, director general of Britain’s MI5, held a joint news conference in London to announce that China was the “biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security.” They accused China, like Russia, of interfering in U.S. and U.K. elections. Wray warned the business leaders they addressed that the Chinese government was “set on stealing your technology, whatever it is that makes your industry tick, and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market.”

[b]This inflammatory rhetoric presages an ominous future. One cannot talk about war without talking about markets. The political and social turmoil in the U.S., coupled with its diminishing economic power, has led it to embrace NATO and its war machine as the antidote to its decline. [/b]Washington and its European allies are terrified of China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) meant to connect an economic bloc of roughly 70 nations outside U.S. control.

The initiative includes the construction of rail lines, roads and gas pipelines that will be integrated with Russia. Beijing is expected to commit $1.3 trillion to the BRI by 2027. China, which is on track to become the world’s largest economy within a decade, has organized the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the world’s largest trade pact of 15 East Asian and Pacific nations representing 30 percent of global trade. It already accounts for 28.7 percent of the Global Manufacturing Output, nearly double the 16.8 percent of the U.S.

China’s rate of growth last year was an impressive 8.1 percent, although slowing to around 5 percent this year. By contrast, the U.S.’s growth rate in 2021 was 5.7 percent — its highest since 1984 — but is predicted to fall below 1 percent this year, by the New York Federal Reserve.

If China, Russia, Iran, India and other nations free themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network financial institutions use to send and receive information such as money transfer instructions, it will trigger a dramatic decline in the value of the dollar and a financial collapse in the U.S.

The huge military expenditures, which have driven the U.S. debt to $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the U.S.’s entire GDP, will become untenable. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. The U.S. spent more on the military in 2021, $801 billion which amounted to 38 percent of total world expenditure on the military, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

The loss of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency will force the U.S. to slash spending, shutter many of its 800 military bases overseas and cope with the inevitable social and political upheavals triggered by economic collapse. It is darkly ironic that NATO has accelerated this possibility.

Russia, in the eyes of NATO and U.S. strategists, is the appetizer. Its military, NATO hopes, will get bogged down and degraded in Ukraine. Sanctions and diplomatic isolation, the plan goes, will thrust Vladimir Putin from power. A client regime that will do U.S. bidding will be installed in Moscow. NATO has provided more than $8 billion in military aid to Ukraine, while the US has committed nearly $54 billion in military and humanitarian assistance to the country. China, however, is the main course. Unable to compete economically, the U.S. and NATO have turned to the blunt instrument of war to cripple their global competitor.

Provocation of China

The provocation of China replicates the NATO baiting of Russia. NATO expansion and the 2014 U.S.-backed coup in Kiev led Russia to first occupy Crimea, in eastern Ukraine, with its large ethnic Russian population, and then to invade all of Ukraine to thwart the country’s efforts to join NATO.

The same dance of death is being played with China over Taiwan, which China considers part of Chinese territory, and with NATO expansion in the Asia Pacific. China flies warplanes into Taiwan’s air defense zone and the U.S. sends naval shipsthrough the Taiwan Strait which connects the South and East China seas.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken in May called China the most serious long-term challenge to the international order, citing its claims to Taiwan and efforts to dominate the South China Sea. Taiwan’s president, in a Zelensky-like publicity stunt, recently posed with an anti-tank rocket launcher in a government handout photo.

The conflict in Ukraine has been a bonanza for the arms industry, which, given the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, needed a new conflict. Lockheed Martin’s stock prices are up 12 percent. Northrop Grumman is up 20 percent. The war is being used by NATO to increase its military presence in Eastern and Central Europe. The U.S. is building a permanent military base in Poland. The 40,000-strong NATO reaction force is being expanded to 300,000 troops. Billions of dollars in weapons are pouring into the region.

The conflict with Russia, however, is already backfiring. The ruble has soared to a seven-year high against the dollar. Europe is barreling towards a recession because of rising oil and gas prices and the fear that Russia could terminate supplies completely. The loss of Russian wheat, fertilizer, gas and oil, due to Western sanctions, is creating havoc in world markets and a humanitarian crisis in Africa and the Middle East. Soaring food and energy prices, along with shortages and crippling inflation, bring with them not only deprivation and hunger, but social upheaval and political instability. The climate emergency, the real existential threat, is being ignored to appease the gods of war.

Threat of Nuclear War

The war makers are frighteningly cavalier about the threat of nuclear war. Putin warned NATO countries that they “will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history” if they intervened directly in Ukraine and ordered Russian nuclear forces to be put on heightened alert status.

The proximity to Russia of U.S. nuclear weapons based in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Turkey mean that any nuclear conflict would obliterate much of Europe. Russia and the United States control about 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, with around 4,000 warheads each in their military stockpiles, according to the Federation of American Scientists.

U.S. President Joe Biden warned that the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would be “completely unacceptable” and “entail severe consequences,” without spelling out what those consequences would be. This is what U.S. strategists refer to as “deliberate ambiguity.”

The U.S. military, following its fiascos in the Middle East, has shifted its focus from fighting terrorism and asymmetrical warfare to confronting China and Russia. President Barack Obama’s national-security team in 2016 carried out a war game in which Russia invaded a NATO country in the Baltics and used a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon against NATO forces. Obama officials were split about how to respond.

“The National Security Council’s so-called Principals Committee — including Cabinet officers and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — decided that the United States had no choice but to retaliate with nuclear weapons,” Eric Schlosser writes in The Atlantic.

“Any other type of response, the committee argued, would show a lack of resolve, damage American credibility, and weaken the NATO alliance. Choosing a suitable nuclear target proved difficult, however. Hitting Russia’s invading force would kill innocent civilians in a NATO country. Striking targets inside Russia might escalate the conflict to an all-out nuclear war. In the end, the NSC Principals Committee recommended a nuclear attack on Belarus — a nation that had played no role whatsoever in the invasion of the NATO ally but had the misfortune of being a Russian ally.”

The Biden administration has formed a Tiger Team of national security officials to run war games on what to do if Russia uses a nuclear weapon, according to The New York Times. The threat of nuclear war is minimized with discussions of “tactical nuclear weapons,” as if less powerful nuclear explosions are somehow more acceptable and won’t lead to the use of bigger bombs.

At no time, including the Cuban missile crisis, have we stood closer to the precipice of nuclear war.

“A simulation devised by experts at Princeton University starts with Moscow firing a nuclear warning shot; NATO responds with a small strike, and the ensuing war yieldsmore than 90 million casualties in its first few hours,” The New York Times reported.

The longer the war in Ukraine continues — and the U.S. and NATO seem determined to funnel billions of dollars of weapons into the conflict for months if not years — the more the unthinkable becomes thinkable. Flirting with Armageddon to profit the arms industry and carry out the futile quest to reclaim U.S. global hegemony is at best extremely reckless and at worst genocidal.

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/07/11/chris-hedges-nato-most-dangerous-military-alliance-on-planet/

Why doesn't Russia simply join NATO and let's be done with it

PoliteActivist:
Why doesn't Russia simply join NATO and let's be done with it

because the main goal of NATO is to destroy any potential threat to Westerner's hegemony.
And Russia is one of the TOP potential threat. Whatever Putin o another Russian leader does
the West accept Russia in NARTO.

Nuclear war no be moin-moin. Person wey no buy, go join pay. God forbid an all-out nuclear conflict

PoliteActivist:
Why doesn't Russia simply join NATO and let's be done with it

they have applied before they were not accepted and that's when they got to know they're the target for and reason for NATO existence

Fact is both Russia and Nato are afraid of nuclear war but nato are more scared cos they've got bigger stakes, and Russia has the biggest nuclear bomb test ever. Much bigger than Hiroshima (the tsar Bomba) the video footage is on YouTube. Also note the bomb capacity was reduced by 50% for test purpose but yet the damage was beyond even the extra precautive measure.
Nuclear bomb is the only peace guarantee from the US and Nato. Yet they preach against it while dey develop more. They don't want countries to have it so they can apply the Iraq treatment to people who go against them, while also apply the ukrain tactics to nuclear armed countries they don't like..
If Russia had no nukes, they might have just been history today.

PoliteActivist:
Why doesn't Russia simply join NATO and let's be done with it

Russia want to join NATO many times but if Russia joined NATO then NATO have no reason to be alive.
NATO need an enemy to stay relevant.
That’s the reason NATO did not accept Russia and Putin later knew that.
Nato was formed to keep Germans down and Russians out.
If Russia was accepted to Nato then USA will have a base inside Russia, which is against Russia law.
The only country USA have no base in form of NATO is France after French former president kicked out USA and NATO out of France.

jackslow:
they have applied before they were not accepted and that's when they got to know they're the target for and reason for NATO existence

They never applied. In 1954 their foreign minister sort of suggested they join NATO. But that was in 1954. They'd be happily and eagerly welcomed to NATO today

seunny4lif:

Russia want to join NATO many times but if Russia joined NATO then NATO have no reason to be alive.
NATO need an enemy to stay relevant.
That’s the reason NATO did not accept Russia and Putin later knew that.
Nato was formed to keep Germans down and Russians out.
If Russia was accepted to Nato then USA will have a base inside Russia, which is against Russia law.
The only country USA have no base in form of NATO is France after French former president kicked out USA and NATO out of France.

This is not true. Russia has never applied to join NATO. In 1954 their foreign minister sort of suggested they join NATO. But that was in 1954. They'd be happily and eagerly welcomed into NATO today. How many NATO operations have had anything to do with Russia? Even Germany joined NATO

PoliteActivist:


This is not true. Russia has never applied to join NATO. In 1954 their foreign minister sort of suggested they join NATO. But that was in 1954. They'd be happily and eagerly welcomed into NATO today. How many NATO operations have had anything to do with Russia? Even Germany joined NATO

Bro, you don’t know what you are talking about on that bro.
Yeltsin and Putin want Russia to join NATO and immediately Putin became president in 2000, he said to G.Bush.
Germany did not join Nato by will, It was west Germany that joined NATO and they don’t have choice then because there are over 300K USA and UK troops in western Germany because Germany was divided into 2 nations on till until collapsed of Warsaw Pact.
Putin have said it himself and many former president of NATO members have said the same thing but the British government disagree with USA over it.

seunny4lif:


Bro, you don’t know what you are talking about on that bro.
Yeltsin and Putin want Russia to join NATO and immediately Putin became president in 2000, he said to G.Bush.
Germany did not join Nato by will, It was west Germany that joined NATO and they don’t have choice then because there are over 300K USA and UK troops in western Germany because Germany was divided into 2 nations on till until collapsed of Warsaw Pact.
Putin have said it himself and many former president of NATO members have said the same thing but the British government disagree with USA over it.

I stated a fact: Russia has never applied to join NATO. See below

PoliteActivist:


I stated a fact: Russia has never applied to join NATO. See below

Did I said Russia applied?
I said Russia wanted to, which have been stated by even Bush.
There is a different between want to and applied for.

seunny4lif:

Did I said Russia applied?
I said Russia wanted to, which have been stated by even Bush.
There is a different between want to and applied for.

Point is, if Russia applies to join NATO today they'd be happily accepted.
Also, as clearly stated, Russia was never serious about wanting to join NATO like other Warsaw Pact countries

jumper524:
Fact is both Russia and Nato are afraid of nuclear war but nato are more scared cos they've got bigger stakes, and Russia has the biggest nuclear bomb test ever. Much bigger than Hiroshima (the tsar Bomba) the video footage is on YouTube. Also note the bomb capacity was reduced by 50% for test purpose but yet the damage was beyond even the extra precautive measure.
Nuclear bomb is the only peace guarantee from the US and Nato. Yet they preach against it while dey develop more. They don't want countries to have it so they can apply the Iraq treatment to people who go against them, while also apply the ukrain tactics to nuclear armed countries they don't like..
If Russia had no nukes, they might have just been history today.

Nothing like Ukraine tactic because Russia needed this war to redeem it image when Soviet Union fell.


This war is sweet to Russia if you don't know wait till they defeat Ukraine then nato will bow to russia future demands.

ECOMOG na baba abeg. NATO is just hyping.

seunny4lif:

Russia want to join NATO many times but if Russia joined NATO then NATO have no reason to be alive.
NATO need an enemy to stay relevant.
That’s the reason NATO did not accept Russia and Putin later knew that.
Nato was formed to keep Germans down and Russians out.
If Russia was accepted to Nato then USA will have a base inside Russia, which is against Russia law.
The only country USA have no base in form of NATO is France after French former president kicked out USA and NATO out of France.

Russia are not welcomed to NATO as they are strong Advisory to the US. Beside NATO was created for peace sake.

BritishNaija:


Russia are not welcomed to NATO as they are strong Advisory to the US. Beside NATO was created for peace sake.

How many peace has NATO kept since its inception?

BritishNaija:


Russia are not welcomed to NATO as they are strong Advisory to the US. Beside NATO was created for peace sake.

NATO was not created for peace never say so,what member states claim is that it's is a "defensive alliance "

jackslow:
NATO was not created for peace never say so,what member states claim is that it's is a "defensive alliance "

Purpose was to avoid war. If i start to explain it will be long.

BritishNaija:


Purpose was to avoid war. If i start to explain it will be long.

explain ,do you know how many wars they have waged