By Philip Giraldi
The 75th anniversary of the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), hosted by the United States and President Joe Biden, is over, but, in four days, it managed to resoundingly make its case that it is the defender of Western civilization against the cossack and Mongol hordes that are pounding at the gates.
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The Washington Summit Declaration issued by the heads of state and government participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council that appeared on the third day of the confab, July 10, is a lengthy document not recommended for anyone with a weak stomach. It, together with the speakers and “Old Genocide Joe” made the point, without providing any evidence, that there are enemies lurking all around us who want to conquer the entirety of Europe while also crushing the United States.
The Summit Declaration begins with:
We, the heads of state and government of the North Atlantic alliance, have gathered in Washington to celebrate the 75th anniversary of our alliance. Forged to preserve peace, NATO remains the strongest alliance in history. We stand in unity and solidarity in the face of a brutal war of aggression on the European continent and at a critical time for our security. We reaffirm the enduring transatlantic bond between our nations.
NATO remains the unique, essential, and indispensable transatlantic forum to consult, coordinate, and act on all matters related to our individual and collective security. NATO is a defensive alliance. Our commitment to defend one another and every inch of allied territory at all times, as enshrined in Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, is iron-clad.
We will continue to ensure our collective defense against all threats and from all directions, based on a 360-degree approach, to fulfil NATO’s three core tasks of deterrence and defense, crisis prevention and management, and cooperative security. We are bound together by shared values: individual liberty, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law.
We adhere to international law and to the purposes and principles of the charter of the United Nations and are committed to upholding the rules-based international order.
It is not necessary to explore the lengthy document farther, as the rest of it is hogwash and out-and-out lies to support its central thesis. Dissenting opinions were not tolerated in the document, perhaps, not surprisingly, as the central narrative of a perfidious and terroristic Russia and a hegemonic China, working in tandem, are setting out to rule the world. This challenges Joe Biden’s bold claim that he and the U.S.A. run the world. America continues to be the “indispensable nation” and is thus empowered to make up the rules as it goes along.
The Summit Document, for all its assertion of what it believes to be hard truths, nevertheless comes across as something like a fantasy document based on a collective delusion, depicting a world where a group of still-privileged players would like to see it shaped by a “rules based” order, dictated by those who claim to “know better,” toward the lesser folk without the law, who need to be guided in their behavior.
If they do not conform, war by what chooses to define itself as a “defensive alliance” is in the cards. The only problem is the world has shifted on its axis due to the heavy (mostly American) hand that has come down on the miscreants, leading to a walk away from the Bretton Woods dollar dominance that has made the whole control system work and toward a Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) type laissez faire approach to national economic management.
And, as the money and natural resources go, the power to exercise self-determination goes with it. Off in the distance, someone is waving a handkerchief and saying “goodbye NATO. It’s been fun!” Well, no, maybe it really hasn’t been.
I will explain. NATO was formed in 1949 when the Soviet Union had still not fully disarmed from WWII and was occupying large swathes of Eastern Europe. This included East Germany and some of Austria as well as Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia). Given that, there was at least a plausible case to be made for a defensive alliance including most of Western Europe and both the United States and Canada.
The United States was the driver of the process, and it also became the lynchpin of what has euphemistically ever since been called the “free world,” a conceit reenforced by the placement of the United Nations in New York and the adoption of the Bretton Woods agreement which made the dollar the world’s reserve currency.
Interestingly, from 1949 until after the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact was created six years later, NATO was not required to intervene “defensively” against the Soviets and was not even able to intervene effectively in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 or the Alexander Dubcek “Prague Spring” upheaval in Czechoslovakia from 1962 to 1968.
NATO did, however, launch an illegal war against Serbia in March of 1999, ostensibly fought to protect the Kosovars, even though the nominally “Christian” United States and NATO states could not have cared less about the basic human rights of the Kosovar Albanians as most of them were Muslims.
The involvement of NATO in faraway Afghanistan followed using the pretext that the “United States had been attacked” on Sept. 11, 2001, i.e., 9/11. 9/11 also produced the aggression by the United States and its NATO-derived “Coalition of the Willing” against Iraq in the name of bringing human rights and democracy. It instead delivered 4 million refugees, more than 1 million Iraqi deaths, and the complete destruction of much of the country’s infrastructure, just like what is occurring in Gaza today.
There was also NATO’s involvement in the Libyan regime change operation, based on fabricated intelligence, that led to the killing of head of state Muammar Qaddafi in 2011.
Beyond that, there is the question of how the world and NATO should respond to the major human rights atrocities and catastrophes that are occurring today?
If NATO and the United States are given carte blanche to determine what crimes against humanity that impact regionally are worth responding to, and which are not, the entire process of ascertaining fault will become a political rather than a moral exercise. That is precisely what is taking place in Ukraine and Gaza, where the “rules based international order” is actually derived from self-interest, as it is skewed to protect friends and punish competitors.
NATO and the Biden administration are currently banging the war drums hardest over Russia and Ukraine, a war that was completely avoidable even though there is no possibility that Ukraine can actually defeat Russia, in spite of Biden’s pledge. And there is zero chance of Russia seeking to expand its war into Eastern Europe, as it does not have the resources to do so, unless the NATO alliance or Biden does something completely stupid to trigger such an action.
The irony is that there would be no war at all if Ukraine had been allowed to declare political neutrality and granted some autonomy to the Russian-speaking provinces of the country, both of which had been considered and more-or-less agreed to before UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson arrived and compelled President Volodymyr Zelensky to reverse course and take a hard line.
Beyond that, NATO is now considering China to be an emerging over-the-horizon threat, as it is allegedly supplying Moscow with so-called “dual use weapons,” precisely what the West is doing for Ukraine. To be planning how to fight a possible war against two powerful nuclear-armed enemies should be unthinkable, but it is not.
The arming of Ukraine with missiles and intelligence that have enabled Kiev to attack deep into Russia has meant that Moscow now considers itself to be de facto at war with NATO. Vladimir Putin has already declared he will authorize using any weapons Russia has to defend the nation.
Far from being a “defensive alliance” that delivers considerable but costly benefits, the United States and the NATO alliance, together with their de facto allies such as Israel, constitute the real Axis of Evil in the modern world, one that seeks to establish and maintain global dominance. The summit decision to declare that Ukraine is on an “irreversible” path to NATO membership and the establishment of a “Ukraine war coordination center” in Wiesbaden, Germany guarantees hostility that could easily escalate to nuclear war.
As Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies of “Common Dreams” have put it, “NATO leaders should conduct a clear-eyed review of how the organization that claims to be a force for peace keeps escalating unwinnable wars and leaving countries in ruins.”
Indeed, the nations of the world that have, up until now, been observers of the NATO farce should begin exercising “responsibility to protect” and shield themselves from the United States, its allies in NATO, and the apartheid state of Israel.
NATO has outlived its relevance and its 75th anniversary celebration should have instead been a good opportunity to conduct a funeral.
Philip Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer and a columnist and television commentator. He is also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest. Other articles by Giraldi can be found on the website of the Unz Review.
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