PRESS RELEASE
Carden: NATO Worried About Aggression? Better Look at Ukraine!
July 13, 2016 (EIRNS)—James Carden, Executive Editor for the American Committee for East-West Accords, EastWestAccord.com, writing in The Nation, argues that if NATO is really worried about aggression, it is looking in the wrong place.
"Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko," who was front and center at the NATO summit,
"has repeatedly fired indiscriminate Grad rockets on heavily populated civilian areas, a war crime under the Geneva Convention and International Criminal Court protocols. Nevertheless, the principal summit ‘deliverable’ was aimed at placating Poroshenko and his vocal band of alliance supporters (particularly the United States, United Kingdom, Poland and the Baltics)."
"Yet the troop buildup is based upon the faulty, though widely believed, premise that Russia’s assistance to the rebel forces in the breakaway republics of Luhansk and Donetsk is a prelude to even grander designs by the Kremlin,"
Carden writes, adding that, in reality, Russia hardly wants the conflict.
"As the neo-Nazi Speaker of the Ukrainian Rada, Andriy Parubiy, told The Washington Post in February, Putin ‘will proceed until he is stopped by force.’ This idea, repeated ad nauseam by Ukrainian officials, is one without any basis in reality. Yet NATO member states, particularly those along Russia’s borders, have embraced Kiev’s rationale, the better to squeeze the alliance for as much money as possible."
But, Carden reports, there are "cracks in the facade" of NATO unity, including dissenting voices from Italy and Germany.
"Ideally, summit meetings should be a time for truth-telling, and the truth is this: NATO has become an insuperable obstacle toward the formation of what Europe needs most: an inclusive security architecture that takes into the account the national-security interests of all parties on the continent, from Lisbon to Vladivostok,"
Carden concludes.
"Considering NATO’s recent history of military interventions in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001-present), and Libya (2011), Western leaders who race around proclaiming that NATO’s ever-eastward expansion shouldn’t be a problem for the Russians because NATO is merely a ’defensive alliance’ are being willfully and dangerously obtuse."
