Talk:NATO

Re comments used to remove images... "already overloaded with images,

Hi GreenMeansGo: Re your comments used justify removal of images:

17:53, 3 June 2019‎ GreenMeansGo talk contribs‎ 81,533 bytes -706‎ also we really don't need three images/quotes from trump, there are more countries in NATO than the US, and more US presidents in the history of NATO other than Trump undothank

17:48, 3 June 2019‎ GreenMeansGo talk contribs‎ 80,056 bytes -959‎ -3 more images, well overloaded undothank

17:30, 3 June 2019‎ GreenMeansGo talk contribs‎ 81,015 bytes +676‎ Undo revision 2612137 by Om777om (talk) This is already overloaded with images, to the point where the images continue some 14 inches past the end of the article undothank Tag: Undo

• Please note that there is a very wide range of different views of the same pages depending on machine used (home pc, laptop, tablet, phone, + screen/monitor size, software/web browser used, and the display settings, etc). Please note that while images may have continued some 14 inches past end of article on your machine, you may have been alone, or part of a very small percentage of total viewers obtaining such a view. Considering that this editor is using a very common monitor size, software, web browser and display resolution, along with the fact that page as it appeared on his monitor did NOT extend past the end of the article at all, and that there was actually room for more images at the time you begain removing images, it seems there is a conflict in perceived reality. Maybe you have your text size increased far above the most common average, so you won't have to use a magnifying glass? :-) Perhaps you were not taking such factors into consideration. Please bear all that in mind in your future calculations.
  Cheers & Best wishes Om777om (talk) 20:27, 3 June 2019 (UTC)

Who wrote this article?

The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs? --Spafky (talk) 22:57, 25 May 2022 (UTC)

Sure seems like it, doesn't it?

There was a sock farm active here, all pushing a strident anti-West, pro-Russia, OMG the US is the most awful country on earth POV. Obviously it's not all cleaned up (and the sock farm is still active, running on IPs now). Antandrus (talk) 23:08, 25 May 2022 (UTC)

@Spafky: and @Antandrus: I made a start improving the article, just for the years 2016 to 2019, as well as the usual sock POV-pushing with bolding and image selection. As suggested on my talk page, I put the removed quotes all together here on the talk page, so that others can easily see them and decide if some should go back. (Some quotes in the article I just trimmed to a "quotable" fraction and left in place.) We should also try to find other quotable quotes about NATO from notable people. Thanks for flagging the problems in this article. HouseOfChange (talk) 16:05, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

To quote the policy: 4. Is the author or work from which the quote comes notable? If so, are they very notable, moderately notable, barely notable? Are they notable as a source of quotes (i.e., as a poet, pundit, or Yogi Berra)?
5. Is the quote particularly witty, pithy, wise, eloquent, or poignant? This page, and many others WQ pages lately, are spammed down with long uninteresting quotes, that somebody has written, but nobody would ever bother to quote.

Removing COATRACK pov-pushing with non-notable, non-quotable paragraphs of editorializing

As suggested, I am storing some "quotes" removed from the main page on this page, so that other editors can make up their own minds whether these quotes should be used in either this article or some other article. HouseOfChange (talk) 14:06, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

Also removing COATRACK POV-pushing by image selection. HouseOfChange (talk) 15:08, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

Sites in Kosovo and southern Central Serbia where NATO used munitions with depleted uranium

I will always be there with NATO, but they have to pay their way. I'm fully in favor of NATO, but I don't wanna be taken advantage of. ~President Donald Trump

...it’s the military industrial complex that needs more weapons sales, and the Russians have always been the bogeyman... And even though we had 20 years of peace and tranquility with the Russians, now they are being vilified again... the increase in the number of weapons all the countries are manufacturing and selling, is big business. ~Ann Wright

In reality, NATO, as an aggressive global arm of U.S. and other local affiliated imperialisms, poses a serious threat to global peace and security. ~Edward S. Herman in NATO: the Imperial Pitbull,,

Huge reverence for NATO is matched by how dangerous NATO has become. NATO’s continual expansion -- all the way to Russia’s borders -- has significantly increased the chances that the world’s two nuclear superpowers will get into direct military conflict. ~Norman Solomon

Lockheed Martin has been awarded a $1.14 billion contract for Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems for Poland, Bahrain and Romania... Lockheed Martin... has produced more than 25,000 GMLRS through 2016 for the United States and NATO allies. ~Allen Cone/UPI

NATO claims to strive for collective defence and for the preservation of peace and security. But, NATO has never been such a system. It is the largest military alliance in the world with the largest military spending and nuclear stockpiles. It is both the main driver for a new arms race and the main obstacle to a nuclear weapons-free world. ~ World Beyond War

McCain conveyed the common madness of reverence for NATO -- and the common intolerance for anything that might approach a rational debate on whether it’s a good idea to keep expanding an American-led military alliance to, in effect, push Russia into a corner. Doing so is understandably viewed from Russia as a dire threat... ~Norman Solomon

In the 1980s, the United States developed the M270 MLRS, the most common rocket artillery system in NATO. It is fielded by the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Greece, Italy and Turkey. It shoots 227mm rockets, twelve of which are held in two six-rocket pods... ~The National Interest

...Russia is not by any means without faults. But the amount of anti-Russian propaganda in our media today is a throwback to the Cold War era. We must ask the question: Is this leading to more arms, a bigger NATO? ...The demonization of Russia is, I believe, one of the most dangerous things that is happening in our world today... Too long has the elite financially gained from war while millions are moved into poverty and desperation. ~Mairead Maguire

Poland has formally requested Lockheed Martin (LMT) F-35 fifth-generation fighters...as Warsaw launches a $49 billion modernization effort... NATO allies are bullish on the fifth-generation jet... Japan is the largest international buyer of the stealth jet, amid rising regional tensions with China. Earlier this year Germany decided against buying the F-35... and will instead look at older fourth-generation jets. ~ Investor's Business Daily

After Republican Sen. John McCain’s death in August, three former NATO secretaries proposed naming the military alliance’s new headquarters in Brussels after him ~WashingtonPost

By 1968 it was obvious... that the submarine was badly in need of major overhaul. Yet the demands of the Cold War made it necessary to send Scorpion and her officers and crew on one more deployment... in joint NATO operations. ~The National Interest
(image: USS_Scorpion on ocean floor with two nuclear Mark 45 anti-submarine torpedoes. U.S. Navy photo)

A Lockheed Martin F-16 Fighting Falcon takes off from Balad Air Base, Iraq.

Russia is right: The West promised not to enlarge NATO, and these promises were broken. ~ Tarik Cyril Amar

Expanding upon Trump’s confrontational approach... Biden met with NATO leaders and instructed them to plan on two wars, China and Russia. According to Chomsky: “This is beyond insanity.” ...the group is carrying out provocative acts when diplomacy is really needed. This is an extraordinarily dangerous situation... throughout history political parties that rely upon lies bring society down to its knees in piles of shameless destruction. ~ Robert Hunziker

There is one question today that is more important than any other question that could possibly be asked, and it’s this: Is what the U.S. and its allies are trying to accomplish in Ukraine worth continually risking nuclear armageddon for? ~ Caitlin Johnstone

I think you’ll see the end of NATO and a whole range of other things that really are the things that maintain peace. ~Joe Biden

Removed from 2014

Just a comment, it is remarkable that in 2014 Russia invaded its neighbor Ukraine and annexed part of Ukraine's territory, but the NATO article talks only about how "pugnacious" and aggressive the "West" was in responding to this big change to the map of Europe. I added some quotes from one article with a different point of viewHouseOfChange (talk) 14:06, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

• It is enlightening to see how pugnacious the U.S. establishment...has been in dealing with the Ukraine crisis. The crisis arguably began when the Yanukovich government rejected an EU bailout program in favor of one offered by Russia. The mainstream media (MSM) have virtually suppressed the fact that the EU proposal was not only less generous than the one offered by Russia, but that, whereas the Russian plan did not preclude further Ukrainian deals with the EU, the EU plan would have required a cut-off of further Russian arrangements. And whereas the Russian deal had no military clauses, that of the EU required that Ukraine affiliate with NATO. Insofar as the MSM dealt with this set of offers, they not only suppressed the exclusionary and militarized character of the EU offer, they tended to view the Russian deal as an improper use of economic leverage, “bludgeoning,” but the EU proposal was “constructive and reasonable” (Ed., NYT, November 20, 2014). Double standards seem to be fully internalized within the U.S. establishment. The protests that ensued in Ukraine were surely based in part on real grievances against a corrupt government, but they were also pushed along by right-wing groups and by U.S. and allied encouragement and support that increasingly had an anti-Russian and pro-accelerated regime change flavor.
  • Edward S. Herman in War is Our Business and Business Looks Good, Z Magazine (28 June 2014)

• The European Union and many of its countries, which used to take initiatives in the United Nations for peaceful settlements of conflict, are now one of the most important war assets of the U.S./NATO front. Many countries have also been drawn into complicity in breaking international law through U.S./U.K./NATO wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and so on.
  • Mairead Maguire in The Disturbing Expansion of the Military-Industrial Complex, Common Dreams, (14 October 2014)

Removed 2016 - 2019

• The Western response to Russia’s collapse was triumphalist. It was hailed as signaling “the end of history,” the final victory of Western capitalist democracy, almost as if Russia were being instructed to revert to its pre-World War I status as a virtual economic colony of the West. NATO enlargement began at once, in violation of verbal assurances to Gorbachev that NATO forces would not move “one inch to the east” after he agreed that a unified Germany could become a NATO member — a remarkable concession, in the light of history... The possibility that NATO might expand beyond Germany was not discussed with Gorbachev, even if privately considered.
  Soon, NATO did begin to move beyond, right to the borders of Russia. The general mission of NATO was officially changed to a mandate to protect “crucial infrastructure” of the global energy system, sea lanes and pipelines, giving it a global area of operations. Furthermore, under a crucial Western revision of the now widely heralded doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” sharply different from the official UN version, NATO may now also serve as an intervention force under US command.
  • Noam Chomsky, in Chomsky: Who Rules the World? BillMoyers.com (9 May 2016)

• Of particular concern to Russia are plans to expand NATO to Ukraine. These plans were articulated explicitly at the Bucharest NATO summit of April 2008, when Georgia and Ukraine were promised eventual membership in NATO. The wording was unambiguous: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.” With the “Orange Revolution” victory of pro-Western candidates in Ukraine in 2004, State Department representative Daniel Fried rushed there and “emphasized US support for Ukraine’s NATO and Euro-Atlantic aspirations,” as a WikiLeaks report revealed.
  Russia’s concerns are easily understandable. They are outlined by international relations scholar John Mearsheimer in the leading US establishment journal, Foreign Affairs. He writes that “the taproot of the current crisis [over Ukraine] is NATO expansion and Washington’s commitment to move Ukraine out of Moscow’s orbit and integrate it into the West,” which Putin viewed as “a direct threat to Russia’s core interests.”.... “Who can blame him?” Mearsheimer asks, pointing out that “Washington may not like Moscow’s position, but it should understand the logic behind it.”
  • Noam Chomsky, in Chomsky: Who Rules the World? BillMoyers.com (9 May 2016)

• We find troubling... NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s statement... that NATO members will agree to “further enhance NATOs military presence in the eastern part of the alliance,” adding... its “biggest reinforcement since the Cold War.” The likelihood of a military clash in the air or at sea – accidental or intentional – has grown sharply, the more so since, as we explain below, President Obama’s control over top U.S./NATO generals, some of whom like to play cowboy, is tenuous. Accordingly we encourage you, as we did before the last NATO summit, to urge your NATO colleagues to bring a “degree of judicious skepticism” to the table at Warsaw – especially with regard to the perceived threat from Russia.
  Many of us have spent decades studying Moscow’s foreign policy. We shake our heads in disbelief when we see Western leaders seemingly oblivious to what it means to the Russians to witness exercises on a scale not seen since Hitler’s armies launched “Unternehmen Barbarossa” 75 years ago, leaving 25 million Soviet citizens dead. In our view, it is irresponsibly foolish to believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin will not take countermeasures... Putin does not have the option of trying to reassure his generals that what they hear and see from NATO is mere rhetoric and posturing... In sum, Russia is bound to react strongly to what it regards as the unwarranted provocation of large military exercises along its western borders, including in Ukraine.
  • Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) Merkel Urged to Temper NATO’s Belligerence, Open Letter from VIPS, Consortium News (July 6, 2016)

• President Donald Trump pressed allies to double their military spending target to 4% of GDP, while questioning NATO’s value and bashing Germany for supporting a gas deal with Russia. After attacking North Atlantic Treaty Organization leaders for months for not meeting a 2% spending target, Mr. Trump said on Wednesday that the amount was too low.
  • Wall Street Journal, Trump Roils NATO Allies With Calls to Double Military Spending, U.S. leader urges allies to double target to 4% while questioning the alliance’s value and bashing Germany for its support of a Russia gas deal, By Rebecca Ballhaus, Valentina Pop and Laurence Norman (11 July 2018)

• What does the US get out of NATO? ...The alliance allows the US to have a strong foothold in Europe, a presence that has traditionally helped it counter Russia's influence in the region. It also allows the US to launch military action in other regions, mainly the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. In Germany alone, the US has 152 military sites for its army and air force, US Defense Department data from 2017 shows. The US' largest military hospital abroad is in Germany, and it uses bases in the country as "lily pads" to go back and forth from countries like Afghanistan. The US also has six nuclear stockpiles in five European NATO countries — Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey — according to the Federation of American Scientists. It also stores tanks and artillery in Norwegian caves... many countries went to Iraq and Afghanistan and many, many soldiers were killed from all these countries, and it was not their war, it was an American war really, more than anything else.
  • CNN Is the US NATO's piggy bank? Here's what America gives and takes, by Nic Robertson and Angela Dewan, CNN (12 July 2018)

• Throughout the day before the summit in Helsinki, the lead story on the New York Times home page stayed the same: “Just by Meeting With Trump, Putin Comes Out Ahead.” ... The Washington Post...editorialized that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is “an implacably hostile foreign adversary.” ...Contempt for diplomacy with Russia is now extreme... A bellicose stance toward Russia has become so routine and widespread that we might not give it a second thought... Often the biggest lies involve what remains unsaid. For instance, U.S. media rarely mention such key matters as the promise-breaking huge expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders since the fall of the Berlin Wall... or the more than 800 U.S. military bases overseas -- in contrast to Russia’s nine... We need a major shift in the U.S. approach toward Russia...The lives -- and even existence -- of future generations are at stake in the relationship between Washington and Moscow... The incessant drumbeat is in sync with what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.
  • Norman Solomon in ...Hostile Propaganda: Contempt for diplomacy with Russia is now extreme, Common Dreams (16 July 2018)

• The story goes back more than three decades to the fall of the Berlin Wall and eventual re-unification of Germany. At the time, the Soviet Union had some 380,000 troops in what was then the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. Those forces were there as part of the treaty ending World War II, and the Soviets were concerned that removing them could end up threatening the USSR’s borders. The Russians have been invaded — at terrible cost — three times in a little more than a century. So in the early 1990s, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, and Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev cut a deal. The Soviets agreed to withdraw troops from Eastern Europe as long as NATO didn’t fill the vacuum, or recruit members of the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact. Baker promised Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch east.” The agreement... was followed in practice. NATO stayed west of the Oder and Neisse rivers separating Germany and Poland, and Soviet troops returned to Russia... But President Bill Clinton blew that all up in 1999, when the U.S. and NATO intervened in the civil war between Serbs and Albanians over the Serbian province of Kosovo. Behind the new American doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” NATO opened a massive 11-week bombing campaign against Serbia... From Moscow’s point of view, the war was unnecessary. The Serbs were willing to withdraw their troops and restore Kosovo’s autonomous status. But NATO demanded a large occupation force that would be immune from Serbian law, something the nationalist-minded Serbs would never agree to. It was virtually the same provocative language the Austrian-Hungarian Empire had presented to the Serbs in 1914, language that set off World War I... But NATO didn’t stop there...
  • Conn Hallinan, in It’s Time for NATO to Go the Way of the Warsaw Pact, Foreign Policy In Focus, (27 July 2018)

• While Moscow is depicted as an aggressive adversary, NATO surrounds Russia on three sides, has deployed anti-missile systems in Poland, Romania, Spain, Turkey, and the Black Sea, and has a 12 to 1 advantage in military spending. With opposing forces now toe-to-toe, it would not take much to set off a chain reaction that could end in a nuclear exchange. Yet instead of inviting a dialogue, the document boasts that the Alliance has “suspended all practical civilian and military cooperation between NATO and Russia.”... The solution seems obvious. First, a return to the 1998 military deployment. While it is unlikely that former members of the Warsaw Pact would drop their NATO membership, a withdrawal of non-national troops from NATO members that border Russia would cool things off. Second, the removal of anti-missile systems that should never have been deployed in the first place. In turn, Russia could remove the middle-range Iskander missiles NATO is complaining about and agree to talks aimed at reducing nuclear stockpiles. But long range, it’s finally time to re-think alliances. NATO was a child of the Cold War, when the West believed that the Soviets were a threat. But Russia today is not the Soviet Union, and there’s no way Moscow would be stupid enough to attack a superior military force. The old ways of thinking are not only outdated, but also dangerous. It’s time NATO went the way of the Warsaw Pact.
  • Conn Hallinan, in It’s Time for NATO to Go the Way of the Warsaw Pact, Foreign Policy In Focus, (27 July 2018)

• [President Trump is]... perfectly right when he says we should have better relations with Russia. Being dragged through the mud for that is outlandish... Russia shouldn’t refuse to deal with the United States because the U.S. carried out the worst crime of the century in the invasion of Iraq, much worse than anything Russia has done. But they shouldn’t refuse to deal with us for that reason, and we shouldn’t refuse to deal with them for whatever infractions they may have carried out, which certainly exist. This is just absurd.
  We have to move towards better—right at the Russian border, there are very extreme tensions, that could blow up anytime and lead to what would in fact be a terminal nuclear war, terminal for the species and life on Earth. We’re very close to that...
  First of all, we should do things to ameliorate it. Secondly, we should ask why. Well, it’s because NATO expanded after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in violation of verbal promises to Mikhail Gorbachev, mostly under Clinton, partly under first Bush, then Clinton expanded right to the Russian border, expanded further under Obama... The fate of... organized human society, even of the survival of the species, depends on this. How much attention is given to these things as compared with, you know, whether Trump lied about something?
  • Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky on Mass Media Obsession with Russia & the Stories Not Being Covered in the Trump Era, Democracy Now (27 July 2018)

• As we watch the media today, we are spoon fed more and more propaganda and fear of the unknown, that we should be afraid of the unknown and have full faith that our government is keeping us safe from the unknown. But by looking at media today, those of us who are old enough will be reminded of the era of Cold War news articles, hysteria of how the Russians would invade and how we should duck and cover under tables in our kitchens for the ensuing nuclear war. Under this mass hysteria all Western governments were convinced that we should join Western allies to fight the unknown evil that lies to the east. Later through my travels in Russia during the height of the Cold War with a peace delegation, we were shocked by the poverty of the country, and questioned how we ever were led to believe that Russia was a force to be afraid of. We talked to the Russian students who were dismayed by their absolute poverty and showed anger against NATO for leading their country into an arms race that they could not win. Many years later, when speaking to young Americans in the US, I was in disbelief about the fear the students had of Russia and their talk of invasion. This is a good example of how the unknown can cause a deep rooted paranoia when manipulated by the right powers.
  • Mairead Maguire in Demonization of Russia in a New Cold War Era, Inventing a foe to sell military ambitions is still the most dangerous of games, Common Dreams (14 September 2018)

• Firstly, I must say, that I personally believe that Russia is not by any means without faults. But the amount of anti-Russian propaganda in our media today is a throwback to the Cold War era. We must ask the question: Is this leading to more arms, a bigger NATO? Possibly to challenge large powers in the Middle East and Asia, as we see the US approaching the South China seas, and NATO Naval games taking place in the Black Sea. Missile compounds are being erected in Romania, Poland and other ex-Soviet countries, while military games are set up in Scandinavia close to the Russian border to practice for a cold climate war scenario. At the same time, we see the US President arriving in Europe asking for increased military spending. At the same time the USA has increased its budget by 300 billion in one year.
  The demonization of Russia is, I believe, one of the most dangerous things that is happening in our world today. The scapegoating of Russia is an inexcusable game that the West is indulging in. It is time for political leaders and each individual to move us back from the brink of catastrophe to begin to build relationships with our Russian brothers and sisters. Too long has the elite financially gained from war while millions are moved into poverty and desperation. 
  • Mairead Maguire in Demonization of Russia in a New Cold War Era, Inventing a foe to sell military ambitions is still the most dangerous of games, Common Dreams (14 September 2018)

Designed to pump out a high volume of fire within a short period, rocket artillery systems are particularly dangerous in their ability to obliterate a position before units have a chance to take cover. This is the best of what NATO has to offer... (the M270 MLRS)... ~National Interest

• Designed to pump out a high volume of fire within a short period, rocket artillery systems are particularly dangerous in their ability to obliterate a position before units have a chance to take cover. This is the best of what NATO has to offer. In the 1980s, the United States developed the M270 MLRS, the most common rocket artillery system in NATO. It is fielded by the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Greece, Italy and Turkey. It shoots 227mm rockets, twelve of which are held in two six-rocket pods...
  • The Big Guns: NATO's 5 Deadliest Rocket Artillery Systems, The National Interest, Charlie Gao (6 January 2019)

• On Feb. 6, Macedonia signed an accession agreement with NATO, paving its way to join the alliance next year. The country will be renamed “North Macedonia” to appease the Greeks. Despite predictable cheers from the U.S. media and foreign policy elites, the addition of another tiny Balkan country to NATO only highlights a clear reality: NATO is making itself irrelevant by becoming an alliance that can’t fight...
  Germany, once NATO’s front line against the Soviets, is the most glaring example. Over the last 25 years, the Germans have chosen to become militarily impotent. On average, just 39 of Germany’s 128 Eurofighter Typhoons, the Luftwaffe’s best fighter plane, were available for service in 2017. Barely a quarter of its older Tornados are serviceable. Maybe this horrible maintenance record is a secondary concern, though: Der Spiegel reported that Germany only had enough missiles for four of the Typhoons to engage in combat... The German military is currently short a staggering 21,000 officers and noncommissioned officers. Even Germany’s elite KSK special operations troops have earned more of a reputation for their beer than their battles.
  • Macedonia is set to join NATO — an alliance that can’t fight, Defense News, February 13, 2019

• NATO turns 70 in 2019 and will celebrate its anniversary on 4th April 2019 in Washington DC... NATO is obsolete, it belongs in the dustbin of history! NATO claims to strive for collective defence and for the preservation of peace and security. But, NATO has never been such a system. It is the largest military alliance in the world with the largest military spending and nuclear stockpiles. It is both the main driver for a new arms race and the main obstacle to a nuclear weapons-free world. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has been transformed into a global alliance structured to wage “out of area” wars in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, as well as to “contain” China. Having military troops at the Russian border, new nuclear weapons and a missile defence shield, it is a key driver for confrontation with Russia and a perpetrator of the corrosive “enemy” narrative.
  • Call for Actions on NATO Summit 2019, No to War — No to NATO, World Beyond War (15 March 2019)

• NATO claims to seek to promote stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area. But, NATO’s heads of states agreed that military spending should amount to 2% of national GPDs. Their unchallenged military spending – NATO members already spend almost 1 trillion US dollars per year – will be increased by billions of US dollars. This should instead be spent on the well-being of the people in the North Atlantic area and beyond. Raising living standards and improving people’s lives must be prioritized over weapons and war which create instability and exacerbate social injustice, deprivation and environmental destruction.
• NATO’s claims are dishonest. It is an unjust, undemocratic, violent and aggressive alliance trying to shape the world for the benefit of a few. On 3rd April 1968, one day before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. stated that “It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.” NATO’s choice is violence. 41 years later we state loud and clear: “it’s the dissolution of NATO or nonexistence. That is where we are today!”
  • Call for Actions on NATO Summit 2019, No to War — No to NATO, World Beyond War (15 March 2019)

• While nostalgic for the past, post-Cold War NATO is a shell of its former self... NATO mimics a dysfunctional club where the U.S. operates as funder, provider, and gatekeeper... In a world without a Soviet juggernaut to contend with, NATO is an organization trying to keep itself in business. As Barry Posen, a professor of political science at MIT, wrote in a New York Times op-ed, "NATO’s founding mission has been achieved and replaced with unsuccessful misadventures.” Some of those misadventures, such as the 2011 regime-change campaign in Libya, have created even more security problems, from the proliferation of terrorist networks in North Africa to an ongoing refugee crisis... Washington should no longer be expected to pick up the tab.
  • Daniel DePetris] in Let's not fool ourselves: America's NATO allies are sandbagging Uncle Sam, Washington Examiner (19 March 2019)

• The promises given to President Mikhail Gorbachev by President George H. W. Bush, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, President Francois Mitterand, Chancellor Helmuth Kohl and their foreign ministers in 1990—not to expand NATO eastward; not to extend membership in the NATO alliance to former member states of the Warsaw Pact—were ignored... In the 1990s, the Russian threat was nonexistent and there was no reason to suppose it would return. In addition, President Clinton and the Senators who were nominally in charge of overseeing the conduct of U.S. Foreign and Security Policy were mesmerized by the prospects of being on the right side of history and campaign donations. Given the voracious appetite for cash in Congress the defense industriess were clearly interested in NATO expansion and found ways to advocate for it. Weapons sales to East European nations invited to join NATO promised huge profits. Bruce Jackson, a Lockheed vice president from 1993–2002, rushed to set up the Committee to Expand NATO and reportedly used contributions from defense companies to lobby Congress for NATO expansion.

Douglas Macgregor in NATO Is Not Dying. It’s a Zombie, The National Interest, (31 March 2019)

• When Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell teamed up to invite NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg to address a joint session of Congress, they had every reason to expect the April 3 speech to be a big hit with U.S. media and political elites. The establishment is eager to affirm the sanctity of support for the transatlantic military alliance. Huge reverence for NATO is matched by how dangerous NATO has become. NATO’s continual expansion -- all the way to Russia’s borders -- has significantly increased the chances that the world’s two nuclear superpowers will get into direct military conflict.  But in the United States, when anyone challenges the continued expansion of NATO, innuendos or outright smears are likely. McCain conveyed the common madness of reverence for NATO -- and the common intolerance for anything that might approach a rational debate on whether it’s a good idea to keep expanding an American-led military alliance to, in effect, push Russia into a corner. Doing so is understandably viewed from Russia as a dire threat... Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall -- and the quickly broken promises by the U.S. government in 1990 that NATO would move “not one inch eastward” -- NATO has been closing in on Russia’s borders while bringing one nation after another into full military membership. During the last three decades, NATO has added 13 countries -- and it’s not done yet.
  • Norman Solomon in Pelosi and McConnell: Cranking Up Bipartisan Madness for NATO, Consortium News (31 March 2019)

• The 1990s saw an effort to expand both NATO’s mission (“out of area or out of business” became the mantra of the day) and NATO’s membership. *Despite the well-documented promises made to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev by Secretary of State James Baker (and many others) that the West would not try to expand NATO “one inch eastward,” the Clinton administration embarked on a dual strategy that expanded the alliance eastward and transformed the defensive alliance into what became a staging ground for US interventions in the Balkans, Africa, and the Greater Middle East. One of NATO’s first major post–Cold War missions, the 78-day airial bombing of Serbia, nearly ended in disaster when NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark ordered British General Mike Jackson, commander of NATO’s troops in Kosovo, to retake the airfield in Pristina, the capital, from the Russians—by force if necessary. Jackson refused: “I’m not going to start Third World War for you.” Undeterred by that apocalyptic near-miss, NATO has soldiered on, playing supporting roles in the Bush and Obama administrations’ wars of choice.
  • James Carden NATO Turns 70 Next week, Washington will throw the military alliance a birthday party. How much is there to celebrate?, The Nation (28 March 2019)

• The policy of NATO expansion is largely responsible for the dangerous deterioration in relations between Russia and the West and lies at the heart of the ongoing Ukraine crisis. Still more, says Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen, a result of “the new Cold War and its rampant Russophobia …has been the near-end of American diplomacy toward Russia and the almost total militarization of US-Russian relations. This alone is a profound source of insecurity-including the possibility of war with Russia.” The end of the Cold War left NATO purposeless; expansion has made it untenable. ...NATO should address what has gone so wrong over the past three decades by reexamining, its policies of eastward expansion and non-defensive deployment and seriously consider adopting a nuclear “no first use” policy.
  • James Carden in NATO Turns 70 Next week, Washington will throw the military alliance a birthday party. How much is there to celebrate?, The Nation (28 March 2019)

• Lockheed Martin has been awarded a $1.14 billion contract for Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems for Poland, Bahrain and Romania. The foreign military sales contract, announced Wednesday by the Department of Defense, covers full rate production for the GMLRS surface-to-surface systems for the three nations. Work on the contract is expected to run through Aug. 31, 2021, and will be performed in Grand Prairie, Texas. Lockheed Martin... has produced more than 25,000 GMLRS through 2016 for the United States and NATO allies.
  • UPI Lockheed awarded $1.1B for rocket sales to Poland, Bahrain, Romania, UPI (28 March 2019)

• Russia follows a pretty standard script when reacting to the U.S. and NATO as a whole, and though it has been slower to react to murmurs of Fort Trump than, say, Washington’s withdrawal from the INF Treaty, Moscow has begun to strike similar notes. Take, for instance, one op-ed run by the state-owned RIA Novosti news agency: “With Suicidal Pleasure: Poland to Make Itself into a Battlefield.” Low-level officials have echoed this sentiment, but the Kremlin has been quiet. As with the Russian reaction to the downfall of the INF treaty, senior leadership is likely to stay out of the fray until there is a concrete development to react to. And even then, Moscow’s counter-moves are unlikely to be any more specific than Putin’s position on INF and possible U.S. missile deployments in Eastern Europe: “We have to ensure our security,” he said in December. Fort Trump would certainly give the Russian government a perceived justification to deploy more troops and equipment in its Western Military District, and bolster support for the Kremlin’s military spending at home.
  • As NATO banks on Poland, is the country becoming the new face of a nervous Europe?, Defense News, Sebastian Sprenger and Matthew Bodner (7 April 2019)

• And then there is NATO. Again Bolton’s directness—and good sense—in past statements have proved awkward in dealing with current political realities. In July 2016, on a Breitbart News radio program, Bolton denounced then-nominee Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. not defend fellow NATO countries. (NATO is one international accord Bolton considers worthwhile.) He called Trump’s statement “very disturbing” and “a dagger at the heart of the most successful political-military alliance in human history.”
  • Will John Bolton Bring on Armageddon—Or Stave It Off? The Atlantic, Graeme Wood, (April 2019)

• In January 2018, the experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to two minutes before midnight, where it had stood during the darkest days of the Cold War, from 1953 to 1960. The latest move of the hands was precipitated by the recklessness in Trump’s nuclear thinking and the deepening crisis over Korea. Trump wondered aloud about the point of having nuclear weapons if he couldn’t use them. His answer was to make them more usable, which he did with his new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), the first since Obama’s 2010 NPR, which had reduced the role of nuclear weapons in the US defense posture. The 2018 NPR significantly elevated their role, permitting use in response to vaguely defined “extreme circumstances,” such as cyberattacks or attacks on the infrastructure of both the United States and its “allies and partners.” The review doubled down on Obama’s unconscionable 30-year trillion-dollar modernization of all parts of the nuclear arsenal. The actual cost looks to be closer to $1.7 trillion and climbing. To make matters worse, all eight other nuclear powers are undertaking their own modernizations, though on a far more modest scale. Russia, it should be noted, actually cut its defense spending this past year.
  • 2 Minutes and Counting, Crises that seemed contained not long ago have now spiraled out of control—and the prospects for resolving them peacefully look depressingly bleak, the Nation, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, (3 April 2019)

• Acting like a hegemon, the United States, starting in 1999, took advantage of Russian weakness and broke its promise not to expand NATO, eventually adding 13 countries, the last of which was Montenegro, in 2017. When Bush announced plans to incorporate Georgia and Ukraine, Putin drew the line. Following the US-backed Ukrainian coup, he took back Crimea and made clear that there are limits to his toleration of NATO expansion.
  In his March 1, 2018, Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly, he went further, throwing down the gauntlet to the United States. Russia, he acknowledged, had been on the defensive since the Soviet Union collapsed, having lost substantial amounts of its territory, population, GDP, industrial potential, and military capability. It depended on the IMF and World Bank for survival. The United States ignored its appeals not to abrogate the ABM Treaty in 2002 and expanded its global missile-defense system, leaving Russia vulnerable to a US attack. A 2006 article in Foreign Affairs contending that neither Russia or China could even retaliate against a US first strike “sent heads spinning” in Russia, The Washington Post reported, “with visions of Dr. Strangelove.”
  • 2 Minutes and Counting, Crises that seemed contained not long ago have now spiraled out of control—and the prospects for resolving them peacefully look depressingly bleak, the Nation, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, (3 April 2019)

• But now, in March 2018, Putin was declaring that the US effort had failed. He unveiled the existence of five new nuclear weapons, all of which could circumvent US missile-defense systems. He concluded defiantly, “I hope everything that has been said today will sober any potential aggressor,” adding, “No one listened to us. Listen to us now.” Independent Russian military analyst Aleksandr Golts said that all the weapons experts he had spoken to were “in shock, as was I.”
  • 2 Minutes and Counting, Crises that seemed contained not long ago have now spiraled out of control—and the prospects for resolving them peacefully look depressingly bleak, the Nation, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, (3 April 2019)

• In her 29-year career in the Army and Army Reserves, Colonel Ann Wright served at the NATO subcommand Allied Forces Central Europe, and later as a diplomat in various posts around the world, but resigned from the U.S. government in protest of George W. Bush’s war on Iraq. She agrees... that NATO is an impediment to peace in Europe.
  Ann Wright: I think it’s the military industrial complex that needs more weapons sales, and the Russians have always been the bogeyman for the United States from the Cold War period. And even though we had 20 years of peace and tranquility with the Russians, now they are being vilified again. Not to say that it’s–you know, there are some things they’ve done I don’t care for at all. But the fact that now they are the enemy, and the increase in the number of weapons all the countries are manufacturing and selling, is big business.
  • RealNews Network What is NATO Good For?, The Real News Network, (8 April 2019)

• Trump’s attacks on NATO have been for his own political reasons, that he wants to show his base in the United States that he’s going to stand up to the Europeans, he’s going to stand up to other nations, he’s going to stand up for Americans. He makes a big deal of making sure other people pay for what, you know, they need, and that the United States is not going to support them. But I think it’s all show. I think in the White House, in the Oval Office, when the generals and admirals and the weapons systems CEOs are present, that President Trump’s attitude is much different. He wants to make sure the United States and NATO are as powerful as possible.
  NATO is extremely dangerous, as well, too, because of potential conflict with Russia. As we’ve expanded up to the Russian border, as we have based our troops around the Russian border, conducted exercises, the Russians have reacted as you would expect a nation to react. And so we are on the brink of war. And this is not the way it should have been, as it was promised with the end of the Cold War.
  NATO conducts military operations around the world, now, to include wars that include mass killing and suffering in places like Libya and Afghanistan, and not doing well, not doing well for the world. Not where you can point and say, look, we resolved this conflict, but rather these conflicts are open-ended with the suffering continual.
  • What is NATO Good For?, The Real News Network, (8 April 2019)

• The celebration of NATO’s 70 years of existence provides another opportunity to unearth the real history of the ideas, practices and destruction wrought by this military alliance. Even with the clear exposure of the cooperation between NATO, the CIA and the British MI6 to spread terror and psychological warfare in Europe immediately after the formation of this military alliance, the mainstream media, academics and policy makers remain silent on activities of the ‘stay behind armies’ and ‘false flag’ operations that distorted the real causes of insecurity in the world after 1945. The evidence of the manipulations of the peoples of the world to ensure the continued survival of NATO has been well documented in the fraudulent interventions and bombings in the Balkans right up the present multiple wars against the peoples of Iran...
  The ostensive reason for the founding of NATO was to ‘thwart’ Soviet aggression, but in practice the organization was a prop for western capital and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, became the core prop for Wall Street. In this year, there will be many commentaries on the fact that the existence of NATO reflects a Cold War relic, that NATO is obsolete and lost its mandate, but very few will link the expansion of NATO to the military management of the international system. Prior to 1991, the planners of NATO could justify the existence of NATO on ideological and political grounds, but with the threat of a multi polar world and the diminution of the dollar, NATO expanded to the point where this author joined with others in labelling this organization Global NATO to reflect its current imperial mandate.
  • Horace G. Campbell Global NATO: A 70-Year Alliance of Oppressors in Crisis, CounterPunch, (9 April 2019)

• In the final analysis we must go back to the Middle East where an alliance between women in Bahrain, Israel, Yemen, Iran and Saudi Arabia holds promise for a new platform. The women of Egypt gave us that notice when they mobilized to come out in forces across religious and class lines. These women are opposed to fundamentalist who want women to cover up but will disrobe them and beat them if they fight for their rights. This new mobilization of progressive women can now be seen in the politics of the USA where a new generation is maturing with new skills to fully mobilize against the NATO and the Pentagon. What remains to be seen is whether these forces will oppose the massive expenditures of the Pentagon and return to the call of Seymour Melman for demilitarization and the conversion of the military, financial, information complex.
  While the energies of many are focused on the issues of electoral politics, progressives must remain alert to new false flag operations of NATO. We are in a revolutionary moment and revolutionaries cannot be pessimistic. There are three important tasks: dismantle NATO, fight imperialism, racism, and white supremacy globally and be at the forefront for social justice and solidarity in all parts of the world.
  • Horace G. Campbell Global NATO: A 70-Year Alliance of Oppressors in Crisis, CounterPunch, (9 April 2019)

• There has always been an element in U.S. politics that questioned American internationalism in general and the U.S. role in European defense in particular. Those views gained new traction after the collapse of the Soviet Union. NATO's future role and its relevance was hotly debated during the Clinton administration.
  Ultimately, Washington pushed to expand the organization eastward, offering membership to the newly independent, former satellite states of the Soviet bloc. In doing so, it fundamentally transformed the organization, in Russian eyes, from a purely defensive one to a more aggressive one, infringing on a region that Moscow had long believed was critical to its own security and obligating itself to the defense and independence of countries that historically had often, albeit unwillingly, accommodated Russian interests.
  In expanding eastward, NATO accepted new obligations that were not central to its own security at a time when the Russian domination of Western Europe was no longer a viable threat while, at the same time, ensuring that its new commitments would be a source of perpetual conflict with Russia.
  • Joseph V. Micallef in NATO on Its 70th Anniversary: A Birthday Party or a Wake? Military.com, (22 Apr 2019)

• Pentagon and State Department officials have told the European Union they’re “deeply concerned” over plans to potentially exclude US defense firms from competing for billions worth of new arms deals, suggesting the US could slap restrictions on buying European defense equipment in retaliation. At issue is the proposed $14 billion European Defence Fund, and a host of procurement programs under the the Permanent Structured Cooperation, or PESCO, the European economic alliance is undertaking.
  • State, DoD Letter Warns European Union to Open Defense Contracts, Or Else, (17 May 2019)

• The Bundeswehr has repeatedly called for more financial resources... Those calls have been supported by pressure from NATO allies, particularly the US, to meet the alliance's defense budget target of 2% of GDP. The 2019 German defense budget is €43.2 billion, some €5 billion more than last year, and Merkel did not miss the opportunity on Monday to underline the "significant increase" in military funding.
  • Angela Merkel inspects NATO troops in Germany DW, Ben Knight (20 May 2019)

• Turkey doesn’t understand that, for the United States, buying a sophisticated Russian air defense system is a major national security issue that can’t be papered over. But Americans don’t understand that all their tough talk about leveling sanctions against Turkey if the Russian arms sale goes through only plays into Turkish leaders’ hands politically...
  Speaking at a forum on Ankara-Washington relations hosted by the Hudson Institute in Washington, Hudson fellow Blaise Misztal said that, to President Tayyip Erdogan and his political coalition partners, “sanctions and kicking you out of 'NATO is a winning policy” because it fuels long-standing and growing anti-Americanism in their nationalist-leaning array of parties. Since 2014, and particularly after a failed coup attempt in 2016 that many Turks believe was known in Washington before it was launched, Erdogan “is becoming closer to [Vladimir] Putin, [[[Bashar al-Assad|Bashir al] Assad]], Iran and China” to burnish his nationalist credentials, Misztal said. As an example of how this plays out, Erdogan told his parliament Wednesday the nation is “passing through a very critical period, from economy to security.” He warned about plotters still inside its borders and their outside supporters. At the same time as Erdogan spoke, a Turkish newspaper reported the defense ministry is sending troops to Russia to receive familiarization training for the S-400 air defense system....All this is taking place even after the United States lowered its asking price for the American Patriot air defense system, which is compatible with 'NATO' standards, Misztal added.
  • The U.S. Naval Institute News, Panel: US/Turkey Dispute Over Buying Russian Air Defense System Has Deeper Roots by John Grady, (22 May 2019)

• On 4 April 2019, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, better known as NATO, marked the 70th anniversary of its existence... Coinciding with the anniversary event on 4 April, peace activists and concerned scholars in several countries conducted a variety of events to draw attention to, and further document, the many war crimes and other atrocities committed by NATO (sometimes by deploying its associate and crony terrorist armies – ISIS, Al Qaeda, Al Nusra – recruited and trained by the CIA and funded by Saudi Arabia, other Gulf countries and the US directly or through one or other of its many agencies: see ‘NATO – No Need – NATO-EXIT: The Florence Declaration’), the threat that NATO poses to global peace and security as an appendage of the US military, and to consider ways that NATO might be terminated.
  • Robert J. Burrowes in Understanding NATO, Ending War, CounterPunch (23 May 2019)

• NATO member states are harnessed into endorsing Washington’s imperial design of World conquest under the doctrine of collective security.... Chossudovsky offers the most comprehensive list of ideas in this regard well aware that stopping NATO is intimately connected to the struggle to end war and globalization. Chossudovsky’s ideas range from organizational suggestions such as integrating anti-war protest with the campaign against the gamut of neoliberal economic ‘reforms’ and the development of a broad based grassroots network independent of NGOs funded by Wall Street, objectives such as dismantling the propaganda apparatus which sustains the legitimacy of war and neoliberalism, challenging the corporate media (including by using alternative media outlets on the Internet), providing encouragement (including information about the illegality of their orders) for military personnel to refuse to fight (perhaps like the GI coffeehouse movement during the US war on Vietnam...
  • Robert J. Burrowes in Understanding NATO, Ending War, CounterPunch (23 May 2019)

• Lockheed Martin sees Europe as a key market opportunity, said Steve Over, director of F-35 international business development at the company. “Europe is probably the seat of interest for the F-35,” he told National Defense. “I see a future in the 2030 timeframe, where, just like the F-16 today is the NATO standard fighter of choice, you’re seeing NATO allies recapitalize those F-16s with F-35s.” By the 2030s, Over said he expects there will be more than 500 joint strike fighters in NATO nation inventories.
  • Sales Taking Off: International Market for F-35 Heats Up, National Defense Industrial Association, (24 May 2019)

• Even in the age of ultra-sophisticated nuclear submarines... the hard truth is inescapable: the sea is the most hostile environment on Earth. It is totally unforgiving of human error or overconfidence. The pressures below 2,000 feet can crush a submarine like an aluminum can in seconds. For reasons that even now are a closely guarded secret, that happened in late May 1968 when the nuclear attack submarine USS Scorpion (SSN-589) sank in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean as she was returning from a long deployment. Ninety-nine officers and men were on board... By 1968 it was obvious to the Navy’s Bureau of Ships that the submarine was badly in need of major overhaul. Yet the demands of the Cold War made it necessary to send Scorpion and her officers and crew on one more deployment... in joint NATO operations. She would, however, sail with one less man. Electrician’s Mate Dan Rogers, who refused to go on the cruise, flatly stated to Lt. Cmdr. Francis Slattery that every man on Scorpion was in danger.
  • In 1968, a U.S. Nuclear Submarine Sank 10,000 Feet to Its Death (No One Knows Why), The National Interest,Warfare History Network (24 May 2019)

• Poland has formally requested Lockheed Martin (LMT) F-35 fifth-generation fighters as it looks to modernize its Soviet-era fleet. The order for the 32 fifth-generation fighter jets comes as Warsaw launches a $49 billion modernization effort. The stealthy planes would replace Poland's Soviet-era Su-22 and MiG-29 aircraft. Poland became a NATO member 20 years ago, and ordering Lockheed's F-35 is a key step toward making its air force more compatible, or interoperable, with other NATO allies that are buying the fighter as well. NATO allies are bullish on the fifth-generation jet. The U.K., Netherlands, Norway and Italy are also purchasing the F-35. Japan is the largest international buyer of the stealth jet, amid rising regional tensions with China. Earlier this year Germany decided against buying the F-35 to replace is fleet of aging Tornadoes and will instead look at older fourth-generation jets.
  • Investor's Business Daily Poland Looks To Get Under Vladimir Putin's Skin, And His Radar, Gillian Rich (28 May 2019)

• Two decades ago NATO started it’s 78 day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. Using the language of peace and humanitarianism NATO dismembered Yugoslavia killing more civilians than they did soldiers. A non-stop aerial assault on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia using more than a thousand Nato warplanes delivering 2,000 air-strikes in 40,000 sorties and with over 20,000 bombs dropped on the country.
  • RS Ahthion The Dismemberment of Yugoslavia 20 Years On (28 May 2019)

• Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House senior advisor Jared Kushner are expected to attend the annual Bilderberg gathering in the Swiss town of Montreux this weekend. Participants at the confab include former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former CIA Director David Petraeus, James Baker, Director of the Office of Net Assessment at the Pentagon, Evercore’s Roger Altman, Jigsaw’s Jared Cohen, Historians Niall Ferguson, Stephen Kotkin, and Timothy Snyder, Palantir Technologies’s Alex Karp, Henry Kravis, Matthew Pottinger, senior director at the National Security Council, CFR’s Robert Rubin, Hudson Institute’s Nadia Schadlow, and Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt... The event first kicked off in 1954, “when a small group of powerful Europeans met with a group of influential North Americans to discuss the future of the transatlantic liberal alliance,” according to the Washington Post. In 2007, the Anti-Defamation League debunked conspiracy theories that the Bilderberg group is part of a global elite trying to promote a “new world order” under their control.
  • Bilderberg guests include Pompeo, Kushner and Kissinger, the Jewish Insider (31 May 2019)

• Relations between Turkey and Greece are the most fractious of any pair of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) 29 member countries. Disputes range from contested offshore hydrocarbon exploration to Athens granting political refugee status to two of eight Turkish officers who fled to Greece after the failed July 2016 coup attempt (Hürriyet Daily News, May 24, 2018). Now, Turkey is protesting Greece’s activities off its Aegean coast. On May 12, Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hami Aksoy stated that Turkey claims Greece does not respect the demilitarized status of its islands in the eastern Aegean, adding that NATO warships operating in the Aegean should not use Greek ports there for visits and refueling (Mfa.gov.tr, May 12, 2019). Aksoy’s concerns mask a broader anxiety in Ankara that NATO and the United States may be planning to deepen their military presence in the eastern Mediterranean to include more bases in Greece and its Aegean islands.
  • Turkey Fumes as Greece Offers Use of Eastern Aegean Islands to NATO, US Eurasia Daily Monitor, Volume: 16 Issue: 80,(The Jamestown Foundation), by John C. K. Daly, (31 May 2019)
• Stephen F. Cohen said when I interviewed him: “The wall had come down...Germany was reunifying. The question became ‘where would a united Germany be?’ The West wanted Germany in NATO. For Gorbachev, this was an impossible sell. Twenty-seven point five million Soviet citizens had died in the war against Germany in the Second World War on the eastern front. Contrary to the bunk we’re told, the United States didn’t land on Normandy and defeat Nazi Germany. The defeat of Nazi Germany was done primarily by the Soviet army.
  How could Gorbachev go home and say, ‘Germany is reunited. Great. And it’s going to be in NATO.’ It was impossible. They told Gorbachev, ‘We promise if you agree to a reunited Germany in NATO, NATO will not move—this was [U.S.] Secretary of State James Baker—one inch to the east. In other words, NATO would not move from Germany toward Russia. And it did... As we speak today, NATO is on Russia’s borders,” Cohen said. “From the Baltics to Ukraine to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. So, what happened? Later, they said Gorbachev lied or he misunderstood. [That] the promise was never made. But the National Security Archive in Washington has produced all the documents of the discussion in 1990. It was not only [President George H.W.] Bush, it was the French leader François Mitterrand, it was Margaret Thatcher of England. Every Western leader promised Gorbachev NATO would not move eastward.”
  • Manufacturing War With Russia, TruthDig, Chris Hedges (3 June 2019)

• NATO member Bulgaria expects the United States to offer to sell it eight new F-16 fighter jets for its air force at a discounted price of $1.2 billion, the defence ministry said on Tuesday. The U.S. State Department approved the possible sale of eight F-16 aircraft and related equipment at an estimated cost of $1.67 billion, a Pentagon agency said on Monday. Bulgaria, which is also a member of the European Union, is looking to replace its ageing Soviet-made MiG-29s and improve compliance with NATO standards. A deal for Lockheed Martin's F-16 Block 70 would be the Balkan country's biggest military procurement since the fall of Communist rule some 30 years ago.
  • Bulgaria sees F-16 jet deal with U.S. at $1.2 bln. Reuters (4 June 2019)

• Trump, with his America First rhetoric, has made clear that he believes that the sovereignty of individual nations pursuing their own interests should be the basis for international relations instead of formal multilateral institutions... Unique among post-Cold War presidents, Trump ditched the traditional view of NATO and the European Union as institutions that bolster the US-led order and multiply American power. The former real estate tycoon takes a more transactional view of such bodies, making hard-nosed calculations about the material return on US investment -- in strictly financial terms. Many Presidents have griped that the allies have failed to share the burden of the NATO umbrella and about the failure of many to live up to their own defense spending goals. But Trump is the only commander in chief to make such complaints an organizing principle of foreign policy -- a strategy mirrored in his attitude toward Asian allies Japan and South Korea. He left NATO leaders visibly shocked at his first visit to the alliance headquarters in May 2017, claiming that some allies "owe massive amounts of money from past years."
  • European leaders give Trump a history lesson, Stephen Collinson, CNN, (6 June 2019)

• In 1980, NATO followed the U.S. military’s lead, adopting the 30-round magazine for standard use. The NATO Standard Agreement magazine...is currently compatible with 75 different types of rifles.... The 30-round rifle magazine has been the standard high-capacity magazine for more than three decades. These devices are used by the military and police around the world, and can be found accompanying popular civilian rifles like the AR-15...The new products can reliably fire 40 or more rounds before requiring reloading. ...Online, they can be purchased for as little as $8 apiece.
  • The Gun Industry Is Betting on Bigger High-Capacity Magazines, The Trace, Alain Stephens (12 June 2019)

• This very big, very dirty secret — that war drives climate change — is carefully guarded. To keep things hush-hush the military is excused from oversight or obligation. This exception to the rule of law has always been the practice but G.W. Bush formalized it demanding language to that effect in the 1997 Kyoto Accords, which he later refused to sign anyway... The complete U.S. military exemption from greenhouse gas emissions calculations includes more than 1,000 U.S. bases in more than 130 countries around the world, it’s 6,000 facilities in the U.S., its aircraft carriers and jet aircraft. Also excluded are its weapons testing and all multilateral operations such as the giant U.S. commanded NATO military alliance and AFRICOM, the U.S. military alliance now blanketing Africa. The provision also exempts U.S./UN-sanctioned activities of “peacekeeping” and “humanitarian relief.”
  • Sara Flounders quoted in: The Climate Counter-Offensive: Secrecy, Deception and Disarming the Green New Deal, Richard Moser, CounterPunch (June 14, 2019)

Objections to: Bulk Removal of properly sourced, relevant quotations from notable people. It IS POV Pushing (May 27, 2022)

• HOC - please note that everyone has different views and that removing quotations that you don't like is POV pushing.
• Suggestion: Instead of deleting the quotations of popular, notable people whose ideology differs from yours, maybe you could leave the material you don't like alone and find worthy quotations from notable people with ideologies that you are comfortable with - and add them to the articles?
• Evidently you have removed much more work that was reviewed & accepted by the administration of this project years or months ago in the last three months, than you've contributed in several years. Removing all those quotations seems an extreme example of POV-pushing. Still you use the phrase "pov pushing" regularly as you push your povs - as if you have been anointed to decide what is and what is not POV pushing. Were you?
  
• It seems we are witnessing a desperate, extremist act of censorship. The systematic removal of quotations from notable, well-known people who have expressed ideas which tyrants who may be fearful of the truth, fearful of democracy & ethics, tyrants who count on/aim for permanent war profit$ based on permanent conflict$ based on permanent deception, would find objectionable and would want removed. Very inconvenient truths for them. Perhaps their big lie is something like:
  The permanent flow of trillions of dollars for weapons, all justified with deception & intentionally cultivated hostilities with some nations (we mu$t have enemie$!), and dirty trick$ are all "good", while certain information that stands in opposition to our beloved mafia state, things like respect for the rule of law, international unity, integrity, diplomacy, truth, democracy, peace & other commonly values are "bad"?
• It seems that the hardworking, dedicated, educated, tolerant admins who've been here every day for years, would almost surely have removed anything significant that was inappropriate long ago if doing so was actually a good idea. But here we are.
• Perhaps you see yourself as someone with special powers of observation that exceed those of the admins?
• Maybe your actions here have been purchased? Sorry but it seems such a question should be asked. Maybe someday wikiquotians will sign an agreement, agreeing to certain conditions and standards. Hope so.
• You may want to note that many educated people believe those who put derogatory labels on others are not elevating themselves in so doing.
• Finally, i'm sorry, but not sorry for this conflict. It seems conflict has been and will remain a normal part of life, until the situation on our planet becomes worthy of being called 'civilized' (as long as the blind lead the blind). All conflicts that are well managed by mentally healthy adults seem to lead eventually to harmony. Of course, nobody has all the answers - but when we cooperate/work together - we move forward. It's not always easy & the truth rarely flatters.
  Agreeing to disagree, but please take it easy! 24.42.166.244 16:55, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

Calling a quote "Not A Quote" = bullshit. WQ Policy goal: 250 words per quote max

• Hi HOC: Earlier today, you wrote: "long editorial paragraphs are not "quotes" in a remarkably orwellian manner, as you removed premium, pro-democracy, pro-truth, pro-peace & sanity quotations from: well known & respected authors ie: Noam Chomsky, Ron Paul, and the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) (some of the countless quotes you've removed are listed below with word counts).
  
  Perhaps you are not aware that "250 words" is the target maximum # of words to be used in quotes here according to wikiquotes policy. The quotes you are saying are not quotes were by wikipedia's definitions, quotes. Please use wikiquotes definitions instead of making up your own here.
  Also, who would be interested in Wikiquotes if the quotations on controversial topics like NATO were all censored away by those who are foolishly trying to promote NATO? Such would not be good for humanity. It would clearly go against the fundamental principles of wikiquotes/wikipedia. You should know, that Nato has it's own web site & is over promoted already by corporate news media already. And that in a matter of time it will only be found in the history books so, all support of it are in vain.. :-)

Great Quotes Censored

• 139 words: There is a crisis brewing at the NATO-Russian border. It is no small matter. In his illuminating and judicious scholarly study of the region, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands, Richard Sakwa writes — all too plausibly — that the “Russo-Georgian war of August 2008 was in effect the first of the ‘wars to stop NATO enlargement;’ the Ukraine crisis of 2014 is the second. It is not clear whether humanity would survive a third.” The West sees NATO enlargement as benign. Not surprisingly, Russia, along with much of the Global South, has a different opinion, as do some prominent Western voices. George Kennan warned early on that NATO enlargement is a “tragic mistake,” and he was joined by senior American statesmen in an open letter to the White House describing it as a “policy error of historic proportions.”
  • Noam Chomsky, in Chomsky: Who Rules the World? BillMoyers.com (9 May 2016)

• 186 words: The Western response to Russia’s collapse was triumphalist. It was hailed as signaling “the end of history,” the final victory of Western capitalist democracy, almost as if Russia were being instructed to revert to its pre-World War I status as a virtual economic colony of the West. NATO enlargement began at once, in violation of verbal assurances to Gorbachev that NATO forces would not move “one inch to the east” after he agreed that a unified Germany could become a NATO member — a remarkable concession, in the light of history... The possibility that NATO might expand beyond Germany was not discussed with Gorbachev, even if privately considered.
  Soon, NATO did begin to move beyond, right to the borders of Russia. The general mission of NATO was officially changed to a mandate to protect “crucial infrastructure” of the global energy system, sea lanes and pipelines, giving it a global area of operations. Furthermore, under a crucial Western revision of the now widely heralded doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” sharply different from the official UN version, NATO may now also serve as an intervention force under US command.
  • Noam Chomsky, in Chomsky: Who Rules the World? BillMoyers.com (9 May 2016)

• 181 words: Of particular concern to Russia are plans to expand NATO to Ukraine. These plans were articulated explicitly at the Bucharest NATO summit of April 2008, when Georgia and Ukraine were promised eventual membership in NATO. The wording was unambiguous: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.” With the “Orange Revolution” victory of pro-Western candidates in Ukraine in 2004, State Department representative Daniel Fried rushed there and “emphasized US support for Ukraine’s NATO and Euro-Atlantic aspirations,” as a WikiLeaks report revealed.
  Russia’s concerns are easily understandable. They are outlined by international relations scholar John Mearsheimer in the leading US establishment journal, Foreign Affairs. He writes that “the taproot of the current crisis [over Ukraine] is NATO expansion and Washington’s commitment to move Ukraine out of Moscow’s orbit and integrate it into the West,” which Putin viewed as “a direct threat to Russia’s core interests.”.... “Who can blame him?” Mearsheimer asks, pointing out that “Washington may not like Moscow’s position, but it should understand the logic behind it.”
  • Noam Chomsky, in Chomsky: Who Rules the World? BillMoyers.com (9 May 2016)

NATO should have disbanded after the Cold War, just as the Warsaw Pact did... NATO is not a friend of peace. We don't need it. ~ Ron Paul

• 202 words: I work on the assumption that most people really want peace. Because of this, there needs to be a lot of propaganda, along with lies, intimidation and fear mongering in order to get people to foolishly acquiesce to war. This week, news broke regarding the emails of NATO Commander and U.S. General Philip Breedlove. Apparently Breedlove was plotting behind the scenes against Obama, who was not as confrontational with Russia as Breedlove would have liked. All back-channels were used to put pressure on Obama and U.S. public opinion about what was happening in Ukraine. One would think that this would be a major story in the media. But after The Intercept broke the news, it was picked up by a few other outlets, and then fell off the face of the Earth!
  NATO should have disbanded after the Cold War, just as the Warsaw Pact did. Instead of disbanding, NATO proceeded to gobble up Eastern European countries that were formerly a part of the Warsaw Pact. The "regime change" and absorption of Ukraine into NATO would put them right on Russia's border. NATO is not a friend of peace. We don't need it.
  • Ron Paul in NATO Is Not A Friend of Peace (5 July 2016)

• 240 words: We find troubling... NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s statement... that NATO members will agree to “further enhance NATOs military presence in the eastern part of the alliance,” adding... its “biggest reinforcement since the Cold War.” The likelihood of a military clash in the air or at sea – accidental or intentional – has grown sharply, the more so since, as we explain below, President Obama’s control over top U.S./NATO generals, some of whom like to play cowboy, is tenuous. Accordingly we encourage you, as we did before the last NATO summit, to urge your NATO colleagues to bring a “degree of judicious skepticism” to the table at Warsaw – especially with regard to the perceived threat from Russia.
  Many of us have spent decades studying Moscow’s foreign policy. We shake our heads in disbelief when we see Western leaders seemingly oblivious to what it means to the Russians to witness exercises on a scale not seen since Hitler’s armies launched “Unternehmen Barbarossa” 75 years ago, leaving 25 million Soviet citizens dead. In our view, it is irresponsibly foolish to believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin will not take countermeasures... Putin does not have the option of trying to reassure his generals that what they hear and see from NATO is mere rhetoric and posturing... In sum, Russia is bound to react strongly to what it regards as the unwarranted provocation of large military exercises along its western borders, including in Ukraine.

• Length of quotes: Inappropriately lengthy quotes will be trimmed or discarded, with a maximum of 250 words per quote, absent a consensus that exceptional circumstances exist.
  • https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wikiquote:Limits_on_quotations

• Wikiquote:Policies and guidelines
  Wikiquote is a collaborative project and its founders and contributors have a common goal:
  Our goal with Wikiquote is to create a free compendium of quotations--indeed, the largest compendium of quotations in history, in both breadth and depth. We also want Wikiquote to become a reliable resource.
  • https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wikiquote:Policies_and_guidelines

Please quit censoring everything that you don't like. :Thank you 24.42.166.244 17:56, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

Responding to the misleading claim above about quote length, Wikiquote:Quotability#Length says "Typically, the most quotable quotes are one line or two short lines. " Quoting from the same policy, 250 words is "a limit, not a goal. Carefully examine excessively long quotes to determine whether all of the material reproduced is really needed."

Thus for example, I shortened the 139-word Noam Chomsky quote mentioned above to 73 words: I believe what is STILL IN THE ARTICLE conveys his meaning: "There is a crisis brewing at the NATO-Russian border. It is no small matter. In his illuminating and judicious scholarly study of the region, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands, Richard Sakwa writes — all too plausibly — that the “Russo-Georgian war of August 2008 was in effect the first of the ‘wars to stop NATO enlargement;’ the Ukraine crisis of 2014 is the second. It is not clear whether humanity would survive a third.”

The 202-word Ron Paul quote mentioned above is also STILL IN THE ARTICLE although shortened to 61 words, again, it still represents his opinion of NATO: "NATO should have disbanded after the Cold War, just as the Warsaw Pact did. Instead of disbanding, NATO proceeded to gobble up Eastern European countries that were formerly a part of the Warsaw Pact. The "regime change" and absorption of Ukraine into NATO would put them right on Russia's border. NATO is not a friend of peace. We don't need it."

Anyone who looks at the part of the article I worked on so far, only the years 2016 to 2019, can easily see that despite removing much cruft, I also left many quotes that express your anti-NATO, pro-Russia opinion. Wikiquote is a collaborative project, and I hope editors who have not been banned will contribute to improving the NATO article. HouseOfChange (talk) 19:36, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

Removing paragraphs of editorializing and COATRACK pov-pushing from more sections

2021 section

I trimmed some long unquotable passages in this section. The following quotes I removed from the article; posting them here so others can decide if they are COATRACK POV-pushing or relevant quotable quotes about NATO. HouseOfChange (talk) 12:49, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

• During the transition to the new Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright famously asked Gen. Colin Powell, then chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" In 1999, as secretary of state under Bill Clinton, Albright got her wish, running roughshod over the UN Charter with an illegal war to carve out an independent Kosovo from the ruins of Yugoslavia. The UN Charter clearly prohibits the threat or use of military force except in cases of self-defense or when the UN Security Council takes military action "to maintain or restore international peace and security." This was neither. When U.K. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told Albright his government was "having trouble with our lawyers" over NATO's illegal war plan, Albright crassly told him to "get new lawyers."
  • Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies, Congress loots the Treasury for U.S. war machine — while bickering over Build Back Better, Salon, (December 7, 2021)

• Twenty-two years later, Kosovo is the third-poorest country in Europe (after Moldova and post-coup Ukraine) and its independence is still not recognized by 96 countries. Hashim Thaçi, Albright's hand-picked main ally in Kosovo and later its president, is awaiting trial in an international court at the Hague, charged with murdering at least 300 civilians under cover of NATO bombing in 1999 to extract and sell their internal organs on the international transplant market. Clinton and Albright's gruesome and illegal war set the precedent for more illegal U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, with equally devastating and horrific results.
  • Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies, Congress loots the Treasury for U.S. war machine — while bickering over Build Back Better, Salon, (December 7, 2021)

• Well, I was myself recently also in Afghanistan, and I sat down with the mothers in these displacement camps around Kabul. And I asked them, “What about the future? What do you think of the future?” And they told me very clearly, “We believe we will starve and freeze to death this harsh winter, unless there is an enormous aid operation coming through and unless there is a public sector again that is able to provide services.” It is as acute as that. Forty million civilians were left behind when the NATO countries went for the door in August.
  • Jan Egeland, Hell on Earth”: Millions of Afghans Face Starvation as U.S. & West Freeze Billions in Gov’t Funds, Democracy Now!, (16 November 2021)

• To illustrate the Pentagon’s ho-hum acceptance of mass destruction, it recently opened in Omaha its new, $1.3 billion Strategic Command headquarters for supervising and targeting the nuclear arsenal, and it named the building after General Curtis LeMay, who, the Omaha World Herald reported, designed and conducted the incendiary bombing of 60 Japanese cities at the end of WWII, bombing that “incinerated entire cities” killing as many as 900,000 civilians. General LeMay’s motto and that of Strategic Command used to be “Death from Above,” but after the war it was changed to “Peace is Our Profession.”
  In Germany, readiness for attacks with nuclear weapons is maintained by the USAF 702nd Munitions Support Squadron, which tends to Germany’s 33rd Fighter-Bomber Wing at Büchel Air Force Base. Headlines from last October’s bombing “theater” included, and “NATO Holds Secret Nuclear War Exercises in Germany,” “German Air Force training for nuclear war as part of NATO;” from 2017, “NATO nuclear weapons exercise unusually open”; and in 2015, “NATO nuclear weapons exercise Steadfast Noon in Büchel.”
  While the uninitiated might be aghast, the US military plans and prepares all year round for nuclear attacks at its far-flung “Defense Nuclear Weapons School” of the Air Force Nuclear College. According to the school’s website, one branch (of “Armageddon Academy”) is at the Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany, the largest US military base outside the country.
  • US and NATO Nuclear Lunacy Still Raving by John Laforge, CounterPunch, December 24, 2021

• How likely is doomsday? Well back to Ukraine, regarding which, on December 1, Russian President Putin asked the west for legal guarantees that it would cease eastward expansion. This request, made because Washington’s word is worthless (vide just for starters, the Iran nuclear pact, and President George H.W. Bush’s promise that NATO would never, ho, ho, expand to Russia’s borders) and met with scoffs by the white house, comes amid complicated tensions. The Kiev military recently claimed it used Turkish attack drones “in combat against ethnic Russian rebels,” Finian Cunningham reported October 28 in Information Clearing House. This is not good. Turkey is in NATO. If Turkey gets tangled up in the Ukraine imbroglio, that substantially escalates things. According to Anatol Lieven in Responsible Statecraft on November 24, “Moscow is especially alarmed by Ukraine’s acquisition of Turkish Bayraktar combat drones,” used to such deadly effect by Azerbaijan in its 2020 conquest of Armenian territory. Unlike the F-35, these things actually work. Worse, Cunningham reports that “American, British and Canadian military advisors… have carried out training missions with UAF combat units.” Now the Kremlin has warned that “NATO’s support to the Kiev regime was posing a direct threat to Russia’s national security.” That’s called drawing a red line. In fact, on December 2, Putin called NATO deployment of troops to Ukraine exactly that, a red line. Will the U.S. and NATO be stupid enough to cross it? If so, now would be a good time to invest in a bomb shelter.
  • Dangerous Games: Western Militaries on the Doorsteps of Russia and China, by Eve Ottenberg, CounterPunch, December 10, 2021

• With regard to nuclear weapons, the situation is far more dangerous than the last Doomsday Clock report. New weapons systems under development are much more effectively dangerous. The Biden administration, expanding upon Trump’s confrontational approach, has Chomsky at a loss for words to describe the danger at hand. Only recently, Biden met with NATO leaders and instructed them to plan on two wars, China and Russia. According to Chomsky: “This is beyond insanity.” Not only that, the group is carrying out provocative acts when diplomacy is really needed. This is an extraordinarily dangerous situation.
  According to Chomsky, the Doomsday Clock setting at 100 seconds to midnight is based upon: (1) global warming (2) nuclear war and (3) disinformation, or the collapse of any kind of rational discourse. As such, number three makes it impossible to deal with the first two major problems... As a result, Chomsky says: “We’re living in a world of total illusion and fantasy.” Accordingly, “Unless this is dealt with soon, it’ll be impossible to deal with the two major issues within the time span that we have available, which is not very long.”
  • A World of Total Illusion and Fantasy: Noam Chomsky on the Future of the Planet, Robert Hunziker, CounterPunch (12 July 2021)

HouseOfChange (talk) 12:49, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

2022 section

I trimmed some longer passages, and removed the following not-very-quotable quotes, still leaving many behind that assert the same POV but have at least more relevance to NATO itself, as opposed to mentioning NATO en passant to a defense of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. HouseOfChange (talk) 13:18, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

• • Russia is right: The West promised not to enlarge NATO, and these promises were broken.
  • Tarik Cyril Amar, Russia is right: The West promised not to enlarge NATO & these promises were broken, RT, 15 January 2022

• Is the proxy war in Ukraine turning out to be only a lead-up to something larger, involving world famine and a foreign-exchange crisis for food- and oil-deficit countries? Many more people are likely to die of famine and economic disruption than on the Ukrainian battlefield. It thus is appropriate to ask whether what appeared to be the Ukraine proxy war is part of a larger strategy to lock in U.S. control over international trade and payments. We are seeing a financially weaponized power grab by the U.S. Dollar Area over the Global South as well as over Western Europe. Without dollar credit from the United States and its IMF subsidiary, how can countries stay afloat? How hard will the U.S. act to block them from de-dollarizing, opting out of the U.S. economic orbit? U.S. Cold War strategy is not alone in thinking how to benefit from provoking a famine, oil and balance-of-payments crisis. Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum worries that the world is overpopulated – at least with the “wrong kind” of people. As Microsoft philanthropist (the customary euphemism for rentier monopolist) Bill Gates has explained: “Population growth in Africa is a challenge.”
  • Michael Hudson, Is US/NATO (with WEF help) pushing for a Global South famine? (6 June 2022)

• Unfortunately, it’s US “diplomacy” which brought the US, Russia, Ukraine, and NATO to the current standoff. As the Warsaw Pact disintegrated and the Soviet Union collapsed, US encouragement for those events included pledges that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization wouldn’t take advantage of the situation to expand eastward. Since then, NATO has inexorably pushed in that direction, nearly doubling the number of member states. Thanks, US “diplomacy.”... Things began coming to a head with the US-sponsored coup in Ukraine that replaced its “Russia-friendly” regime with a “US/Europe-friendly” regime in 2014, courtesy of Barack Obama. Thanks, US “diplomacy.”
  Then in 2019, the US withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which forbade the US to place missiles within surprise strike distance of Russia, and Russia to place similar missiles within surprise strike distance of NATO. The US followed up by placing exactly such missiles in Poland, courtesy of Donald Trump. Some “diplomacy.”... Then the US went into overdrive (courtesy of Trump and Biden) against the opening of a pipeline (Nord Stream 2) which would have supplied Russian natural gas to Germany. The pipeline would have been a force for peace insofar as Russia likes to sell natural gas (at a fraction of prices the US can offer), and Germans like to not freeze to death.
  • Ukraine: US “Diplomacy” is the Problem. Can it Become the Solution? Thomas Knapp, CounterPunch, February 23, 2022

• As in a Greek tragedy whose protagonist brings about precisely the fate that he has sought to avoid, the US/NATO confrontation with Russia in Ukraine is achieving just the opposite of America’s aim of preventing China, Russia and their allies from acting independently of U.S. control over their trade and investment policy... The basic U.S. policy has been to threaten to destabilize countries and perhaps bomb them until they agree to adopt neoliberal policies and privatize their public domain. But taking on Russia, China and Iran is a much higher order of magnitude. NATO has disarmed itself of the ability to wage conventional warfare by handing over its supply of weaponry – admittedly largely outdated – to be devoured in Ukraine... All that NATO can do is bomb from a distance. It can destroy, but not occupy. The United States found that out in Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan. And just as the assassination Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo (now Bosnia-Herzegovina) triggered World War I in 1914, NATO’s bombing of adjoining Serbia may be viewed as throwing down the gauntlet to turn Cold War 2 into a veritable World War III. That marked the point at which NATO became an offensive alliance, not a defensive one.... Russia is no more in a position to invade Western Europe than NATO countries are to send conscripts to fight Russia.
  • Michael Hudson, American Diplomacy as a Tragic Drama, (28 July 2022)

• In the case of Ukraine, NATO membership for that country implied the expulsion of Russia from the naval base of Sevastopol in Crimea (a city of immense importance to Russia, both strategic and emotional), and the creation of a hard international frontier between Russia and the Russian and Russian-speaking minorities in Ukraine, making up more than a third of the Ukrainian population....while the terms of any compromise with Russia over Ukraine would involve some tough negotiation, we can seek such a compromise without fearing that this will open the way for further Russian moves to destroy NATO and subjugate eastern Europe—a ridiculous idea for anyone who knows either the goals of the Russian establishment or the character of Poles and Estonians.
  • Anatol Lieven,Russia Has Been Warning About Ukraine for Decades. The West Should Have Listened Time,  January 25, 2022

• Failing at least initial moves towards such a compromise, it does indeed look likely that there will be some form of new Russian attack on Ukraine, though by no means necessarily a large-scale invasion. In the event of war, however far the Russian army marches will be followed by a new Russian proposal for a deal in return for Russian withdrawal. The only difference between then and now will be that NATO will have been humiliated by its inability to fight, the West and Ukraine will be in a much weaker position to negotiate a favorable deal—and that in the meantime, thousands of people will have died.
  • Anatol Lieven,Russia Has Been Warning About Ukraine for Decades. The West Should Have Listened Time,  January 25, 2022

• That NATO advance makes no sense. It is going to lead us again to a division of the world.
  • José Mujica, referring to 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Quoted in José Mujica habla así de Putin y augura qué va a pasar: alucinan hasta los periodistas, huffingtonpost (19 July 2021)

• We had a moment in history, between 1988 and 1991, where we could have worked with Mikhail Gorbachev to make his vision of perestroika succeed. Instead, we allowed him to fail, without any real plan on how we would live with what emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union. Save for a short period of time during the Second World War where we needed the Soviet Union to defeat Germany and Japan, we have been in a continual state of political conflict with the Soviet Union. Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, we viewed the Russian Federation more as a defeated enemy that we needed to keep down, than a friend in need of a helping hand up. Yeltsin’s Russia was useful to the US and NATO only to the extent that we could exploit it economically while controlling its domestic politics in a manner that kept Russia in a perpetual state of weakness. The Obama “reset” was simply a ploy to remove Vladimir Putin, who rejected the vision of Russia projected by the west, and replace him with Dmitri Medvedev, whom Obama believed could be remade in the figure of Yeltsin. The fact that Putin believes in a strong Russia has upset the plans of the US, NATO, and Europe for post-Cold War hegemony, predicated as they were on a weak, compliant Russian state.
  • Scott Ritter as quoted in What Are The Prospects For Peace? by John Rachel, Dissident Voice / February 24th, 2022

• There’s a lot of talk about nuclear weapons. Why? Russia respects Article five of the NATO treaty, which is an attack against one is an attack against all. Russia is fully cognizant of the fact that if it attacks Poland or the Baltic states, it’s at war with NATO, and they know what that means.
  But NATO doesn’t respect anything about Russia... NATO’s been expanding nonstop. They lied about it, about not wanting to do it back in 1990 to Gorbachev, they’ve lied about it ever since... But one of the whole reasons we’re at war in Ukraine right now is because of NATO wanting to expand and bring Ukraine into its umbrella. So when Russia moved into Ukraine, it also had to mollify Belarus, which is very nervous saying, well, okay, while you guys are down here doing the Ukraine thing, what’s to protect us? What if NATO decides to come into us? So Russia... said, if NATO decides to get involved in this, intervene, we will use all the means at our disposal to protect ourselves. And everybody went nuclear... There are other weapons that Russia has called hypersonics... I think what Russia was saying is we will take out NATO cities, NATO decision making centers, with non-nuclear means, all the means at our disposal. And Putin talked about weapons that are deployed such as the Kinzhal or the dagger, the hypersonic missile that’s been used, NATO can’t shoot it down... If Russia launches it against NATO, it will hit the target...
  • Scott Ritter: Don't Believe the Hype. Ukraine Can't Win This War; The Real News Network; (15 November 2022)

• Despite assurances to the contrary, NATO is not a ‘defensive organization’. Even though American memories are short, people elsewhere remember the bombing campaign against Serbia, and the removal of Gaddafi from power in Libya. What NATO is in fact is the military arm of US hegemony, a hegemony that has seen it expand eastwards through Europe, right up to Russia’s very own borders.
  • Niccolo Soldo, "Fuck it!" Russia's Final Break With the West, Substack, 24 February 2022

Long passages of editorializing by non-notable people, none of which are notable or quotable

IMO none of the following quotes are suited to WQ's mission of hosting short notable/quotable passages. Archiving them here for those who want to check whether they agree. The uniform POV expressed in these is still amply represented in the article, but in more quotable ways. HouseOfChange (talk) 09:03, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

• The key issue is the status of NATO and the role of NATO in general and particularly with regard to the Ukraine. First, let me just begin with the more general issue of NATO. I think the Soviet Union to the very end expected that NATO would simply disappear because the Soviet counterpart to NATO, the Warsaw Pact effectively went out of business in 1989. And, you know, NATO didn’t seem to have any purpose anymore since the Cold War — by everybody’s agreement — was effectively over by the end of 1989.
  • David Gibbs, in NATO Expansion Key to Understanding Threat of War on Russia-Ukraine Border: Interview with David Gibbs, professor of history at the University of Arizona, conducted by Scott Harris, Between the Lines, December 15, 2021

• In terms of the Ukraine, in 2008, there were repeated statements by both U.S. and NATO officials that the Ukraine would be welcomed into NATO, and the Russians insisted that that was simply a bridge too far and they would not allow it.... I think there’s a tendency not to realize how provocative this is to the Russians in light of A, the fact that this is a violation of a U.S. agreement and B, that this is directly on the southern border of Russia. It’s a little bit like how the United States would feel if, let’s say, Russia established an alliance with Mexico and began building bases in Mexico.
  • David Gibbs, in NATO Expansion Key to Understanding Threat of War on Russia-Ukraine Border: Interview with David Gibbs, professor of history at the University of Arizona, conducted by Scott Harris, Between the Lines, December 15, 2021

• While Civil Society and a global movement work steadfastly across dozens of fields for the abolition of nuclear weapons, planning, preparations, and rehearsals for attacks using deployed H-bombs and nuclear missiles are routine in the US military and NATO.
  • US and NATO Nuclear Lunacy Still Raving by John Laforge, CounterPunch, December 24, 2021

• NATO, originally set up to counter the USSR’s expansion into Europe, was left without a raison d’etre after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR. Nevertheless, it pressed on eastwards, and thanks to the CIA and MI6, effected Colour Revolutions to put into power friendly regimes that sought NATO membership in places like Tbilisi and Kiev. Where Colour Revolutions weren’t necessary due to historical grievances against Russia, NATO missile systems pointed at Russia have been set up (Romania and Poland).
  • Niccolo Soldo, "Fuck it!" Russia's Final Break With the West, Substack, 24 February 2022

• The alliance’s expansion coincided with the creeping spread of neoliberalism, helping secure the dominance of U.S. financial capital and sustain the rapacious military-industrial complex that underpins much of its economy and society. The umbilical bond between NATO membership and neoliberalism was expressed clearly by leading Atlanticists throughout the alliance’s eastward march.
  • Pawel Warden, "NATO and the Long War on the Third World." Monthly Review. January 1, 2023.