Brussels, June 13, 2021
At a meeting of NATO
foreign ministers on June 1 in preparation for
the Brussels summit, the alliance's Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg
emphasized that
NATO 2030 is about enhancing NATO's role in preserving the rules-based
international order, which he said is challenged by authoritarian
regimes, like Russia and China. He said this
requires strengthening existing partnerships and building new ones,
including in the Asia-Pacific, Africa, and Latin America -- in other
words extending NATO's reach to regions far beyond
the north Atlantic to China's own neighbourhood and regions where the
U.S. is stirring up trouble by meddling and aggressively contending
with China in particular for influence and
markets.
At a June 4 event in Washington, DC,
organized by NATO, the German
Council of Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution, where one
of the main topics for discussion was
China, Stoltenberg said the communiqué that will be approved
at the
summit will have "much more language on China than we have ever had
before." He claimed NATO was not declaring
China an adversary, but went on to paint it as a threat to U.S. global
dominance, urging other members of the alliance to get on the U.S.
bandwagon against China, in the spirit, if not the
letter, of NATO's Article 5 on collective "defence" which says that an
attack on any NATO member is an attack on all of them. This was the
basis on which, shortly after 9/11, Canada and
some European countries were dragged into the U.S. war on Afghanistan,
an act of brazen aggression in which the aggressor claimed to be acting
in self-defence.
The Secretary
General of NATO made an effort to underline the importance of Europe and
North America working together and overcoming the differences that
became particularly acute during Trump's presidency. He said in
Washington that NATO has become “even more valuable" to the
United States, as it is a great advantage for the U.S. not to
have to confront the "security consequences" of China's rise and the
shifting global balance of power alone but together with the alliance's
29 other members. (In a similar vein, U.S. President
Joe Biden, upon his arrival in England on June 9, underlined his
support for NATO and set himself apart from his predecessor in remarks
made to U.S. troops at Royal Air Force
Mildenhall, saying that at the NATO summit he will make it clear that
"the United States commitment to our NATO alliance in Article 5 is rock
solid.")
In making the case in support of the U.S.
warmongering
against China, Stoltenberg referred to the fact that the U.S. is no
longer top dog in all domains, that China will soon surpass it in terms
of the size of the economy. He said China is seeking to
control
critical infrastructure in NATO countries and around the world and is
leading in some of the most important technologies, including parts of
artificial intelligence and autonomous systems. He raised the alarm
further saying China already has the second largest defense budget, the
biggest Navy, and is investing heavily in advanced military
capabilities. He did not need to add that for China to approach the
military capacity of the U.S. would be intolerable for the
"indispensable" power that heads up NATO. On the basis of this
warmongering logic, ratcheting up war preparations is in
order.
Related
to this, Stoltenberg made clear that "burden sharing" remains on NATO's
agenda as always -- meaning that NATO members must stay the anti-social
course of increasing their military budgets until they account for at
least two per cent of their national expenditures, no matter how much
their debt and deficits have grown as a result of the pandemic
and
its attendant pay-the-rich schemes, or how much the peoples of their
countries demand military spending be cut, not increased.
NATO's
Values
Another problem with China is that it
does not share NATO's values,
Stoltenberg said. The values NATO claims to stand for have been
expressed differently at different times and for
different purposes. However upon signing the Cold War-era North
Atlantic Treaty to become a member of NATO, a country affirms its
commitment to safeguard "the freedom, common
heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles
of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law....to promote
stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area...
[and] to unite their efforts for collective defence and for the
preservation of peace and security."
In
fact, NATO has never worked to preserve peace and security for
the
peoples of Europe, but to establish political and military structures
which would not permit people's empowerment. Its participation in at
least three U.S. wars of aggression (against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan
and Libya) provide whatever proof is required to show it is not a force
for peace or security. As for the rule of law, increasingly NATO speaks
less and less about the need to uphold international law and the rule
of law, referring instead to the need to defend and preserve "the
rules-based international order." The rule of law is based on
recognized public
standards for judging what is and is not acceptable, what is a crime
and the punishment for it. The fraud of what is
referred to as a "rules-based international order" is that there are
those who control the rules and exercise their own discretion about
what must be done to follow the rules and what the
punishments are for failure to abide by them. When the U.S. or U.S. and
NATO give themselves the right to enforce the rules they make and
impose on other countries, typically through coercive measures up
to and including military intervention to remove their governments,
they are acting in contempt of international law. Defence of the
rules-based international order that NATO has made the centrepiece of
its mission is the antithesis of the rule of law and amounts to nothing
more than might makes right.
As for the democracy
that NATO stands for, it is to
impede any
people vesting decision-making power in themselves. Today, when the
fight is precisely for people's empowerment and for new arrangements so
the people participate in governance and in setting the direction of
the economy and of the foreign policy of their countries based on what
favours them, NATO is in no position to give any nation lessons about
democracy. Even within NATO there is no democracy. It claims that
decisions taken by its North Atlantic Council, which are made on the
basis of unanimity, with no voting taking place, and which all must
accept, are “the expression of the collective will of all
member
countries."
It is time the taboo is ended on
discussing all these matters,
including the role the aggressive NATO alliance plays in the world,
whether Canada should be a member of NATO or not,
and whether NATO should even exist. Since NATO's founding in 1949 to
the present there has been no discussion or debate allowed in
Parliament on any of these things. Canada's
membership in NATO is to be regarded as a fait accompli,
end of story. Nor is there discussion about the fact that decisions are
taken by NATO -- a supranational body -- then
imposed on Canadians without any participation by Members of
Parliament, much less the people of Canada.
Canadians,
along with people in the U.S. and Europe are using the
occasion of NATO's summit to hold actions and events such as
counter-summits to have these much-needed discussions and make
plans to build a movement calling for their countries to get out of
NATO and for NATO to be dismantled. Join in!
Brussels, June 13, 2021
This article was published in
Volume 51 Number 14 - June 13, 2021
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2021/Articles/MS51142.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
