Fallen Star: NATO’s Blood-Soaked Dance of the Seven Betrayals

Oblivious to its contradictions, NATO knows that the Soviet Union was all but 70 when it unilaterally dissolved. With NATO’s own 70th anniversary rapidly approaching in 2019, the Alliance’s rationale for keeping Europeans trapped in the past remains its sinister coupling to the US military and the European Union.  

But as the EU enters a race to the bottom and many Americans question whether the Alliance works at all, NATO must continually reinvent its enemies. This regression to cold war era status follows a grim procession of serial betrayals. Yet how is it possible that NATO can wrench Europe from the stability it has always craved?   

Steady Luck: Faced with a rational opponent in the USSR, NATO played a careful hand. While boasting that the EU-NATO Axis maintained peace, it was nuclear weapons that had really kept NATO in the game. NATO’s first betrayal was its obdurate refusal to disband shortly after 1991. The Alliance could have gently faded into a peaceful sunset, its mission accomplished, the curtain drawn down on decades of division in Europe and Russia incorporated into a new common security framework. But NATO had other ideas and this required both new enemies and the careful repackaging of the old. And as the former Yugoslavia tore itself to pieces, NATO found its lifeline.

First Blood: NATO’s second betrayal saw its founding charter of 1949 ripped to shreds when its warplanes attacked the Bosnian Serbs in 1994. NATO was 45 and hadn’t yet fired a single shot. But its mid life crisis was going to get much worse.  This betrayal was only possible because the global order had fatefully entered a uni-polar phase. From this point on, NATO roiled along a corpse strewn road that put the West on the path to Kosovo, Iraq in 2003, Libya, and to where we are today- an unrestrained NATO whose self doubt has been filled with the insufferably arrogant concept of liberal interventionism and a distressingly parasitic relationship with the EU’s expansionist feudal communitarianism.  

NATO crossed the Rubicon in 1994 and was no longer any kind of defensive alliance but one that was ready to use its potential of up to 7 million soldiers and the member states’ 70% of global defence spending to carve out a new world order: it is a far cry from what NATO’s founders had envisaged when the Soviet Union controlled eastern Europe. The truth is, NATO had killed and found it quite satisfying: maritime patrols and no-flight zones weren’t ever again going to be enough.  

In 1995 NATO launched Operation Deliberate Force against the Bosnian Serbs with 400 planes and Tomahawk cruise missile strikes. NATO had sided with one faction in a civil war and put the Luftwaffe back in the skies for the first time since 1945. This scenario of incremental involvement would become standard interventionist protocol.  

By the end of the 90s, Germany’s post unification euphoria now cringed in guilty horror before the gore-spattered Balkans where NATO emerged resplendent from the carnage slick with blood and born again strong.   NATO’s 1999 mass air offensive against Yugoslavia was based on the lie that 100,000 Albanian males had disappeared in Kosovo. It also rested on a highly restricted media debate with the western intelligentsia easily co-opted into the duplicitous narrative of liberal interventionism

NATO’s Blitzkrieg: Voluminous US documentary evidence reveals that the real intent behind the devastating bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was to punish Serbia for its refusal to compromise its own sovereignty by orientating itself towards the EU-NATO Axis. NATO’s war would leave 5000 civilians dead and Kosovo a nexus of mafia and extremist activity that is still run by NATO to this day.  Willing Accomplices?

Journalists, NGOs, and intellectuals cowered at the prospect of questioning NATO’s manipulation of the UN as cover for its armed aggression, fearing they would be flayed as racists indifferent to genocide in distant lands. The fact that NATO’s allies might be holy psychopaths or Nazi paramilitaries was wished away in the general progressive narrative where outraged immigrant pressure groups that are normally anti-western, suddenly become the teary eyed pleading fans of the Alliance’s airpower.

War is Peace: Those who opposed the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 were castigated as Milošević’s sympathizers, while opponents of the 2011 Libyan intervention were derided as right wing racists who had contempt for North Africans as being unfit for democracy. Yet in both cases, NATO intervention worsened the existing humanitarian crises with disastrous long term consequences.

NATO’s third betrayal was its crass march to the east despite the fact that James Baker had given an ironclad guarantee not to expand the Alliance’s existing territory: this is confirmed by hundreds of notes and memos in US archives, and John Matlock, the US ambassador to Moscow in 1991, agrees that Russia was indeed given ‘firm guarantees.’  

Breaking its promise never to move a ‘thumbs inch eastwards,’ NATO shamelessly gorged on Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary in 1999 in triumphal celebration of its 50th birthday.  But the gambler was on a winning streak and had thrown caution to the wind: the Baltic States, Bulgaria and the Czech and Slovak Republics, along with Romania, joined in 2004. Croatia and Albania gained NATO membership in 2009, while Montenegro is the latest addition. NATO has therefore lurched not just eastwards, but north east and south east, its aggrandizement coordinated with EU expansion and the undermining of Sweden and Finland’s long cherished neutrality.  

NATO’s fourth betrayal is the creeping encirclement of Russia with a single militarized front now running from the Arctic Circle to Turkey with the Black Sea acting as a NATO lake. This challenges Russia with the most dangerous threat on her doorstep since June 1941: it is a infuriating betrayal of all that was hoped for when, in 1989, millions took to the streets for what they believed would be a safer future.  

Instead, NATO, now all but unhindered by the internal dissent that would never have allowed this provocative policy in previous decades, has used loopholes in the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe to steadily press its forward attack posture. Rightly convinced that the real aim of this is to achieve first strike superiority, Russia has taken all necessary steps to defend the nation. But NATO’s relentless propaganda machine spins even these wholly justified countermeasures as proof of Russia’s ‘threat to Europe.’  As Russia responds to NATO’s military buildup, Raytheon’s patriot missiles are now parked outside Warsaw.  

Europeans must ask themselves if this is the Europe we wish to live in as NATO approaches 70 and the Soviet Union disappeared a quarter of a century ago.

The Serpent Uncoils: Anakonda 2016 will see over 25,000 NATO soldiers embark on war games from June 7th. The drills will run pressed up close to Russia’s Kaliningrad Oblast where almost a million Russian citizens live. These will be the largest ever drills on Russia’s frontiers and include Ukrainian troops headquartered in Lublin as part of the LITPOLUKR Brigade.

NATO’s fifth betrayal is the betrayal of democracy. Far from being an alliance of democratic states dedicated to European collective self-defence, NATO cynically exploited the world after 1991 for enduring geopolitical gain. Turkey is rapidly lurching away from its western democratic anchor, while still reaping the benefits of NATO protection and the EU’s liberal sycophancy.    

Moreover, no EU member state’s voters have any say whatsoever concerning NATO’s constant stealth frontloading on the eastern flanks. Electorally, NATO is all but invisible and what cannot be seen remains unimpeded: after having witnessed people power up close in 1989- NATO will slither behind the curtain until the EU order is truly threatened, or it triggers the unthinkable on Russia’s borders and its provocations explode in its face. UKIP is alone among British political parties in realizing the menace posed by the lack of accountability in the EU and by extension, NATO itself.

Along with illegal wars has come an ideological belief in the innate superiority of western liberal democracy and all the politically correct baggage that goes with it.

While NATO has fused with the increasingly authoritarian EU, it covertly sponsors  what it believes to be the only way it can truly win- regime change in any country it considers to be incompatible with its interests and values.  

Such flawed thinking led to the Maydan Putsch where even as Ukraine tottered in 2014, under the Rapid Trident Exercises, NATO had forces tearing about the country. Meanwhile, Libya lay bleeding and Kosovo languished under NATO direct rule.

Had NATO learned nothing from Yugoslavia’s implosion, or was it again seeking to justify its onerous existence by this time capitalizing on Ukraine’s agony?

The fact that 94% of Crimean’s citizens voted to rejoin Russia predictably meant nothing to NATO. Illegal wars and permanent conflict have become NATO’s norm, a panacea for the near death experience it suffered in 1991- and unfortunately survived.  

As EU citizens become more disillusioned with the European Commission’s autocracy, euroskeptic parties achieving power is just a matter of time. Having sunk its heart and soul into the EU, NATO might see a sovereignty based movement in a member state in much the same way as it saw the Serbs. The alarming truth is that NATO’s ideology, welded as it is to the EU, can readily be deployed to oppress European citizens on a massive scale.

All indices- political, strategic, economic, and ideological suggest that NATO would act as an occupier should the EU ever reach tipping point. Instead of Budapest or Prague waking up to the rattle of the Red Army’s tanks- it would be NATO’s armored columns rolling through the streets this time.

NATO’s sixth betrayal is the current migrant crisis where the Alliance’s ships have used the cover of international law to expedite the flow of 1.5 million migrants into the EU. Embedded within the refugees, terrorists are able to infiltrate Europe at will- courtesy of NATO.

In the event of the need for NATO to intervene militarily in an EU state on behalf of Washington and the European Commission, a society that is polarized by mass migration and its attendant pockets of religious radicalism is that much more plausible a candidate for full blown NATO occupation. Might the Netherlands, or Belgium end up under NATO governance just like Kosovo?  

NATO’s seventh betrayal is the criminally false promise it has touted to Russia’s neighbors that confrontation somehow secures peace. Indeed, no NATO planner thinks that the Baltic States or Moldova, let alone Ukraine and Georgia, are militarily defensible. These countries have been sold the worst security deal since the Franco-Polish Agreement of 1939.

Fortunately, Russia has no designs on any of them- which is perhaps something the local elites fully understand even as they agitate for NATO funds and EU investment.  

NATO has signed a grubby Faustian pact in these states where ethnically divided populations are held hostage by an EU-salaried nomeklatura and where citizens are kept blinkered by a Russophobic media, local fascist demagogues, and the pavlovian begging bowl politics of Brussels’ handouts.  

The danger is that NATO still dreams of repeating its self- proclaimed victory of 1989, its 70th birthday due just as Ukraine plans to hold a no doubt highly divisive referendum on joining NATO.  

Frustrated by Russia’s unity and her growing strategic potential in Eurasia, NATO seems predestined to splurge on the ultimate birthday gift: assimilating both Ukraine and Georgia 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Perilously addicted to gambling, paranoid, and cursed with a something to prove personality, betting on Ukraine joining the Alliance would see NATO staring at its last, tragic throw of the dice.         

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.