An article republished in the online magazine Kontinent USA considers the perils of Western saber rattling against Moscow and Beijing, warning that NATO hostility “threatens to set in train a Cuban Missile Crisis of truly global magnitude.”
“Recall that in 1962, nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union was averted only at the last moment,” writes German Bundestag member Sevim Dagdelen. “To resolve the crisis, US Jupiter missiles – developed by former Nazi rocket engineer Werner von Braun – had to be withdrawn from Italy’s south-eastern region of Puglia and the Turkish city of Izmir.”
“Since then, an unspoken diplomatic rule has held that countries in the close proximity of great powers should neither be bound by military pacts, nor make their territories available to rival alliances,” the politician notes.
But since the 1990s, NATO expansion amid Western triumphalism over the fall of the Soviet Union threatens to bring the world back to the precipice of nuclear annihilation, Dagdelen warns. Author and historian Dr. Gerald Horne joined Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program to assess the odds of global conflict as NATO’s summit in Washington and US naval drills in the Pacific signal an escalation of tensions beyond already heightened levels.
“It’s clear that US imperialism and its accomplices in NATO are threatening World War Three, and it’s important to add that China is in the bullseye,” said Horne, a researcher at the University of Houston in Texas. “What was remarkable about this NATO summit, the 75th anniversary noted and marked in Washington, DC, was its attention to geography. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization mentioned China repeatedly in its various communiques.”
“We had thought that when NATO came into being 75-odd years ago that Moscow was being made the target, and to be sure Moscow remains a major target as evidenced by this escapade in Ukraine,” he observed. But the academic claimed China has also become a major focus of the alliance’s attention amid Beijing’s stratospheric economic rise, arguing, “the only hope for US imperialism right now is somehow to manipulate India against China.”
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), founded in 1949, is typically portrayed as a defensive alliance formed to protect Europe against the threat of alleged communist aggression. But the organization was founded a full six years before the creation of the Warsaw Pact, an alliance of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies.
Moscow was compelled to respond to NATO after West Germany’s accession to the US-led alliance; Germany’s invasion of Russia just a few years prior led to the death of 27 million Soviet citizens, 70% of whom were civilians.
Now as the rise of China once again threatens global Western dominance, Beijing has joined Moscow in presenting an alternative model of development to the US-led capitalist order. Although America has made efforts to court Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Horne suggests India will not become an offensive pawn against Beijing as Japan was against Moscow a century ago.
“Even though these two giants fought a war in 1962… Prime Minister Modi visiting Moscow just a few days ago suggests that it will be more than a notion, once again, to get India to join this anti-China train, particularly since India is the ‘I’ in BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa,” the researcher observed.
“India is part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which had its summit in Kazakhstan just a few days ago. And so this presents a riddled dilemma of US imperialism.”
China is home to a population of over 1.4 billion and is the world’s third largest nation by territorial landmass. Although some Western analysts debate the country’s capacity to project military power worldwide, Beijing now possesses the world’s largest Navy by number of ships, granting it substantial defensive capabilities.
Admiral Philip Davidson, appointed commander of the United States’ Indo-Pacific Command under former President Donald Trump, once claimed the US must go to war with China by 2027 to stem its threat to Western global hegemony. General Mike Minihan, appointed commander of the US Air Force’s Air Mobility Command under President Joe Biden, insisted the confrontation must take place by 2025.
China is a nuclear-armed power, possessing some 500 nuclear weapons while its ally Russia maintains over 5,500. Any conflict with Moscow or Beijing threatens the detonation of these destructive munitions, risking massive loss of life if not the end of human life itself.
“World imperialism is in crisis but that doesn't necessarily mean that it will go down without a fight,” Horne warned.
“A beast, which is what imperialism is, is oftentimes most dangerous when it's cornered and feels like it's losing its grip because of precisely the state of affairs today as we speak.”