Christopher Hedges on Nato expansion

[Ajay0]

Pulitzer prize winning American journalist, Presbyterian minister and senior lecturer Christopher Lynn Hedge's insights on NATO and Ukraine war given in an interview...

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202402/1307352.shtml

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GT: American media and politicians continue to hype the "Russian threat." Is this to garner public support for the Russia-Ukraine conflict to continue?

Hedges: Yes, but of course it's absurd. First of all, I was in Eastern and Central Europe in 1989, covering the revolutions there. I was present when the promises were made to Gorbachev not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany. I was there. I heard it. I was in the room. The US betrayed that promise. NATO was formed to prevent a Soviet invasion of Europe, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it became redundant. It should have been disbanded.

Two things, however, happened. One, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US felt that they could create what they called a unipolar world, which meant global domination. There would be no other superpower that would rival the US. Two, there were billions upon billions of dollars to be made by the arms industry if they reconfigured the military hardware in Central and Eastern Europe to be NATO compatible. So if Russia was not willing to be a threat - and we must remember that Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin all hoped initially to build economic and even military alliances with Europe and the US - Russia would be turned into a threat.

Over many years Russia was provoked and baited by NATO expansion up to its borders and US hubris. The war in Ukraine was a war that should have never happened. Washington bears a lot of responsibility for starting it and most of the responsibility for sustaining it.

The playbook the pimps of war in Washington use to lure us into one military fiasco after another, including Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine, does not change. Freedom and democracy are threatened. Evil must be vanquished. Human rights must be protected. The fate of Europe and NATO, along with a "rules-based international order" is at stake. Victory is assured.

GT: NATO recently kicked off its largest military drills since the Cold War, with its eye fixated on Russia. Some think it marks the return of the Cold War. What's your view?

Hedges: Since the end of the World War II, the US government has spent between 45 to 90 percent of the federal budget on past, current and future military operations. The US spends more on national defense than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, UK, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan and Ukraine combined. It is the largest sustained activity of the US government. It has stopped mattering — at least to the war machine — whether these wars are rational or prudent. The war industry metastasizes within the bowels of the American empire to hollow it out from the inside. The US is reviled abroad, drowning in debt, has an impoverished working class and is burdened with a decayed infrastructure as well as shoddy social services. 

 

 

[Basman]

Ukraine war was started by Russia. The gaslighting is crazy.

Current NATO investment is reactionary to Russia's escalotory war path. It's not that complicated.