Christopher Hedges on Nato...

[Ajay0]

Pulitzer prize winning American journalist, Presbyterian minister and senior lecturer Christopher Lynn Hedge's insights on NATO...

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Chris_Hedges

 

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I was in Eastern Europe in 1989, reporting on the revolutions that overthrew the ossified communist dictatorships that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a time of hope. NATO, with the breakup of the Soviet empire, became obsolete. President Mikhail Gorbachev reached out to Washington and Europe to build a new security pact that would include Russia. (U.S.) Secretary of State James Baker in the Reagan administration, along with the West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, assured the Soviet leader that if Germany was unified NATO would not be extended beyond the new borders.

The commitment not to expand NATO, also made by Great Britain and France, appeared to herald a new global order. We saw the peace dividend dangled before us, the promise that the massive expenditures on weapons that characterized the Cold War would be converted into expenditures on social programs and infrastructures that had long been neglected to feed the insatiable appetite of the military.

How naive we were. The war industry did not intend to shrink its power or its profits. It set out almost immediately to recruit the former Communist Bloc countries into the European Union and NATO... The expansion of NATO swiftly became a multi-billion-dollar bonanza for the corporations that had profited from the Cold War.

Once NATO expanded into Eastern Europe, the Clinton administration promised Moscow that NATO combat troops would not be stationed in Eastern Europe, the defining issue of the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act on Mutual Relations. This promise again turned out to be a lie.

 

 

[Ajay0]

Insightful article by Christopher Hedges on Nato...

https://scheerpost.com/2022/07/11/hedges-nato-the-most-dangerous-military-alliance-on-the-planet/
 

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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the arms industry that depends on it for billions in profits, has become the most aggressive and dangerous military alliance on the planet. Created in 1949 to thwart Soviet expansion into Eastern and Central Europe, it has evolved into a global war machine in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia. 

NATO expanded its footprint, violating promises to Moscow, once the Cold War ended, to incorporate 14 countries in Eastern and Central Europe into the alliance. It will soon add Finland and Sweden. It bombed Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo. It launched wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, resulting in close to a million deaths and some 38 million people driven from their homes. It is building a military footprint in Africa and Asia. It invited Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, the so-called “Asia Pacific Four,” to its recent summit in Madrid at the end of June. It has expanded its reach into the Southern Hemisphere, signing a military training partnership agreement with Colombia, in December 2021.

It has backed Turkey, with NATO’s second largest military, which has illegally invaded and occupied parts of Syria as well as Iraq. Turkish-backed militias are engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Syrian Kurds and other inhabitants of north and east Syria. The Turkish military has been accused of war crimes – including multiple airstrikes against a refugee camp andchemical weapons use – in northern Iraq. In exchange for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s permission for Finland and Sweden to join the alliance, the two Nordic countries have agreed to expand their domestic terror laws making it easier to crack down on Kurdish and other activists, lift their restrictions on selling arms to Turkey and deny support to the Kurdish-led movement for democratic autonomy in Syria.

 

 

[Bobby_2021]

Show me a war mongering dictator who has started more wars in the world than NATO.

Not only they start the wars, but they get their ass whopped and destabilize the entire continent and the sanction them since they are too violent. 

Liberals and the endless hunger for power and imperialism.

[Ajay0]

On 4/12/2024 at 10:42 AM, Bobby_2021 said:

Show me a war mongering dictator who has started more wars in the world than NATO.

The arms industry is a highly lucrative business. This is one of the reasons why Nato did not come to a full stop after the Cold War and continues inspite of the bickerings and lack of cohesion among the member states.

Imho, like in Afghanistan the war in Ukraine will continue for some time till optimal profits are reaped by the military industrial complex. As Assange stated , a long unsuccessful war is more profitable than a short successful war.

The stock values of westen defence companies have skyrocketed after the Ukraine invasion as well as the Hamas-Israel conflict.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2022/03/04/war-stocks-are-surging-as-russia-ukraine-conflict-rages-on-lockheed-martin-northrop-up-20/

https://theconversation.com/ukraine-the-worlds-defence-giants-are-quietly-making-billions-from-the-war-178806

https://www.newsweek.com/politicians-defense-stock-profits-israel-hamas-conflict-1840327

The fact that politicians are among the major reapers of profits as shown in the above article shows that they have advance knowledge of such conflicts. Engineered conflicts thus are bound to be lucrative to the arms industry and I would say that world attention should scrutinize such events proactively to ensure that the hidden agendas do not get a chance to materialize.