By Alain ROUY, Le Mouvement de la Paix (France)      

Prise de parole lors de la Manifestation Square Lafayette, devant la Maison Blanche

Washington, 7 juillet 2024

Dear friends,

I am here from France to bring you the support of French pacifists for your demonstration against NATO and for peace. In France, NATO has never been popular, because this military alliance serving the policies and interests of the United States of America does not respect the will and autonomy of its member states. But today, the situation is even worse than during the Cold War : today’s global NATO is a factor of insecurity and destabilization in the world. In the Ukrainian conflict, NATO is fuelling the war and opposing any ceasefire or negotiation. NATO means the politics of force and confrontation, and its expansion in Asia is leading to the threat of a new war with China. The risk is to end up in a new world war that could lead to nuclear apocalypse.

NATO means the never-ending militarization of international relations and permanent wars.

That’s why we must work together to say NO to NATO, and YES to PEACE!

Chers amis,

Je suis venu de France pour vous apporter le soutien des pacifistes français à votre manifestation contre l’OTAN et pour la paix. En France, l’OTAN n’a jamais été populaire car cette alliance militaire au service de la politique et des intérêts des Etats-Unis d’Amérique ne respecte pas la volonté et l’autonomie de ses états-membres. Mais aujourd’hui, la situation est encore pire que pendant la guerre froide : l’OTAN globale d’aujourd’hui est un facteur d’insécurité et de déstabilisation dans le monde. Dans le conflit d’Ukraine, l’OTAN nourrit la guerre et s’oppose à tout cessez-le-feu et à toute négociation. L’OTAN, c’est la politique de la force et de la confrontation et son expansion en Asie fait craindre une nouvelle guerre avec la Chine. Le risque, c’est d’aboutir à une nouvelle guerre mondiale qui pourrait conduire à l’apocalypse nucléaire.

L’OTAN, c’est la militarisation sans fin des relations internationales, c’est la guerre en permanence.

C’est pourquoi nous devons dire tous ensemble NON à l’OTAN pour dire OUI à la PAIX !

By Matt Bivens, Truthdig, July 9, 2024

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization plans to celebrate its 75^th birthday this week in Washington, D.C., and there will no doubt be much happy talk about how tirelessly the alliance works for peace, democracy and world stability. 

A new and timely book reminds us that NATO is not very good at any of those things. “NATO: What You Need to Know” is a concise and caustic introduction to the world’s largest military alliance, written by longtime peace activists Medea Benjamin, a founder of the peace group Code Pink, and David Swanson, an author and talk radio host. The two cover a lot of territory, including how and why NATO was formed, the way it has metastasized since the collapse of its Soviet rival (and original raison d’etre), the havoc it has wreaked, and the grim future it holds out. In their telling, NATO’s demonstrated skills have little to do with peace and stability, and everything to do with drumming up wars, disenfranchising the average citizen, nurturing the international arms trade and dragging us ever closer to a species-level annihilation event.

You’d never guess it from U.S. press coverage, but around the world, NATO has few fans. Benjamin and Swanson describe a Gallup poll conducted 10 years ago, across 65 nations, which found that people everywhere considered the United States to be the world’s gravest threat to peace — a wolf dressed in NATO sheepskin. Gallup’s findings, the authors note wryly, were widely shared, “and the lesson learned: Gallup never did that poll again.” 

Here in America, views of NATO are vaguely positive but substance-free. For many of us, NATO is hazily conflated with the United Nations. Outwardly, the similarities are uncanny. NATO was set up just four years after the U.N. was established. Both are international structures that authorize the movements of thousands of soldiers into troubled foreign lands — as “peacekeeping forces” — and both are headed by a “general secretary.” NATO’s North Atlantic Council is designed to mirror the U.N. Security Council, and NATO has a Parliamentary Assembly based loosely on the U.N. General Assembly. The briefly worded treaty that created NATO — which the U.S. Senate ratified and then President Harry Truman signed in July 1949 — even opens with a statement that all signatories “reaffirm their faith in the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments.”

This all sounds wonderful. But as Benjamin and Swanson recount, NATO genuflects towards peace and stability, and pays the U.N. the compliment of imitating it in style and comportment, but its agenda is something else. Over the years, the U.N. has frustrated Washington by becoming an independent and unpredictable world organization. NATO, by contrast, has become Washington’s pet — a homunculus created in the U.N.’s image, sitting docilely on the Pentagon’s shoulder.

Benjamin and Swanson note that NATO is useful for insulating Washington’s war-machine from the influence of the American public, which can be suspicious of the latest expensive and horrifically destructive war. “The more NATO becomes the entity that is understood to be taking actions in the world, rather than the U.S. military, the harder it is to oppose those actions,” they write. “People cannot get upset with and vote out their local representative to NATO because there is no such thing.”

In the modern era, this is in fact Washington’s preferred way to go to war, because a scheme hatched in the Pentagon can be gussied up as a noble, internationally authorized project involving a “coalition of nations.” NATO has thus repeatedly announced a military conflict that it has solemnly declared to be authorized by no one but itself. When it does this, NATO asserts an authority no one actually granted it, and disrespects the U.N. Security Council and international law.

“[NATO approval of a military action] serves in U.S. discourse as a legal justifier,” write Benjamin and Swanson. “When the U.S., U.K., and three other nations attacked Yemen in January 2024, NATO helpfully published a statement declaring the action to have been ‘defensive.’ If NATO and the United Nations are a bit conflated in your mind — they are both international and have something to do with war — this sounds like a judicial finding, whereas in reality it is simply a bit of rhetoric.”

This is more than just an academic point. Washington, disguised in its 75-year-old NATO sheepskin, is getting ever-closer to provoking a true world war, perhaps even a nuclear war. As Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs observes in the introduction to “NATO: What You Need to Know,” the organization is “a war machine run amok” with an “utterly dismal track record” of military forays that

have led to years, and sometimes decades, of destabilization in the targeted countries, including Bosnia, Serbia, Afghanistan, Libya, and Ukraine among others. In Orwellian fashion, all of this violence and instability has been justified as defending ‘the rules-based order,’ even as NATO has repeatedly violated the core precepts of the UN Charter. … NATO, we are told by our governments, is peace-loving, even as it provokes one war after another. NATO, we are told by our governments, is defensive, even as it violently topples other governments.

Why does NATO do this? As a U.S. Marine Corps major general once famously observed, “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.”

In the racket known as international wars, NATO acts as the marketing and sales division. It hounds each of its member states to spend 2% of all annual economic activity on the military (and then insists that at least 20% of that gets spent specifically on arms and equipment). NATO calls this its 2/20 goal: 2% of each nation’s gross domestic product for the military, and 20% of that specifically for defense contractors. That works out to hundreds of billions of dollars a year — and when it’s time to spend the money, NATO has an entire Support and Procurement Agency to help line up the arms deals.

Never mind that this entire 2/20 spending goal is a made-up, arbitrary target arrived at “in a totally undemocratic fashion in 2006, without a vote by elected governments — much less the consent of the taxpayers in their countries.” Military spending “famously requires enormous trade-offs,” write Benjamin and Swanson:

It would cost about 3% of U.S. military spending to end starvation on Earth, a bit over 1% to provide the world with clean drinking water, about 7% to end poverty in the United States, and other small fractions to transform education or green energy. Prioritizing bringing military spending up to levels decreed by a club of militaries and never put to a public or even a congressional / parliamentary vote anywhere is a choice, but it is not the only choice.

What are some of those other choices? Benjamin and Swanson end on a positive note by suggesting what the American people could do instead of signing off on, and paying for, NATO-branded worldwide military adventures.

There are, for example, existing international treaties to foster peace that the United States still ignores — including treaties to ban landmines, cluster munitions and even nuclear weapons. (A ban on cluster munitions, which are notorious for killing children disproportionately, would be particularly appropriate today, after a Ukrainian-launched, U.S.-supplied missile, filled with U.S.-supplied cluster bombs, recently rained down on a civilian beach in Crimea and killed several, including children.) There are also new treaties in the works to limit space-based weapons and cyber wars that would also be in our national interest.

“This, of course, would be a radically different approach to the world that would require a radical reorientation of priorities,” write Benjamin and Swanson. “But when the status quo is making nuclear apocalypse increasingly likely … a radical shift is essential.”

​​But don’t expect to hear any of this counter-narrative during media coverage of NATO’s international summit and 75^th birthday party this week. Instead, the main event will be a Joe Biden-led vacuous celebration of NATO’s massive expansion across Europe. As for criticism, the only thing to pass for that will be the grudging acknowledgement of a Donald Trump-associated call that “Europeans need to pay their fair share” of that massive expansion, and buy more American defense contractor output. Not one American media or political figure of note is likely to publicly review the billions wasted, or to ask any NATO leader to justify the millions killed in NATO-fed wars from the Middle East to Central Europe. For that, we need voices of honesty like those of Benjamin and Swanson.

Peace Instead of NATO

Speech by Sevim Dagdelen, Member of the German Bundestag at
„No to NATO – Yes to Peace“-rally in Washington DC on July 7th 2024.

As NATO marks its 75th anniversary on the eve of its Washington summit, three of its great myths are unravelling.

First myth: That NATO is a defensive alliance abiding by international law.

In reality, over the last quarter century, NATO has waged unprovoked, illegal wars of aggression against Yugoslavia and Libya; and the United States, the leader of the alliance, invaded and occupied Iraq, in a catastrophic adventure – to name three notorious examples.

Second myth: That NATO stands for democracy and the rule of law.

The reality is that NATO has never had a problem with counting military dictatorships or fascist regimes among its members. Portugal, one of NATO’s founding members, murdered thousands of Africans in its colonial wars and tortured hundreds to death in concentration camps. That was never a problem for this particular collective of shared values, just as Erdoğan’s Türkiye, with its support for jihadists terrorist groups in Syria, poses no particular ethical problem for it today.

Third myth: That NATO is a community of shared values and stands for human rights.

In reality the wars conducted by the United States and its Allies over the last 20 years alone have killed four and a half million people, as calculated by researchers at the esteemed Brown University. The torture and detention camp at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base is still in operation to this day. The journalist Julian Assange was tormented nearly to death for 14 years because he had published evidence of US war crimes. Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government continues to receive American and European support in the form of arms deliveries for its onslaught against Gaza, which cannot credibly be justified by recourse to the right of self-defense.

At its Washington summit, NATO intends to make its strategy of escalation and expansion global. Ever more weapons deliveries to Ukraine are planned; the danger of direct involvement in the war is rising; and the NATO-isation of Asia is now getting underway officially.

With its bilateral agreements, NATO is now seeking to expand its hegemony in Asia and to pit itself against China; and this will be preceded by further skirmishes in a self-destructive trade war – all instances of a reckless strategy in urgent need of being shut down.

If you want to know what character NATO has, you only have to look at the fact that NATO unconditionally supports the far-right government of Netanyahu in Israel.

If you want to know what character NATO has, you only have to look at how NATO Stoltenberg torpedoes every initiative for peace in Brussels, and also do Washington and Berlin. The plan is escalation nor negotiations for peace! We say: We need to Stop the killings in Ukraine. Ceasefire now!

And we also say: we need to stop the killings in Gaza! Ceasefire now!

What is the role of Germany in this ongoing war in Gaza?

In fact, Germany is the second most important arms supplier for Israel after the USA. From 2019 to 2023, 30 percent of weapons came from Germany. In 2023, the figure was 47 percent while the USA supplied 53 percent. I think that is irresponsible and a shame to send weapons to an ongoing war.

The majority of the German population now no longer wishes to follow Berlin in its mindless escalation, and it likewise stands opposed to granting Ukraine NATO membership, and to funnelling endless sums of money to the corrupt, undemocratic regime in Kyiv.

It is completely irresponsible and insane to hold on to Ukraine’s NATO membership. A majority in Germany rejects this accession. 55 percent in the whole of Germany and 70 percent in eastern Germany reject it. Our governments are doing politics against the majority of the population.

It is an embarrassment and a travesty that the current German Government, like no other before it, carries out Washington’s commands at a moment’s notice, repeatedly, continuously – and shamefully, with its belligerence – puts at grave risk the well-being of the people who elected it.

We need peace instead of NATO.

We need, at long last, to stand up for democratic and popular sovereignty, and to reject the indignity of being a vassal to Washington, which is just about all we’ve gotten from the ruling coalition in Berlin.

Global NATO: Expansion and Escalation

Keynote speech by Sevim Dagdelen, Member of the German Bundestag at
„No to Nato – Yes to Peace“-Summit in Washington DC July 6th 2024

Just in time for its 75th anniversary, NATO has dropped its mask. And the NATO summit in Washington is one particularly illuminating moment in this revelation. The history of the Enlightenment teaches us never to accept a person’s or an organization’s self-image at face value. So do the early sources of Enlightenment ideas in ancient Greece. The Greeks already possessed that insight. Inscribed above the Temple of Apollo was the maxim: Know thyself.

If we take that injunction not lightly as a gentle reminder of the limits of human thought but also as meaning what the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclis insisted – that “It belongs to all men to know themselves and think well” – then we must regard self-knowledge as an essential human quality, which perhaps also ought to apply to our organizations.

With NATO, however, it seems to be exactly the reverse. For NATO, denial of its true nature is part of the essence of the organization. Or to put it another way, an almost meditative immersion in its own self-image is part of the essence of the military alliance. It is all the more astonishing, then, that Western media are so often content to reflect a thousand iterations of this self-image back to the public, without question and without pausing to consider whether the image adequately represents reality.

In fact, 75 years of NATO is equivalent to 75 years of denial, albeit with a dramatic expansion of scale and scope in recent years.

This is so in part because the three great myths of NATO are now fading.

First is the central myth of a NATO organized as a defense community committed to international law: a NATO that is a community of constitutional states upholding the law, allowing international law to rule its actions so that it exists for no other purpose but to defend the territory of its members.

Yet if we interrogate NATO’s actual policies, what do we find?

In 1999, NATO itself conducted a war of aggression, in breach of international law, against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. NATO’s war crimes included the bombing of a television station in Belgrade and an allegedly accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy which killed three Chinese journalists.

In 2011, NATO attacked Libya. It misused a UN Security Council resolution to fight a war for regime change, one result of which was that part of the country came under the rule of Islamists; Libya on the whole was plunged into a state of appalling misery, and even suffered the return of slavery.

In Afghanistan, NATO involved itself from 2003 in a war far from Alliance territory, only to hand power, 20 years later, to the Taliban – whose overthrow had been the invasion’s stated objective. That 20-year war in Afghanistan was marked by numerous war crimes – such as the October 2015 US airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz –which, needless to say, went unpunished.

NATO has assumed the musketeers’ motto: all for one and one for all. This means in practice that the deeds of individual NATO members must also be ascribed to the organization itself. Brown University puts the death toll of the US’s wars in the Middle East over the last 20 years alone at 4.5 million people – wars, like that in Iraq, based on lies and which were nothing but egregious violations of international law.

NATO’s self-image as a community for defense in adherence to international law simply does not match reality. We must rather draw the opposite conclusion.

NATO is a community of illegality and of the violators of international law who, either separately or as an organization, conduct wars of aggression on a politically opportunistic basis.

A second myth, perhaps the one most insistently impressed upon the public, is that of NATO as a community of democracies grounded in the rule of law. But if we examine the past with any care, this flattering self-presentation is immediately deflated by an ugly and shameful record. Until 1974, NATO member Portugal was ruled by a fascist dictatorship which waged blood-soaked colonial wars in Angola and Mozambique. Those who resisted were driven into concentration camps like Tarrafal in Cape Verde, where many Angolans and Guinea-Bissauans were tortured to death. Like fascist Portugal, Greece and Türkiye both were members of NATO in the aftermath of their respective military coups.

NATO itself, as we now know, put into motion Operation Gladio, a clandestine organization to be activated whenever democratic majorities threatened to vote against NATO membership. In Italy, for example, terrorist attacks were carried out in the name of far-left groups so as to discredit the Italian Communist Party in its efforts to form a government.

One might object that here we’re referencing a bygone era, and that NATO now stands ready to be called up in the global fight by democrats against autocrats. But on this point too, any serious observer must conclude that something is amiss in that aspect of the 21st century Alliance’s self-image.

Take Türkiye under President Erdoğan. It has repeatedly conducted illegal wars against Iraq and Syria, supported Islamist terrorist groups in Syria and, according to the German Government’s own assessment in 2016, is a launchpad for Islamists; yet Türkiye has always been and remains to this day a valued NATO member.

Bilateral security agreements, such as those struck with Franco’s Spain, are now in place with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, even in the full knowledge that these states are avowedly anti-democratic. Clearly, the only meaningful criterion for dealing with the Alliance is geopolitical advantage. NATO is neither a community of democracies, nor does it exist to defend democracy.

Third: NATO presently claims to be safeguarding human rights. Even if we were to overlook how NATO’s actions trample on the rights to work, health and adequate housing a million times over – amidst growing poverty and a historic upward redistribution of wealth domestically – such a self-serving image does not withstand scrutiny in international matters.

As we debate here, prisoners taken in the US’s so-called “Global War on Terror” still languish in Guantánamo Bay, where they have been kept without trial for nearly a quarter century. That is the reality of “human rights” in NATO’s leading state. When it comes to freedom of opinion and the press, the US, supported by its NATO auxiliaries, attempted to make an example of Julian Assange by tormenting him for 14 years. His sole crime was having revealed US war crimes to the public. A smear campaign was then launched against him; Hillary Clinton and Mike Pompeo openly contemplated his murder. This is a bit of the reality of NATO’s relationship to human rights.

I am thrilled to be able to say finally that Julian Assange is now a free man. And Julian is undefeated.

The international campaign for Assange, all of the confidential talks and the like, were in the end successful. But we must also realize that the fight for Julian Assange’s freedom was also part of the struggle for freedom as such. And this struggle continues to rage here at the very heart of the NATO system.

Given the density of the propaganda, how tireless it operates in celebration of the NATO mythology, day in and day out, it is almost a miracle that not only is support for NATO crumbling worldwide, but that it is precisely those most exposed to its propaganda who are increasingly skeptical of the military pact.

In the United States, public approval of NATO has been falling continuously over recent years, while majorities in Germany question the principle of defending all members; that is, they are no longer prepared to commit themselves to Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.

Why is that? Why are people starting to have doubts about NATO – despite the onslaught of propaganda?

The answer is simple enough: NATO is itself causing this crisis, and people sense that.

While its defenders speak of the alliance as if it were eternal, the organization’s drive toward escalation in Ukraine and its expansion into Asia is exceeding the Alliance’s own capacities. Just as with most empires, NATO is falling into a self-made trap of overextension. In this regard, NATO is a political fossil, unprepared to learn from the defeat of the German Empire in the First World War and appears to be repeating the gross miscalculations of the Kaiser’s Germany, only on a global scale.

The German Empire believed it could wage a war on two fronts. Today, a similar conviction is gaining traction within NATO that it must not only confront Russia and China, but that it is also to involve itself in the Middle East. This is a claim to global hegemony now under formulation. What hubris!

NATO evidently sees itself waging a war on three fronts. But if it were to do this, its defeat would be certain right from the start.

Given this, it is only logical that three particular meetings are planned for this week’s NATO summit. The first is a working session devoted to further ramping up the Alliance’s own rearmament. The NATO-Ukraine Council is next on the agenda. It is to discuss how the lavish financial transfers and pledges from NATO to Ukraine can be augmented, with an increase in arms deliveries and eventual NATO membership for Ukraine. Third, there will be a session with the AP4, or Asia-Pacific partners – Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea – and a meeting with the leaders of the EU.

Seventy-five years after it was founded, NATO is to push for stepped-up belligerence in Ukraine and expansion into Asia. The intention is to advance the NATO-ization of Asia, and to put the strategy it believes it has already deployed successfully against Russia in place there.

For the moment, the primary focus in the Pacific is not on direct NATO accession for Asian countries, but rather on the expansion of NATO’s sphere of influence via bilateral security agreements – and not only with the AP4, but also with the Philippines, Taiwan and Singapore.

Just as Ukraine was erected as a frontline state against Russia, NATO is hoping to transform Asian countries like the Philippines into challenger states vis-à-vis China. The initial aim is to engage in a cold proxy war, but at the same time to prepare for a hot US and NATO proxy war in Asia.

And just as NATO enlargement was pursued under the “boiling frog” principle with regard to Russia, with enlargement proceeding incrementally so as not to arouse Russia’s suspicion too much, the policy of containing China now is comprised of lining up states one by one into a phalanx ready for war. The goal is, as ever, to avoid having to fight such a war oneself, but to be able to access Allies’ resources so as to conduct these cold, and then hot, wars. These developments are flanked by economic warfare, which is now also being directed against China and the main burden of which is borne by the economies of US client states.

The US and NATO are in fact pursuing a method of war laid out by the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, who counselled that warfare not employing one’s own resources was that type a state should aspire to wage.

The problem for NATO strategists here is not only their willingness to set fire to the entire world, but also the self-imposed risk posed by their global pretensions, which only fosters alliances among those states rejecting NATO. Indeed, NATO policy played a major role in the rise of the BRICS countries, as that grouping is for many states a means of protecting their own sovereignty.

Paradoxically then, if there are forces now promoting a multipolar world, the US and its NATO Allies must be considered among the most significant. Even states like India and Vietnam are refusing to subordinate themselves to NATO strategy.

And with its unconditional support for the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu, NATO is losing all moral legitimacy in the Global South, as it is seen to be complicit in Israeli war crimes.

As already mentioned, public support for a NATO committed to escalation and expansion is crumbling in the West. In Germany, 55% of people reject Ukraine’s accession to NATO. The majority opposes supplying arms to Ukraine and desires an immediate ceasefire. In the United States, financial aid to Ukraine, USD 200 billion so far, has become extremely unpopular. Growing numbers of people want a stop on the flow of money to a system in Kyiv which is not only corrupt but honors a far-right state cult around the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.

NATO’s myths are losing their luster. The Alliance’s strategies are succumbing to their own imperial overextension. What we need now is an immediate end to arms deliveries to Ukraine and, at long last, a ceasefire there. Those who seek peace and security for their own populations must halt the aggressive policy of expansion into Asia.

Ultimately, the fight against NATO is a fight for one’s own sovereignty. As an alliance of client states, Europe is in danger of collapsing. Emancipation as seen in Latin America’s has yet to materialize. A first step would be to stop letting ourselves be played for fools by a military alliance that funds its aggressive strategy with a social war waged by its constitutive governments against its own population.

(A PDF of a presentation by Tamara Lorincz, July 6, 2024)

A new report on July 8, 2024.

By Ludo De Brabander, July 6, 2024
Presented at https://nonatoyespeace.org

The war in Ukraine has brought nuclear weapons back into the spotlight. Unfortunately, a nuclear confrontation is even more likely than during te cold war.

In my contribution I would like to address NATO’s nuclear policy and the concept of nuclear sharing in which US nuclear weapons stored at military bases of 5 European NATO countries play a central role.

Only gradually, nuclear weapons became a central part of NATO’s military post-cold war strategy. In NATO’s earliest years, nuclear weapons were in fact not even mentioned in the alliance’s strategic concepts even when US nuclear weapons in Europe peaked at more than 7000 in the 70s. Nuclear arms were considered a responsibility of NATO’s nuclear powers. Only in 2010 at the NATO Summit in Lissabon, NATO accepted a strategic concept proclaiming for the first time to be a ‘nuclear alliance’.

The collectivization of nuclear responsibility

From the 1950s, the US began to deploy nuclear weapons in other NATO member states, giving them a role in the planning and preparation of nuclear war with the establishment of the Nuclear Planning Group in 1966. In the years that followed, all countries, new members included, except France became involved in the nuclear deterrent policy, which was increasingly defined as a form of alliance solidarity. The reason? International support among the population for nuclear disarmament grew. In the 80’s many hundreds of thousands demonstrated in European and US-cities opposing new deployments of nuclear arms. The strengthening of humanitarian and anti-nuclear norms during and after the Cold War played a key role in pushing NATO to  adapt. This led to the collectivization of political responsibility for nuclear weapons.

First, the nuclearization of NATO as an organizational identity allowed pro-nuclear actors to justify costly nuclear modernization programs and nuclear deployments as contributions to alliance “solidarity” and “cohesion”. 

Second, this nuclearization of NATO undercut the potential for intra-alliance resistance to nuclear arms. Calls for nuclear disarmament could thus be seen as anti-NATO.

Nuclear Sharing

Nuclear sharing became a core component of NATO’s strategy. Of the three nuclear powers in NATO (France, the United Kingdom and the United States), only the United States has nuclear arms in other member states: Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. Once there have been also US nuclear arms in Canada (1950-1984), Greece (until 2001) and the UK (until 1992, but new deployments are planned).

Currently, the US has an estimated 100 tactical B61 gravity bombs deployed in Europe. They have to be mounted into (not in Turkey) dual capable aircrafts (DCA) in war time. Each year, the nuclear sharing is exercised in Steadfast Noon maneuvers that until recently have been kept secret.

There are several legal and political problems with NATO’s nuclear policies.

First, the concept of nuclear sharing can be considered as a transfer of nuclear arms to non-nuclear states which would be in breach with art 1 and 2 of the non-proliferation treaty (NPT) of 1970. The NPT prohibits the direct or indirect transfer or control of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states. This would certainly be the case once the fighter jets of non-nuclear-weapon states take to the skies and the Permessive Action Links (PAL) are activated that allow the nuclear weapon to be used during a military operation or an all open war. But according to the US the NPT is not valid anymore in war time (argument: the purpose of the NPT to avoid war failed). These bombs will soon be replaced by new B61-12 bombs equipped with an electronic tail kit that can guide the bomb to its target. They have also lower yield options.

The mixture of both, precision and lower yield options could be seen by war planners as more useable weapons. The new B61-12 could increase the danger of a war with nuclear weapons eroding the concept of deterrence.

A second problem is that there is no transparency whatsoever around the presence of US nuclear weapons at European military bases. It makes democratic debates and decision-makings virtually impossible which is probably no coincidence. Traditionally, according to several surveys a majority of the population in most NATO countries is in favor of a ban on nuclear weapons. Even if it is not clear if the war in Ukraine changed this public mood, the secrecy surrounding nuclear sharing is unacceptable in a democracy.

A third problem is NATO’s aggressive stance towards the nuclear ban treaty (TPNW). At its latest Summit in Vilnius, NATO reiterated that the Non-Proliferation treaty (NPT) remains the essential bulwark against the spread of nuclear weapons, claiming its strongest committment to the full implementation of the NPT across its three pillars, including Article VI. On the other hand, NATO member states have been boycotting the negotiations on a treaty to ban nuclear arms (TPNW) although it can be seen as an implementation of Article 6 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in which the parties commit to negotiate a treaty for complete nuclear disarmament. 

NATO has been waging disinformation campaigns with the false claim that the Ban Treaty undermines the nuclear disarmament regime and that it lacks control and verification mechanisms although article 3 of the TPNW clearly states that non-nuclear weapon states shall “maintain its International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards obligations” at a minimum.

NATO sees the TPNW as a threat to its political unity over the nuclear strategy. That’s the reason for the strong dismissive language in the Vilnius declaration, calling the TPNW in “opposition”, “inconsistent” and “incompatible with the Alliance’s nuclear deterrence policy” and at “odds with the existing non-proliferation and disarmament architecture” causing “risks undermining the NPT.”

In any case, the reactions and declarations of the US and NATO are expressions of concerns about the general impact of the TPNW and the wide support it receives endangering its political cohesion. Therefore, the Vilnius declaration emphasizes that talks and negotiations on disarmement should be done with “NATO as a platform”. In other words, NATO members are not supposed to initiate or participate in disarmament initiatives outside NATO or without the leadership of the US. 

Fourth, NATO has always been ambiguous in its nuclear policy. It is paying lip service to the NPT while its nuclear powers continue to pour billions into replacing or upgrading their nuclear arsenals. NATO’ statements are full of contradictions. According to NATO: “Nuclear weapons are a core component of NATO’s overall capabilities for deterrence and defense, alongside conventional and missile defense forces. NATO is committed to arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation, but as long as nuclear weapons exist, it will remain a nuclear alliance.” (quote from Deterrence and Defence Posture Review, 2012)

The language NATO used in the Vilnius declaration is not such as to invite Russia or China to disarm, blaming these countries for the erosion of the disarmament regime while it remains silent over its own role in it, like the deployment of a missile shield after the US pulled out of the ABM, the US withdrawal of the INF and Open Skies treaty and the Iran deal, the future delivery of nuclear submarines to Australia (AUKUS)…

How should we free ourselves from the nuclear danger?

The challenge for the peace movement is to convince other social movements of the collective importance of nuclear disarmament. Like climate change, nuclear weapons are a planetary threat. The climate and the peace movement are both fighting to preserve the planet. It is a common struggle for which they need to join forces.

A wide social and political movement against the danger of nuclear war should put forward a number of common demands:

1. Full transparency must be provided on nuclear weapons in Europe to enable democratic debate and decision-making.

2. We do not need lip service to nuclear disarmament, but concrete disarmament initiatives leading to negotiations to avert the growing nuclear danger in Europe. These can only be successful if there is a ceasefire in Ukraine, international tensions are reduced and mutual security interests are taken into account.

3. New agreements are needed to avoid new nuclear weapon deployments in Europe on all sides. Once this is realised, the withdrawal of nuclear weapons from the territories of nuclear sharing countries can help shape conditions and commitments for a nuclear weapon-free zone (NWFZ) in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe. Is this possible? Of course. It is a matter of political will to negotiate procedures, a timeframe and verification mechanisms for a NWFZ.

4. a legal ban on nuclear weapons and accession to the TPNW. How difficult politically this seems to be, I believe there is always an opportunity to break the nuclear cohesion of NATO. Under pressure from the USA and NATO, the Belgian government was reluctant to recognise the Ban Treaty as an important instrument for nuclear disarmament. Finally, the government gave in to pressure from the peace movement and participated in both Meetings of State Parties as an observer. So did Germany and the Netherlands, two other NATO countries involved in nuclear sharing.

5. Last but not least, we must disband NATO to achieve a nuclear-free world. Ultimately the true abbreviation of this militaristic war organisation is Nuclear Armed Terrorist Organisation.

(a PDF of a slide show by Ann Wright, July 6, 2024)

Français ci-dessous

By Alain ROUY, Le Mouvement de la Paix (France), July 6, 2024
Remarks at https://nonatoyespeace.org

I’d like to give you a French voice on NATO: in France, NATO has never been very popular, because the USA, which dominates this military alliance, respects neither the diplomatic nor the military autonomy of its member states. That’s why, in 1966, the President of the French Republic, General de Gaulle, decided to withdraw France from the integrated military structures and to close the US military bases in France. De Gaulle did not dispute the existence of the Atlantic Alliance, and had always been a loyal ally of the United States in times of East-West crisis. But he contested the determining weight of the USA in the integrated military command, at the service of the American policy of hegemony. De Gaulle was opposed to bloc politics, refusing to alienate member states to the will and interests of the United States. Other French presidents have also opposed NATO’s orientations: President François Mitterrand contested the American conception of global security assured by NATO, and questioned NATO’s role after the end of the USSR; President Jacques Chirac criticized NATO’s evolution towards a broader alliance engaged in military interventions, a NATO that presents itself in Kosovo or Afghanistan as a kind of “armed arm of the UN”, which France rejects. Logically, in 2003, Chirac announced that he would veto any UN resolution authorizing war against Iraq.

The fears and criticisms expressed by French presidents in their day would be even more justified today: globalized NATO is no longer a defensive military alliance, but an offensive alliance at the service of the Western powers, and first and foremost at the service of the United States. Unfortunately, since President Sarkozy, successive presidents have broken with the tradition of independence of French policy, France has re-entered NATO’s integrated command, France is systematically aligning itself with US policy, and now French President Emmanuel Macron is calling those who won’t help Ukraine fight to military victory “cowards”.

Before Macon became one of the most aggressive leaders in the Western camp, French diplomacy had played a positive role in recognizing that Russian demands for security guarantees had to be taken into account: this was the case for the Minsk agreements in 2014 and 2015, for which France was guarantor along with Germany; it was again the case in February 2024 when Macron maintained contact with Putin and evoked security guarantees for Russia. Everyone knows that the war in Ukraine didn’t start in February 2022 with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: Putin’s illegal and criminal invasion is the culmination of a conflict that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Like Michael Gorbachev, we might have believed that a new era was about to begin, an era of collective security and cooperation. But this was not the case: the West proclaimed its victory, it wanted to extend its economic system to the whole planet, and to this aim, it maintained, then enlarged and strengthened NATO, the USA’s real “armed arm” on the whole planet.

This is the context in which the war in Ukraine must be analyzed: Russia feels threatened by Western expansion, and sets a red line: Ukraine must not join NATO. Nationalist Putin believed in force, and invaded Ukraine, deliberately violating the United Nations Charter. In the end, this war will benefit NATO. NATO welcomed Finland and Sweden as new members on Russia’s borders, NATO increased its hold on the European Union and could now focus on its expansion into Asia. Today, NATO is fanning the flames of conflict and has no interest in negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine. In NATO’s bloc logic, confrontation and expansion are more important than peace efforts. NATO means : never ending militarization of the international relations.

Yet we know that the foundations for an agreement to put an end to the war in Ukraine exist: they were already laid down in the Minsk agreements, and were still being formulated during the negotiations in Turkey in March 2022, as David Swanson reminded us. They include the neutrality of Ukraine, self-determination for the populations of Crimea and Donbass, and security agreements guaranteed by the international community. NATO countries have pushed Ukraine to reject such agreements and interrupt all negotiations. For NATO, the only valid notion of security is security by force and military supremacy: this is why NATO cannot be a force for peace, neither in Ukraine nor anywhere else in the world.

The war in Ukraine has become one of NATO’s confrontations with those designated as “systemic rivals” in the Nato 2030 strategic document. These orientations cannot bring greater security to the world; on the contrary, they make NATO a factor of aggravated insecurity. We must oppose this global NATO with all our energy, which is why we hold counter-summits and demonstrations every year. We must also develop alternatives to NATO, and re-prioritize the notion of common security.

In France, which is currently going through a very dangerous period with the risk of the extreme right coming to power, we are not resigning ourselves and we appreciate that the ideas of pacifists inspire the forces of progress in their fight against the extreme right. By reviving its tradition of independent diplomacy, and breaking free from the NATO straitjacket, France could become a force for peace and disarmament, in the service of social and climate justice.

No justice without peace, no peace without justice,

So say : no to NATO and  no to war!

Je souhaite vous faire entendre une voix française sur l’OTAN : en France, l’OTAN n’a jamais été très populaire parce que les USA qui dominent cette alliance militaire ne respectent ni l’autonomie diplomatique, ni l’autonomie militaire des états membres. C’est pour cette raison qu’en 1966, le président de la République Française, le Général de Gaulle, a décidé de retirer la France des structures militaires intégrées et de fermer les bases militaires US en France. De Gaulle ne remettait pas en cause l’existence de l’Alliance Atlantique et s’est toujours montré un allié fiable des Etats-Unis dans les moments de crise Est-Ouest. Mais il contestait le poids déterminant des USA dans le commandement militaire intégré, au service de la politique d’hégémonie américaine. De Gaulle était hostile à la politique des blocs, il refusait d’aliéner les états-membres à la volonté et aux intérêts des Etats-Unis. D’autres présidents français se sont également opposés aux orientations de l’OTAN : le président François Mitterrand a contesté la conception américaine d’une sécurité mondiale assurée par l’OTAN et s’est interrogé sur le rôle de l’OTAN après la fin de l’URSS ; le président Jacques Chirac a critiqué l’évolution de l’OTAN vers une alliance plus large engagée dans des interventions militaires, une OTAN qui se présente au Kosovo ou en Afghanistan comme une sorte de « bras armé de l’ONU », ce que la France refuse. Logiquement en 2003, Chirac annonce qu’il opposera son veto à toute résolution de l’ONU autorisant la guerre contre l’Irak.

Les craintes et les critiques exprimées à leur époque par les présidents français seraient encore bien plus justifiées aujourd’hui : l’OTAN globalisée n’est plus une alliance militaire défensive, mais une alliance offensive au service des puissances occidentales, et en premier lieu au service des Etats-Unis. Malheureusement, depuis Sarkozy, les présidents successifs ont rompu avec la tradition d’indépendance de la politique française, la France a réintégré le commandement intégré de l’OTAN, la France s’aligne systématiquement sur la politique américaine et maintenant, le président français Emmanuel Macron traite de « lâches » ceux qui ne veulent pas aider l’Ukraine à se battre jusqu’à la victoire militaire.

Avant que Macon ne devienne l’un des dirigeants les plus bellicistes du camp occidental, la diplomatie française avait pourtant joué un rôle positif en reconnaissant qu’il fallait tenir compte des demandes russes de garantie de sécurité : ce fut le cas pour les accords de Minsk en 2014 et 2015, dont la France était garante avec l’Allemagne ; ce fut encore le cas en février 2024 quand Macron maintenait un contact avec Poutine et évoquait des garanties de sécurité pour la Russie. Tout le monde sait que la guerre en Ukaine n’a pas commencé en février 2022 avec l’invasion de l’Ukaine par la Russie : cette invasion illégale et criminelle déclenchée par Poutine, c’est l’apogée d’un conflit qui commence avec l’effondrement de l’Union Soviétique. On aurait pu croire comme Mickaël Gorbatchev qu’une nouvelle ère allait commencer, une ère de sécurité collective et de coopération. Mais ce ne fut pas le cas : l’occident a proclamé sa victoire, il a voulu étendre son système économique à toute la planète, et dans cet objectif, il a maintenu, puis élargi et renforcé sans cesse l’OTAN, le véritable « bras armé » des Etats-Unis sur toute la planète.

C’est dans ce cadre là qu’l faut analyser la guerre en Ukraine : la Russie se sent menacée par l’expansion occidentale et elle fixe une ligne rouge : l’Ukraine ne doit pas entrer dans l’OTAN. Le nationaliste Poutine croit à la force, il envahit l’Ukraine en violant délibérément la Charte des Nations-Unies. Finalement, cette guerre va faire le jeu de l’OTAN. L’OTAN accueille de nouveaux membres, la Finlande et la Suède aux frontières de la Russie, l’OTAN accroît son emprise sur l’Union Européenne et peut dès lors se consacrer à son expansion vers l’Asie. Aujourd’hui, l’OTAN attise le conflit et n’envisage aucune négociation, l’OTAN n’a aucun intérêt à voir cesser la guerre en Ukraine. Dans la logique de blocs qui est celle de l’OTAN, la confrontation et l’expansion sont plus déterminantes que les efforts de paix. L’OTAN, c’est la militarisation sans fin des relations internationales.

Nous savons pourtant que les bases d’un accord pour mettre fin à la guerre en Ukraine existent : elles étaient déjà à la base les accords de Minsk, elles étaient encore formulées lors des négociations en Turquie en mars 2022 comme l’a rappelé David Swanson. : la neutralité de l’Ukraine, l’autodétermination des populations de Crimée et du Donbass, des accords de sécurité garantis par la communauté internationale. Les pays de l’OTAN ont poussé l’Ukraine à rejeter de tels accords et à interrompre toute négociation. Pour l’OTAN, la seule notion de sécurité valable, c’est la sécurité par la force et la suprématie militaire : voila pourquoi l’OTAN ne peut être une force de paix, ni en Ukraine, ni ailleurs dans le monde.

La guerre en Ukraine est devenu pour l’OTAN l’un des lieux d’affrontements avec ceux qui sont désignés comme « rivaux systémiques » dans le document stratégique Nato 2030. Ces orientations ne peuvent apporter plus de sécurité au monde, au contraire, elles font de l’OTAN un facteur d’insécurité aggravée. Nous devons nous opposer de toutes nos forces à cette OTAN mondiale, c’est le sens de nos contre-sommets et de nos manifestations chaque année. Nous devons aussi développer des alternatives à l’OTAN et remettre en avant les notions de sécurité commune.

En France qui vit actuellement une période très dangereuse avec le risque de voir arriver l’extrême droite au pouvoir, nous ne nous résignons pas et nous apprécions que les idées des pacifistes inspirent les forces de progrès dans leur leur lutte contre l’extrême droite. En renouant avec la tradition d’indépendance de sa diplomatie, en sortant du carcan de l’OTAN, la France pourrait devenir une force de proposition pour la paix et pour le désarmement, au service de la justice sociale et climatique.

Pas de justice sans paix, pas de paix sans justice et donc : non à l’OTAN pour dire non à la guerre!

By David Swanson, July 6, 2024

The NATO of the popular imagination is an assembly of representatives of democratic nations who commit to making the world more peaceful, including by militarily defending each other if one of them is attacked. There could hardly exist a more grave collection of lies. NATO is in fact an institution devoted primarily to the increased sale of weaponry to governments of every type — neither its members nor its often openly dictatorial partners acting at the bidding of any populace — and devoted secondarily to doing the will of one government, that based here in Washington, D.C., which is represented by over 900 military bases outside its borders. NATO’s wars have never involved defending one of its members from a foreign invasion. Only once ever has NATO even claimed to be calling its members to collective defense, and that was for the idiotic, mass-murderous, environmentally catastrophic, counter-productive on its own terms, 20-year war on the distant, impoverished nation of Afghanistan, waged principally for U.S. political reasons following terrorist attacks — even though terrorist attacks have not been used as a justification for NATO wars when they have happened in any other NATO member country — and waged by NATO only following the individual U.S. attack on Afghanistan that overthrew a government made up of people who, with a few tweaks, would have fit in well a couple of blocks from here on the U.S. Supreme Court. Every other NATO war has lacked even the ridiculous pretense of defensiveness, and often even any agreement among NATO members, so that one could debate what has or has not been a NATO war, were one to ignore the fact that the staff and infrastructure of NATO have been used to launch, continue, or escalate the wars on Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, and Gaza. Not a single one of these has been legal — neither before nor during NATO involvement. NATO has no power to legalize anything. Even the NATO of popular imagination would be a criminal enterprise even during a war of popular imagination involving an angelically innocent nation invaded out of the blue by subhuman monsters. There is nothing in the UN Charter about good Samaritan mass-murder machines joining in an authorized war. There is much in actual human history to suggest the value of negotiation, diplomacy, demilitarization, unarmed civilian defense, and an actual law-based order, and to suggest that these alternatives are damaged by heavy investment in institutions dedicated to the structures and the cultures that drive weapons sales.

In Bosnia and Serbia, NATO first went to war, and did so against a nation that had not attacked or even threatened any NATO member, and despite some NATO members wanting to work for peace. The United States went to war without approval from the UN or even the U.S. Congress, but with the new law-unto-itself NATO proclamation of Humanitarian War. In the U.S. government those wanting more wars had discovered that they could justify them by bringing vassal states along — like a shoplifter discovering that if he dragged along 10 buddies the cops would help them all fill their pockets. In Congress it was discovered that particular horrors in wars wouldn’t need to be investigated if they could be labeled NATO’s — and NATO doesn’t have any government to investigate it because it’s not a nation — it just plays one on TV sending its unelected leader around the world to joint press conferences with prime ministers and presidents. The biggest discovery, however, was that there needed be no end-of-cold-war peace dividend. In fact, there needed be no end to the cold war. War, it was discovered, could be an endless humanitarian public service fending off an array of ineliminable threats from terrorists to pirates to China to Russia to various governments buying their weapons from the wrong places — horrible governments to be sure, but no more horrible than many of those buying their weapons from the right places. And, of course, wars kill a lot more than governments and generally don’t kill governments at all.

NATO’s grandest accomplishment thus far is the destruction of Afghanistan, the deforestation and poisoning of the land, the killing of hundreds of thousands, the making homeless of millions, the diversion of trillions of badly needed dollars into massive devastation, and the defeat of the vast majority of the world’s militaries by an impoverished and divided people reduced to stealing the invaders’ equipment and selling the invaders drugs to finance a successful resistance — not to mention the propaganda accomplishment which takes no notice of any of this reality, namely the merging of the criminal and nonsensical Humanitarian War with the criminal and nonsensical War of Revenge. In U.S. culture a war as horrific as that on Afghanistan can be transformed into a glowing model of goodness and wonder simply by launching another war that’s even worse. Once the war on Iraq was despised enough to require people like Barack Obama to pretend to oppose it, the war on Afghanistan had to be a good war in the manner in which World War II had become the ultimate good war during the war on Vietnam. And yet, quite shamelessly and openly, what makes Afghanistan a good war is in part that it was a war of revenge — a justification present in no law or treaty whatsoever, but absent from almost no Hollywood movie in my lifetime. Somebody had stepped out of line. Somebody had disrespected NATO and that little sliver of the world’s population called The International Community, and therefore the people who lived in a place those criminals had spent some time in needed to pay with their lives. And because the last moments of the war were as violent as the previous 20 years, the problem is now understood as not what the war did but how it was ended — even that it was ended.

Of course Tony Blair, humanitarian Middle East expert, had told George W. Bush, famous portrait painter and masters’ class instructor, that it would be OK to attack Iraq if they attacked Afghanistan first — because revenge. And attack Iraq they did — without formal NATO involvement, which is part of what has left NATO with a reputation of being more law-abiding than your average Congress Member. But NATO militaries were bullied into helping. And eventually Iraq became the site of a NATO training mission that was a bit hard to distinguish from a U.S.-led occupation (the same U.S. generals in charge of both), and which persists, in a newer version, to this day despite Iraqi demands to Nexit, if you’ll allow that word.

In 2003, there were moves in a Belgian court to prosecute General Tommy Franks, the commander of the U.S. troops in Iraq, for using cluster bombs in civilian areas. U.S. Secretary of so-called Defense Donald Rumsfeld dealt with that problem at a NATO meeting by warning Belgium that the United States would not fund NATO’s headquarters in Belgium, and would not take part in meetings in Belgium, leaving the impression that NATO headquarters would be moved elsewhere. Instead of shouting “Good riddance! And take your illegal nuclear weapons with you!,” Belgium fell in line, a tool in the Tools Based Order. The prosecution quickly disappeared, while the war on Iraq rolled on unchanged.

In 2011, NATO decided to attack Libya. It lied about threats to Libyans and pretended that a UN resolution on protecting Libyans was an authorization for a war, the bombing of the country, and the overthrow of the government — leaving chaos and mountains of weapons spreading across the region for years afterwards, not to mention open-air slave markets. The excuse for the war was even called genocide prevention — this was back before genocide facilitation became the respectable order of the day here on Capitol Hill. To its credit, the U.S. Congress, like the UN, like all laws and treaties, and like much of the world, opposed the war. To its shame, Congress did nothing about it. Once a president does something, especially if it’s under the banner of NATO, that means it’s not illegal. This was effectively true when Richard Nixon said it and has been ever more true up until the Supreme Court recently said it.

You’re going to hear from other speakers about Ukraine and Gaza and the South China Sea. I just want to comment briefly on Ukraine because it is the lie that half the U.S. public believes, because it is the foundation of support for NATO, and because — in one of the weirdest developments I can recall — it is, in U.S. (and European) politics, rightwing racist militarist fascistic figures who are most open to ending this particular war, albeit in order to focus on other wars.

The facts suggest that Ukraine is harmed, not helped, by endless weapons shipments. In December 2021 Russia proposed an agreement focused on Ukraine not joining NATO, and the U.S. rejected it. The criminal murderous inexcusable Russian invasion that followed was motivated, according to the Secretary General of NATO, by NATO’s refusal to exclude Ukraine. Just after the invasion, in March 2022, after negotiations mediated by Turkey, it appeared that Russia was ready to withdraw from Ukraine if Ukraine would commit to not joining NATO and that Ukraine was prepared to agree. We’ll never know for sure, but do know that well-sourced news reports show that the U.S. and UK told Ukraine to refuse the deal and keep the war going. Even now, after all the slaughter and destruction, the U.S. could allow Ukraine to sit down and negotiate with Russia, could indicate that there is a limit to the supply of free weapons. But the Secretary General of NATO has publicly told the U.S. government to allow Ukraine to use U.S. weapons to attack inside Russia, and the U.S. government has agreed. The plan is escalation, not negotiation.

NATO bragged last year that it had trained 800 Ukrainians to be as corruption-free as a U.S. politician, and yet after dumping unlimited unaccountable weapons and dollars into the place and insisting on war for years, Ukraine is still too corrupt for NATO, according to NATO. Or, rather, NATO still can’t corrupt all of its members into inviting Ukraine to join, but it can move many of them to make bilateral commitments to Ukraine, it can militarize the whole region, and it can prepare the West culturally for World War III. After all, how much preparation do you need to say goodbye to everything?

When top scientists and observers keep warning that we are closer than ever to a nuclear war — a threat to all life on Earth — what ever one does to increase that risk makes one an opponent of humanity. While Ukrainians and Russians are exactly as valuable as everyone else, most everyone else gets forgotten and treated as worthless if we consider a nuclear-risking war in only local terms. What happens in Ukraine does not stay in Ukraine.

NATO calls itself a “nuclear alliance” and maintains a “Nuclear Planning Group” for all of its members—those with and those without nuclear weapons—to discuss the launching of the sort of war that puts all life on Earth at risk, and to coordinate rehearsals or “war games” practicing for the use of nuclear weapons in Europe, where the U.S. uses NATO as cover to illegally proliferate nuclear weapons to six nations, and Russia now follows suit.

We’re in trouble and need a radical reversal, not because NATO is a good idea that’s gone bad, not because NATO could be a good idea if some other countries did it, not because NATO must be a good idea because we imagine — rightly or wrongly — that certain odious individuals oppose it for their own quirky reasons, but because the enemy of life on Earth is the institutionalization of war, the establishment of, normalization of, and acceptance of mass murder as a public service.

On this fourth of July weekend, let us recall that the United States was born out of war, a war for power, empire, and slavery, as well as limited freedoms for limited numbers of people. There have been few moments of peace for the U.S. military ever since. Nations that lend their names and respectability to a war addict are not its friends. The friendly thing to do would be to cut it off and take an independent stand for peace.

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, July 1, 2024

Anti-NATO protest in Chicago, 2012. Photo credit: Julie Dermansky

After NATO’s catastrophic, illegal invasions of Yugoslavia, Libya and Afghanistan, on July 9th NATO plans to invade Washington DC. The good news is that it only plans to occupy Washington for three days. The British will not burn down the U.S. Capitol as they did in 1814, and the Germans are still meekly pretending that they don’t know who blew up their Nord Stream gas pipelines. So expect smiling photo-ops and an overblown orgy of mutual congratulation. 

The details of NATO’s agenda for the Washington summit were revealed at a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in Prague at the end of May. NATO will drag its members into the U.S. Cold War with China by accusing it of supplying dual-use weapons technology to Russia, and it will unveil new NATO initiatives to spend our tax dollars on a mysterious “drone wall” in the Baltics and an expensive-sounding “integrated air defense system” across Europe. 

But the main feature of the summit will be a superficial show of unity to try to convince the public that NATO and Ukraine can defeat Russia and that negotiating with Russia would be tantamount to surrender.    

On the face of it, that should be a hard sell. The one thing that most Americans agree on about the war in Ukraine is that they support a negotiated peace. When asked in a  November 2023 Economist/YouGov poll “Would you support or oppose Ukraine and Russia agreeing to a ceasefire now?,” 68% said “support,” and only 8% said “oppose,” while 24% said they were not sure.

However, while President Biden and NATO leaders hold endless debates over different ways to escalate the war, they have repeatedly rejected peace negotiations, notably in April 2022, November 2022 and January 2024, even as their failed war plans leave Ukraine in an ever worsening negotiating position. 

The endgame of this non-strategy is that Ukraine will only be allowed to negotiate with Russia once it is facing total defeat and has nothing left to negotiate with – exactly the surrender NATO says it wants to avoid. 

As other countries have pointed out at the UN General Assembly, the U.S. and NATO’s rejection of negotiation and diplomacy in favor of a long war they hope will eventually “weaken” Russia is a flagrant violation of the “Pacific Settlement of Disputes” that all UN members are legally committed to under Chapter VI of the UN Charter. As it says in Article 33(1), 

“The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.”

But NATO’s leaders are not coming to Washington to work out how they can comply with their international obligations and negotiate peace in Ukraine. On the contrary. At a June meeting in preparation for the Summit, NATO defense ministers approved a plan to put NATO’s military support to Ukraine “on a firmer footing for years to come.” 

The effort will be headquartered at a U.S. military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, and involve almost 700 staff. It has been described as a way to “Trump proof” NATO backing for Ukraine, in case Trump wins the election and tries to draw down U.S. support. 

At the Summit, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg wants NATO leaders to commit to providing Ukraine with $43 billion worth of equipment each year, indefinitely. Echoing George Orwell’s doublethink that “war is peace”, Stoltenberg said, “The paradox is that the longer we plan, and the longer we commit [to war], the sooner Ukraine can have peace.”

The Summit will also discuss how to bring Ukraine closer to NATO membership, a move that guarantees the war will continue, since Ukrainian neutrality is Russia’s principal war aim.

As Ian Davis of NATO Watch reported, NATO’s rhetoric echoes the same lines he heard throughout twenty years of war in Afghanistan: “The Taliban (now Russia) can’t wait us out.” But this vague hope that the other side will eventually give up is not a strategy.

There is no evidence that Ukraine will be different from Afghanistan. The U.S. and NATO are making the same assumptions, which will lead to the same result. The underlying assumption is that NATO’s greater GDP, extravagant and corrupt military budgets and fetish for expensive weapons technology must somehow, magically, lead Ukraine to victory over Russia. 

When the U.S. and NATO finally admitted defeat in Afghanistan, it was the Afghans who had paid in blood for the West’s folly, while the US-NATO war machine simply moved on to its next “challenge,” learning nothing and making political hay out of abject denial.

Less than three years after the rout in Afghanistan, US Defense Secretary Austin recently called NATO “the most powerful and successful alliance in history.” It is a promising sign for the future of Ukraine that most Ukrainians are reluctant to throw away their lives in NATO’s dumpster-fire.

In an article titled “The New Theory of Ukrainian Victory Is the Same as the Old,” the Quincy Institute’s Mark Episkopos wrote, “Western planning continues to be strategically backwards. Aiding Kyiv has become an end in itself, divorced from a coherent strategy for bringing the war to a close”.

Episkopos concluded that “the key to wielding [the West’s] influence effectively is to finally abandon a zero-sum framing of victory…” 

We would add that this was a trap set by the United States and the United Kingdom, not just for Ukraine, but for their NATO allies too. By refusing to support Ukraine at the negotiating table in April 2022, and instead demanding this “zero-sum framing of victory” as the condition for NATO’s support, the U.S. and U.K. escalated what could have been a very short war into a protracted, potentially nuclear, war between NATO and Russia.

Turkish leaders and diplomats complained at how their American and British allies undermined their peacemaking, while France, Italy and Germany squirmed for a month or two but soon surrendered to the war camp.

When NATO leaders meet in Washington, what they should be doing, apart from figuring out how to comply with Article 33(1) of the UN Charter, is conducting a clear-eyed review of how this organization that claims to be a force for peace keeps escalating unwinnable wars and leaving countries in ruins. 

The fundamental question is whether NATO can ever be a force for peace or whether it can never be anything but a dangerous, subservient extension of the U.S. war machine. 

We believe that NATO is an anachronism in today’s multipolar world: an aggressive, expansionist military alliance whose inherent institutional myopia and blinkered, self-serving threat assessments condemn us all to endless war and potential nuclear annihilation. 

We suggest that the only way NATO could be a real force for peace would be to declare that, by this time next year, it will take the same steps that its counterpart, the Warsaw Pact, took in 1991, and finally dissolve what Secretary Austin would have been wiser to call “the most dangerous military alliance in history.”

However, the world’s population that is suffering under the yoke of militarism cannot afford to wait for NATO to give up and go away of its own accord. Our fellow citizens and political leaders need to hear from us all about the dangers posed by this unaccountable, nuclear-armed war machine, and we hope you will join us—in person or online—in using the occasion of this NATO summit to sound the alarm loudly.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books in November 2022.

Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

By David Swanson

A democratic and accountable institution that worked to defend certain nations could be imagined as promoting stability. Unfortunately, NATO is an unelected and unaccountable institution without even any democratic or transparent procedures among its members — an institution that drives military spending and arms races, opposes negotiations, escalates conflicts, heightens tensions, and increases the risk of nuclear war.

The NATO Support and Procurement Agency, which lines up weapons deals between manufacturers and governments, has a greater number of staff and handles greater amounts of money than does NATO itself, which also raises money from its partners to spend on weapons. NATO members and partners together account for 69% of the world’s military spending. China spends 19%, China 6%, and Iran 0.4% what NATO members and partners do. Yet NATO pressures its members hard to spend more on weaponry, and less on human and environmental needs.

NATO’s warmaking, in violation of the United Nations Charter, in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya has been the opposite of stabilizing. NATO has supported catastrophic and destabilizing wars that only some of its members would agree to, in places like Iraq and Palestine. The outgoing Dutch Prime Minister slated to be the next Secretary General of NATO displayed utter contempt for the rule of law when he asked “What can we say to make it look like Israel is not committing war crimes?”

The outgoing Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg, in September 2023, admitted what had been clear to unbiased observers, namely that the expansion of NATO had been central to creating the current conflict in Ukraine. Both prior to and shortly following Russia’s criminal (and predictably counterproductive) invasion of Ukraine, Russia indicated a willingness to negotiate peace, with its primary demand that Ukraine not join NATO. The United Kingdom and the United States told Ukraine that the West would not support such an agreement. No wonder the world has in great part failed to support Ukraine’s war, and no wonder global opinion is strongly opposed to NATO.

NATO calls itself a “nuclear alliance” and maintains a “Nuclear Planning Group” for all of its members to discuss the launching of the sort of war that puts all life on Earth at risk, and to coordinate rehearsals or “war games” practicing for the use of nuclear weapons in Europe. The scientists who maintain the Doomsday Clock have set it closer than ever before to midnight.

By Ludo De Brabander

Humanity has to cope with two planetary threats of increasingly dangerous proportions: climate change and the threat of nuclear war. Unfortunately, international tensions reduce space for diplomacy and action to address these and other major planetary challenges. Underlying all this is the competition between superpowers in the struggle for hegemony and the profit-driven capitalist system that keeps making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

After the cold war, in 1992 a first draft of the Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994–1999 period by US undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was leaked. The major objective of what became known as the Wolfowitz doctrine was “to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere”. The document outlined an imperialist policy of unilateralism and pre-emptive military action with the fundamental goal of keeping the US in the role of sole superpower in a ‘new world order’. More than 30 years later this hasn’t changed.

NATO’s provocative behaviour in Eastern Europe

The rise of China and Russia’s ambitions to reassert its role as a superpower were potential threats to the hegemonic role of the US. Although the Warschaupact and Sovjet-Union ceased to exist, Washington successfully managed to strengthen NATO in the post-cold war period with the purpose of defending its interests in Europe and the wider region and step up its confrontation and provocations with Russia. A few years after cancelling the ABM Treaty in 2002, the US announced its plans to build a new missile shield in Eastern Europe. In 2008, at its summit in Bucharest under pressure of the US, NATO gave the green light to Ukraine’s future membership. At the time, Germany and France were aware of the consequences of Ukraine becoming NATO member. In the words of then French Prime Minister Fillon, it would upset the balance of power in Europe. The successive rounds of NATO enlargement – the number of members has now doubled from 16 at the end of the Cold War to 32 today – were done without taking into account the security interests of Russia, which raised strong objections from the outset from under Yeltsin.

NATO’s provocative behaviour helped shaping the current pivotal moment towards what is regularly called Cold War 2.0. In a cold war, superpowers fight their mutual rivalries through third countries.

Ukraine and US intrests in Europe

That is what is going on in and around Ukraine. In Ukraine, a nationalist conflict that took on an armed character turned into a proxy war as of 2014. For the US, that was the ultimate moment to realise its hegemonic goals according to old geopolitical guideline as it was defined by the first NATO Secretary General Hastings Ismay in the 1950’s to summarise NATO’s raison d’être: to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in and the Germans down”.

The military cooperation and support to Ukraine that started immediately after 2008, with arms deliveries and joint manoeuvres was intensified after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Economic ties between European countries and Russia were severed and replaced by a comprehensive package of sanctions that also immediately strengthened the US position in Europe, including by seizing much of the energy market. US LNG (liquid Gas) exports to Europe tripled in three years (between 2021 – 2023). Russia’s position as a superpower was to be curtailed with a war of attrition at the expense of Ukraine, which was economically grounded and faces difficulties in finding new recruits for the battlefield.

The US was very open about the purpose of massive arms deliveries to Ukraine. It is not so much about ending the war quickly, but about weakening Russia as confirmed in April 2022 by US Secretary of Defence, Lloyd Austin. At the same time, Europe was undergoing rapid militarisation to the benefit of the military industry in the US and Europe. The military industrial complex is a not to underestimate driving force of western war policies. Many European proponents advocate the transformation to a war economy to tackle “the danger of Russian imperialism” even though it is clear that Russia is forced to concentrate all military efforts in Ukraine with little means of expanding its war.

Before I continue, I want to make clear that we as a peace movement must denounce and condemn Russian aggression against Ukraine. In Russia, conservative, nationalistic and militaristic forces are in power. Forces that symbolize just about everything the peace movement fights against. But the western focus on the problematic nature of the Russian invasion, a violation of Ukrainian sovereignty, should divert attention from NATO’s huge responsibilities and provocations that lead to the outbreak of war in Ukraine.

NATO continues to claim that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked”. But NATO Secretary-General Stoltenberg himself admitted in a speech to the European Parliament in September last year that halting NATO expansion was a Russian condition for not invading Ukraine. According to Stoltenberg, he “went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, from getting close to its borders. Stoltenberg says no more or less that there was a recipe for averting a Russian war against Ukraine, namely Ukraine’s neutrality.

NATO and its member states have yet to make any attempt to use diplomacy to seek a way out of the war. The military alliance instead continue to fuel it, even though Ukraine is paying a huge price and there is little chance of Kiev regaining its territory by military means. China’s 12-point plan of mid-May 2024 is dismissed by NATO. According to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Beijing is not well-placed to negotiate an end to the war. Clearly, the war must continue because Russia must be eliminated as a ‘strategic rival’.

Dangerous tensions among nuclear armed powers

Meanwhile, in the so-called ‘Indo-pacific region’, much energy is invested to also weaken China, the other ‘strategic rival’ – as China and Russia are defined in the ‘NATO 2030 Agenda’ in 2021 – with economic sanctions and the militarisation of the region with numerous military exercises and the arming of allies such as Taiwan, South Korea and Japan (the latter country decided to double its military spending in five years). It is a dangerous policy that has greatly increased the nuclear threat, exacerbated by the cancellation of key disarmament agreements by former President Trump. As a result of the current tense relations diplomatic channels are disrupted for new agreements of arms control. Worse, instead of nuclear disarmament initiatives, nuclear arsenals are being modernised and even expanded, making the world more unsafe. According to a new ICAN-report, nuclear armed states spent 91 billion dollar in their nuclear arsenals last year. 10% more than the previous year and an increase of 34% in the last five years.

The increased nuclear threat should be a major motivation to work towards rapprochement with Russia and China. But for now, there is little sign of any urgency in transatlantic circles.

Another dangerous trend is that the international legal system, as developed after the Second World War, is increasingly coming under pressure. We have witnessed how decisive the European Union can be with by now 14 sanctions packages against Russia. That same show of political will and principles is completely absent when it comes to the genocidal actions of the Israeli colonial occupying power and Apartheid state. On the contrary, the US and some other NATO member states continue to supply Israel with arms and make themselves complicit in war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. This hypocritical behaviour of two weights and two measures is undermining the international legal system. It proves that not international law and human rights are the driving forces of Western foreign policy, but geopolitical, imperialist and neo-colonial interests.

The capitalist system is grounded in competition and makes countries seek market domination, control over resources and capital accumulation that is accompanied by militarism and confrontations. Human insecurity (lack of access to basic needs) and environmental problems faced by large populations in the global south as a result of exploitation, unequal trade relations and the neoliberal policies of institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank are a breeding ground for violent conflicts and civil wars.

Peace and capitalism are two concepts that are difficult to combine. Militarism and capitalism go against fundamental values of equality, solidarity and humanity. We need to revive the idea of a new international economic order (NIEO), to counter neoliberalism, imperialism and neocolonialism without being paralysed and weakened by often minor underlying differences in how a NIEO should look like. There is a historical reference. In 1974 a declaration for a new international economic order was voted by the UN General Assembly. However it was immediately and strongly rejected by the US for obvious reasons.

The need for human and common security

It is also up to us, social movements and left forces to keep fighting for the principle that there is no peace without social justice and that peace is impossible if people have no access to essential needs in a healthy environment. It is a struggle that social organisations, trade unions, environmental groups, human rights and peace activists must fight together even if the balance of power is very unequal. Resistance pays off. History proves it. Workers in many countries have succeeded in establishing a social security system. In Belgium numerous large and small actions have pushed political parties, municipalities and universities to implement principles of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) towards Israeli entities complicit with the occupation.

The war in Ukraine, tensions in Asia and violence in the Middle East and Africa are great challenges to the peace and other social movements that seems divided and unable to weigh on politics. In time it will be realised that the politics of war are hopeless and bankrupt. Therefore, the peace movement must knock on the same nail each time: In Ukraine that means pushing for a cease-fire followed by negotiations aimed at a just, but also lasting peace. We have to emphasize that real security is based on the principle of ‘I am only safe if my neighbour also feels safe’.

Militarization and a new arms race come at the expense of necessary environmental and social investments. Tensions between militarized blocs prevent swift action to save our planet from climate change, address unsustainable inequality and poverty, and avert the nuclear weapons threat. We need a new security system that is people-centred, inclusive and based on respect for mutual security interests, on common security.

In three weeks NATO will ‘celebrate’ its 75the anniversary. The peace movement is calling up to join the counter-summit, demonstrations and actions in Washington and elsewhere with the message: NATO get out of our countries, of our world! It’s time to retire. Stop war! Stop NATO! No Peace without social justice!

Check out these basic military spending numbers in 2022, and in 2022 U.S. dollars, from SIPRI (so, leaving out a huge chunk of U.S. spending):

• Total $2,209 billion
• U.S. $877 billion
• All countries on Earth but U.S., Russia, China, and India $872 billion
• NATO members $1,238 billion
• NATO “partners across the globe” $153 billion
• NATO Istanbul Cooperation Initiative $25 billion (no data from UAE)
• NATO Mediterranean Dialogue $46 billion
• NATO Partners for Peace excluding Russia and including Sweden $71 billion
• All NATO combined excluding Russia $1,533 billion
• Entire Non-NATO world including Russia (no data from North Korea) $676 billion (44% of NATO and friends)
• Russia $86 billion (9.8% of U.S.)
• China $292 billion (33.3% of U.S.)
• Iran $7 billion (0.8% of U.S.)

By Jeffrey Sachs, World BEYOND War, September 20, 2023

During the disastrous Vietnam War, it was said that the US government treated the public like a mushroom farm: keeping it in the dark and feeding it with manure.  The heroic Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers documenting the unrelenting US government lying about the war in order to protect politicians who would be embarrassed by the truth.  A half century later, during the Ukraine War, the manure is piled even higher.

According to the US Government and the ever-obsequious New York Times, the Ukraine war was “unprovoked,” the New York Times’ favorite adjective to describe the war.  Putin, allegedly mistaking himself for Peter the Great, invaded Ukraine to recreate the Russian Empire.  Yet last week, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg committed a Washington gaffe, meaning that he accidentally blurted out the truth.

In testimony to the European Union Parliament, Stoltenberg made clear that it was America’s relentless push to enlarge NATO to Ukraine that was the real cause of the war and why it continues today.  Here are Stoltenberg’s revealing words:

“The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course, we didn’t sign that.

The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second-class membership. We rejected that.

So, he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite.”

To repeat, he [Putin] went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.

When Prof. John Mearsheimer, I, and others have said the same, we’ve been attacked as Putin apologists.  The same critics also choose to hide or flatly ignore the dire warnings against NATO enlargement to Ukraine long articulated by many of America’s leading diplomats, including the great scholar-statesman George Kennan, and the former US Ambassadors to Russia Jack Matlock and William Burns.

Burns, now CIA Director, was US Ambassador to Russia in 2008, and author of a memo entitled “Nyet means Nyet.”  In that memo, Burns explained to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the entire Russian political class, not just Putin, was dead-set against NATO enlargement. We know about the memo only because it was leaked.  Otherwise, we’d be in the dark about it.

Why does Russia oppose NATO enlargement?  For the simple reason that Russia does not accept the US military on its 2,300 km border with Ukraine in the Black Sea region. Russia does not appreciate the US placement of Aegis missiles in Poland and Romania after the US unilaterally abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty.

Russia also does not welcome the fact that the US engaged in no fewer than 70 regime change operations during the Cold War (1947-1989), and countless more since, including in Serbia, Afghanistan, Georgia, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, and Ukraine.  Nor does Russia like the fact that many leading US politicians actively advocate the destruction of Russia under the banner of “Decolonizing Russia.” That would be like Russia calling for the removal of Texas, California, Hawaii, the conquered Indian lands, and much else, from the U.S.

Even Zelensky’s team knew that the quest for NATO enlargement meant imminent war with Russia.  Oleksiy Arestovych, former Advisor to the Office of the President of Ukraine under Zelensky, declared that “with a 99.9% probability, our price for joining NATO is a big war with Russia.”

Arestovych claimed that even without NATO enlargement, Russia would eventually try to take Ukraine, just many years later. Yet history belies that.  Russia respected Finland’s and Austria’s neutrality for decades, with no dire threats, much less invasions.  Moreover, from Ukraine’s independence in 1991 until the US-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, Russia didn’t show any interest in taking Ukrainian territory.  It was only when the US installed a staunchly anti-Russian, pro-NATO regime in February 2014 that Russia took back Crimea, concerned that its Black Sea naval base in Crimea (since 1783) would fall into NATO’s hands.

Even then, Russia didn’t demand other territory from Ukraine, only fulfillment of the UN-backed Minsk II Agreement, which called for autonomy of the ethnic-Russian Donbas, not a Russian claim on the territory.  Yet instead of diplomacy, the US armed, trained, and helped to organize a huge Ukrainian army to make NATO enlargement a fait accompli.

Putin made one last attempt at diplomacy at the end of 2021, tabling a draft US-NATO Security Agreement to forestall war.  The core of the draft agreement was an end of NATO enlargement and removal of US missiles near Russia.  Russia’s security concerns were valid and the basis for negotiations.  Yet Biden flatly rejected negotiations out of a combination of arrogance, hawkishness, and profound miscalculation. NATO maintained its position that NATO would not negotiate with Russia regarding NATO enlargement, that in effect, NATO enlargement was none of Russia’s business.

The continuing US obsession with NATO enlargement is profoundly irresponsible and hypocritical.  The US would object—by means of war, if needed—to being encircled by Russian or Chinese military bases in the Western Hemisphere, a point the US has made since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823.  Yet the US is blind and deaf to the legitimate security concerns of other countries.

So, yes, Putin went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to Russia’s border. Ukraine is being destroyed by US arrogance, proving again Henry Kissinger’s adage that to be America’s enemy is dangerous, while to be its friend is fatal.  The Ukraine War will end when the US acknowledges a simple truth: NATO enlargement to Ukraine means perpetual war and Ukraine’s destruction.  Ukraine’s neutrality could have avoided the war, and remains the key to peace.  The deeper truth is that European security depends on collective security as called for by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), not one-sided NATO demands.

……………………….

Jeffrey Sachs is Professor at Columbia University, is Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has served as adviser to three UN Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General António Guterres.   Article sent to Other News by the author. September 19, 2023

The Real History of the War in Ukraine:
A Chronology of Events and Case for Diplomacy

Jeffrey D. Sachs   |   July 17, 2023   |   The Kennedy Beacon

The American people urgently need to know the true history of the war in Ukraine and its current prospects. Unfortunately, the mainstream media ––The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, MSNBC, and CNN –– have become mere mouthpieces of the government, repeating US President Joe Biden’s lies and hiding history from the public.

Biden is again denigrating Russian President Vladimir Putin, this time accusing Putin of a “craven lust for land and power,” after declaring last year that “For God’s sake, that man [Putin] cannot stay in power.”  Yet Biden is the one who is trapping Ukraine in an open-ended war by continuing to push NATO enlargement to Ukraine.  He is afraid to tell the truth to the American and Ukrainian people, rejecting diplomacy, and opting instead for perpetual war.

Expanding NATO to Ukraine, which Biden has long promoted, is a U.S. gambit that has failed.  The neocons, including Biden, thought from the late 1990s onward that the US could expand NATO to Ukraine (and Georgia) despite Russia’s vociferous and long-standing opposition.  They didn’t believe that Putin would actually go to war over NATO expansion.

Yet for Russia, NATO enlargement to Ukraine (and Georgia) is viewed as an existential threat to Russia’s national security, notably given Russia’s 2,000-km border with Ukraine, and Georgia’s strategic position on the eastern edge of the Black Sea.  U.S. diplomats have explained this basic reality to U.S. politicians and generals for decades, but the politicians and generals have arrogantly and crudely persisted in pushing NATO enlargement nonetheless.

At this point, Biden knows full well that NATO enlargement to Ukraine would trigger World War III.  That’s why behind the scenes Biden put NATO enlargement into low gear at the Vilnius NATO Summit.  Yet rather than admit the truth – that Ukraine will not be part of NATO – Biden prevaricates, promising Ukraine’s eventual membership.  In reality, he is committing Ukraine to ongoing bloodletting for no reason other than U.S. domestic politics, specifically Biden’s fear of looking weak to his political foes.  (A half-century ago, Presidents Johnson and Nixon sustained the Vietnam War for essentially the same pathetic reason, and with the same lying, as the late Daniel Ellsberg brilliantly explained.)

Ukraine can’t win.  Russia is more likely than not to prevail on the battlefield, as it seems now to be doing. Yet even if Ukraine were to break through with conventional forces and NATO weaponry, Russia would escalate to nuclear war if necessary to prevent NATO in Ukraine.

Throughout his entire career, Biden has served the military-industrial complex. He has relentlessly promoted NATO enlargement and supported America’s deeply destabilizing wars of choice in Afghanistan, Serbia, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and now Ukraine. He defers to generals who want more war and more “surges,” and who predict imminent victory just ahead to keep the gullible public onside.

Moreover, Biden and his team (Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland) seem to have believed their own propaganda that Western sanctions would strangle the Russian economy, while miracle weapons such as HIMARS would defeat Russia.  And all the while, they have been telling Americans to pay no attention to Russia’s 6,000 nuclear weapons.

Ukrainian leaders have gone along with the US deception for reasons that are hard to fathom. Perhaps they believe the US, or are afraid of the US, or fear their own extremists, or simply are extremists, ready to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to death and injury in the naïve belief that Ukraine can defeat a nuclear superpower that regards the war as existential. Or possibly some of the Ukrainian leaders are making fortunes by skimming from the tens of billions of dollars of Western aid and arms.

The only way to save Ukraine is a negotiated peace. In a negotiated settlement, the US would agree that NATO will not enlarge to Ukraine while Russia would agree to withdraw its troops.  Remaining issues – Crimea, the Donbas, US and European sanctions, the future of European security arrangements – would be handled politically, not by endless war.

Russia has repeatedly tried negotiations: to try to forestall the eastward enlargement of NATO; to try to find suitable security arrangements with the US and Europe; to try to settle inter-ethnic issues in Ukraine after 2014 (the Minsk I and Minsk II agreements); to try to sustain limits on anti-ballistic missiles; and to try to end the Ukraine war in 2022 via direct negotiations with Ukraine. In all cases, the US government disdained, ignored, or blocked these attempts, often putting forward the big lie that Russia rather than the US rejects negotiations. JFK said it exactly right in 1961: “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.”  If only Biden would heed JFK’s enduring wisdom.

To help the public move beyond the simplistic narrative of Biden and the mainstream media, I offer a brief chronology of some key events leading to the ongoing war.

January 31, 1990.  German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich-Genscher pledges to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that in the context of German reunification and disbanding of the Soviet Warsaw Pact military alliance, NATO will rule out an “expansion of its territory to the East, i.e., moving it closer to the Soviet borders.”

February 9, 1990.  U.S. Secretary of State James Baker III agrees with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that “NATO expansion is unacceptable.”

June 29 – July 2, 1990.  NATO Secretary-General Manfred Woerner tells a high-level Russian delegation that “the NATO Council and he [Woerner] are against the expansion of NATO.”

July 1, 1990.  Ukrainian Rada (parliament) adopts the Declaration of State Sovereignty, in which “The Ukrainian SSR solemnly declares its intention of becoming a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs and adheres to three nuclear free principles: to accept, to produce and to purchase no nuclear weapons.”

August 24, 1991.  Ukraine declares independence on the basis of the 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty, which includes the pledge of neutrality.

Mid-1992.  Bush Administration policymakers reach a secret internal consensus to expand NATO, contrary to commitments recently made to the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation.

July 8, 1997.  At the Madrid NATO Summit, Poland, Hungary, and Czech Republic are invited to begin NATO accession talks.

September-October, 1997.  In Foreign Affairs (Sept/Oct, 1997) former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski details the timeline for NATO enlargement, with Ukraine’s negotiations provisionally to begin during 2005-2010.

March 24 – June 10, 1999.  NATO bombs Serbia.  Russia terms the NATO bombing “a flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter.”

March 2000.  Ukrainian President Kuchma declares that “there is no question of Ukraine joining NATO today since this issue is extremely complex and has many angles to it.”

June 13, 2002.  The US unilaterally withdraws from the Anti-Ballistic Weapons Treaty, an action which the Vice-Chair of the Russian Duma Defense Committee characterizes as an “extremely negative event of historical scale.”

November-December 2004.  The “Orange Revolution” occurs in Ukraine, events that the West characterizes as a democratic revolution and the Russian government characterizes as a Western-manufactured grab for power with overt and covert US support.

February 10, 2007.  Putin strongly criticizes the U.S. attempt to create a unipolar world, backed by NATO enlargement, in a speech to the Munich Security Conference, declaring: “I think it is obvious that NATO expansion … represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?”

February 1, 2008.  US Ambassador to Russia William Burns sends a confidential cable to U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, entitled “Nyet means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines,” emphasizing that “Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region.”

February 18, 2008.  The US recognizes Kosovo independence over heated Russian objections.  The Russian Government declares that Kosovo independence violates “the sovereignty of the Republic of Serbia, the Charter of the United Nations, UNSCR 1244, the principles of the Helsinki Final Act, Kosovo’s Constitutional Framework and the high-level Contact Group accords.”

April 3, 2008.  NATO declares that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO.” Russia declares that “Georgia’s and Ukraine’s membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security.”

August 20, 2008.  The US announces that it will deploy ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems in Poland, to be followed later by Romania.  Russia expresses strenuous opposition to the BMD systems.

January 28, 2014.  Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt plot regime change in Ukraine in a call that is intercepted and posted on YouTube on February 7, in which Nuland notes that “[Vice President] Biden’s willing” to help close the deal.

February 21, 2014.  Governments of Ukraine, Poland, France, and Germany reach an Agreement on settlement of political crisis in Ukraine, calling for new elections later in the year.  The far-right Right Sector and other armed groups instead demand Yanukovych’s immediate resignation, and take over government buildings.  Yanukovych flees.  The Parliament immediately strips the President of his powers without an impeachment process.

February 22, 2014.  The US immediately endorses the regime change.

March 16, 2014.  Russia holds a referendum in Crimea that according to the Russian Government results in a large majority vote for Russian rule.  On March 21, the Russian Duma votes to admit Crimea to the Russian Federation. The Russian Government draws the analogy to the Kosovo referendum.  The US rejects the Crimea referendum as illegitimate.

March 18, 2014.  President Putin characterizes the regime change as a coup, stating: “those who stood behind the latest events in Ukraine had a different agenda: they were preparing yet another government takeover; they wanted to seize power and would stop short of nothing. They resorted to terror, murder and riots.”

March 25, 2014.  President Barack Obama mocks Russia “as a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors — not out of strength but out of weakness,”

February 12, 2015.  Signing of Minsk II agreement.  The agreement is unanimously backed by the UN Security Council Resolution 2202 on February 17, 2015.  Former Chancellor Angela Merkel later acknowledges that the Minsk II agreement was designed to give time for Ukraine to strengthen its military.  It was not implemented by Ukraine, and President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged that he had no intention to implement the agreement.

February 1, 2019.  The U.S. unilaterally withdraws from the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty.  Russia harshly criticizes the INF withdrawal as a “destructive” act that stoked security risks.

June 14, 2021.  At the 2021 NATO Summit in Brussels, NATO reconfirms NATO’s intention to enlarge and include Ukraine: “We reiterate the decision made at the 2008 Bucharest Summit that Ukraine will become a member of the Alliance.”

September 1, 2021.  The US reiterates support for Ukraine’s NATO aspirations in the “Joint Statement on the U.S.-Ukraine Strategic Partnership.”

December 17, 2021.  Putin puts forward a draft “Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees,” based on non-enlargement of NATO and limitations on the deployment of intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles.

January 26, 2022.  The U.S. formally replies to Russia that the US and NATO will not negotiate with Russia over issues of NATO enlargement, slamming the door on a negotiated path to avoid an expansion of the war in Ukraine.  The U.S. invokes NATO policy that “Any decision to invite a country to join the Alliance is taken by the North Atlantic Council on the basis of consensus among all Allies. No third country has a say in such deliberations.”  In short, the US asserts that NATO enlargement to Ukraine is none of Russia’s business.

February 21, 2022.  At a meeting of the Russian Security Council, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov details the U.S. refusal to negotiate:

“We received their response in late January. The assessment of this response shows that our Western colleagues are not prepared to take up our major proposals, primarily those on NATO’s eastward non-expansion. This demand was rejected with reference to the bloc’s so-called open-door policy and the freedom of each state to choose its own way of ensuring security. Neither the United States, nor the North Atlantic Alliance proposed an alternative to this key provision.”

The United States is doing everything it can to avoid the principle of indivisibility of security that we consider of fundamental importance and to which we have made many references. Deriving from it the only element that suits them – the freedom to choose alliances – they completely ignore everything else, including the key condition that reads that nobody – either in choosing alliances or regardless of them – is allowed to enhance their security at the expense of the security of others.”

February 24, 2022.  In an address to the nation, President Putin declares: “It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts at pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns. Its military machine is moving and, as I said, is approaching our very border.”

March 16, 2022.  Russia and Ukraine announce significant progress towards a peace agreement mediated by Turkey and Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.  As reported in the press, the basis of the agreement includes: “a ceasefire and Russian withdrawal if Kyiv declares neutrality and accepts limits on its armed forces.”

March 28, 2022.  President Zelensky publicly declares that Ukraine is ready for neutrality combined with security guarantees as part of a peace agreement with Russia.  “Security guarantees and neutrality, the non-nuclear status of our state — we’re ready to do that. That’s the most important point … they started the war because of it.”

April 7, 2022.  Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov accuses the West of trying to derail the peace talks, claiming that Ukraine had gone back on previously agreed proposals.  Prime Minister Naftali Bennett later states (on February 5, 2023) that the U.S. had blocked the pending Russia-Ukraine peace agreement.  When asked if the Western powers blocked the agreement, Bennett answered: “Basically, yes. They blocked it, and I thought they were wrong.”  At some point, says Bennett, the West decided “to crush Putin rather than to negotiate.”

June 4, 2023.  Ukraine launches a major counter-offensive, without achieving any major success as of mid-July 2023.

July 7, 2023.  Biden acknowledges that Ukraine is “running out” of 155mm artillery shells, and that the US is “running low.”

July 11, 2023.  At the NATO Summit in Vilnius, the final communique reaffirms Ukraine’s future in NATO: “We fully support Ukraine’s right to choose its own security arrangements.  Ukraine’s future is in NATO … Ukraine has become increasingly interoperable and politically integrated with the Alliance, and has made substantial progress on its reform path.”

July 13, 2023.  US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin reiterates that Ukraine will “no doubt” join NATO when the war ends.

July 13, 2023.  Putin reiterates that “As for Ukraine’s NATO membership, as we have said many times, this obviously creates a threat to Russia’s security. In fact, the threat of Ukraine’s accession to NATO is the reason, or rather one of the reasons for the special military operation. I am certain that this would not enhance Ukraine’s security in any way either. In general, it will make the world much more vulnerable and lead to more tensions in the international arena.  So, I don’t see anything good in this. Our position is well known and has long been formulated.”

##

More insight into motivations:

🚨 Lindsey Graham has just confirmed that they are not sacrificing the Ukrainian people for “freedom” and “democracy,” but for Ukraine’s minerals, which are worth trillions of dollars, and the West wants them.

This is unbelievable…
pic.twitter.com/A1aYqy6CPb

— Gabe (@GabeZZOZZ) June 9, 2024

By David Swanson, February 14, 2024

How can media outlets be taken seriously — and I do not mean this rhetorically — when they shout that two hostages have been freed while adding in the fine print that several dozen mere Palestinians have been killed in the process, when they propose that a city of starving refugees be bombed in a manner that “protects civilians,” when they equate fueling wars with “aid”?

One part of the answer is that they feature raging debates between wildly opposed positions. Surely only open and free media would allow that! Typically, they have to do this in all the small-budget (that is, non-military) policy areas. Trump’s gift to corporate propaganda is the inclusion of foreign policy among the areas of debate. But, just as with most of the other debates, the key characteristic of the foreign policy debates is that both sides firmly agree on all the basic points and get them all dead wrong.

“Arm Taiwan to build up to a war on China right now” is opposed by the demand to arm Taiwan to build up to a war on China right now.

“Militarize the border of Mexico right now” is opposed by the demand to militarize the border of Mexico a bit later. Big debate!

“Rush more free weapons to the genocide in Gaza” is opposed by the demand to rush more free weapons to the genocide in Gaza. Except that the fierce opposition of the majority of the U.S. public starts to leak through here and there. It becomes necessary to move the focus to Biden’s age, or even to talk of demanding a ceasefire while providing the weapons, or at the far extreme to discuss redundantly banning weapons shipments that already violate more laws than a Trump bank account. Debate rages!

The really big debate, however, is on the topic of Ukraine and NATO. One side (Trump and whoever tries to make sense of his logorrhea) maintains that militarism is a public service that every nation should invest in for the good of the world and to the extent of that nation’s financial ability, that arms build-ups never provoke wars but only prevent them, that the Russian invasion of Ukraine resulted from insufficient Western militarism, and that there is no path to a better world that involves the rule of law, diplomacy, conflict management, disarmament, unarmed civilian defense, the inclusion of Russia in NATO, or the abolition of NATO. This is countered by the other side (virtually every corporate commentator) which maintains the exact same thing on every point.

So where’s the debate? While Trump evicted Russian diplomats, sanctioned Russian officials, put missiles practically on Russia’s border, sent weapons into Ukraine that Obama refused to send because it could lead to war with Russia, lobbied European nations to drop Russian energy deals, left the Iran agreement, tore up the INF Treaty, rejected Russia’s offers on banning weapons in space and banning cyberwar, expanded NATO eastward, added a NATO partner in Colombia, proposed adding Brazil, demanded and successfully moved most NATO members to buy significantly more weapons, splurged on more nukes, bombed Russians in Syria, oversaw the largest war rehearsals in Europe in half a century (now outdone), condemned all proposals for a European military, and insisted that Europe stick with NATO — all of which is considered decent and respectable, so best not to talk about, Trump also says things like that he would encourage Russia to do whatever it wants to countries that have not paid the money they owe NATO.

The debate is not over Trump’s notion of using war as the answer to all problems, but over his suggestion that Russia wage wars. That is almost the very worst thing that could ever be said, in the view of many, including — but by no means limited to — many of the same people for whom “This genocide is all right” used to be one of the very worst things that could ever be said.

As it’s our civic duty to ignore Biden’s mental blunders, according to three — count them — op-eds in Tuesday’s New York Times, I think we should also ignore, or at least not completely obsess over, the fact that Trump has no idea how NATO works, that dues paid into NATO are small and all paid, and that what he’s actually talking about is the notion that each nation should spend at least 2% of its “economy” on weapons (mostly U.S. weapons, so that Trump can brag about the sales in front of cameras, as other presidents brag behind closed doors).

Of course on the debate over whether one should encourage Russia to wage wars, the Trump side is dead wrong and the other side dead right. But the reason for that is not, as Biden says, that a commitment to NATO is “sacred” or that Trump is being “un-American.” Trump is of course being more “American” by threatening anybody else with war in the name of saving U.S. dollars. And commitments to military alliances are not “sacred.” Trump is wrong to suggest encouraging wars because war is an evil, mass-murderous enterprise.

The “NATO is a sacred commitment” crowd is of course also threatening war. The commitment in joining NATO is not to say nice things about Europe or to hate Russia or to sanction Russia or to pretend Trump never sanctioned Russia, or to buy weapons, or to pay dues. The commitment is to join in any war that any other NATO member is in, if that war is depicted as being defensive. So, if Russia attacks a NATO member, the U.S. commitment is to go to war with Russia, even if that means nuclear war and the end of life in Earth. Life on Earth is not “sacred” apparently. Or if a NATO member attacks Russia but Western media maintains Russia started it, or if the two nations attack each other simultaneously, or if minor raids escalate into larger assaults and each side gets to choose which assault constitutes the initiation of war, then the U.S. has a “sacred” commitment to end life on Earth. That may be more respectable than Trump’s blather, but I wouldn’t call it more sane. I would call it sharing in the illness of war thinking.

Trump is not wrong, as some U.S. media outlets suggest, because he takes credit for boosting weapons spending by NATO members, whereas in reality NATO members have been spending more and more on war preparations before Trump was president, while Trump was president, and since Trump was president. Trump is wrong because spending more and more on war preparations is an evil, mass-murderous enterprise that leads toward more wars, while taking funds away from health, education, retirement, environment, housing, food, and everything worth living for. The idea that anyone in Europe might not be a war-crazed maniac who is freeloading, and might instead be prioritizing something other than military spending seems to be literally unthinkable by both sides of the U.S. debate over NATO.

When NATO celebrates 75 years of itself in Washington D.C. in July, some of us will be saying No to NATO and Yes to Peace, without joining either side of the commonly understood debate. See https://nonatoyespeace.org

By Florina Tufescu, World BEYOND War, March 28, 2024

EU Leaders, Stop the Warmongering!

The most recent poll commissioned by the European Council for Foreign Relations (an influential think tank that employs numerous leading politicians, EU officials, and former NATO secretaries general) shows that 41% of European citizens would prefer for Europe to put pressure on Ukraine to engage in negotiations with Russia, as compared to 31% who favour continued military support. Yet the conclusion of the poll analysis, coauthored by the director of ECFR, is not that European leaders should pay any attention to citizens’ views, but simply that they need to repackage and refine their message, stressing the preferability of the “durable peace” to be achieved through continued fighting over the actual peace that could be achieved right now through negotiations.

We know from the head of the Ukrainian delegation and leader of the Servant of the People’s Party David Arahamiya that Russian negotiators “were ready to end the war if we took – as Finland once did – neutrality.” This was rejected due to the lack of security guarantees and on the grounds that the intention of joining NATO was written into Ukraine’s Constitution. A subsequent round of peace talks in April 2022 was allegedly sabotaged by the UK and the U.S. according to multiple sources, which once again include the Ukrainian spokesman.

No peace negotiations have been attempted since, probably because the risk of their succeeding has been too great. The war needs to go on to justify the expansion of the U.S. and EU military industries. Total military spending by NATO, which is supposedly a ‘defensive’ alliance, has reached an all-time high of USD 1,100 billion in 2023 while military spending by Central and Western European countries as self-declared champions of democracy and peace is also at its highest ever, i.e.  USD 345 billion already in 2022 according to SIPRI. By comparison, Russia, a dictatorship that is directly involved in war, spent USD 86.4 billion on the military in 2022 according to SIPRI.

The war in Ukraine has already resulted in hundreds of thousands of lives lost since February 2022, millions of refugees and 30% of Ukrainian territory contaminated by mines. This tragedy cannot be allowed to continue purely to justify the growth of the weapons industry, which EU leaders now seem determined to make a key one, with Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton asking for another EUR 100 billion of military funding on top of all the existing commitments at EU level and at the national level by the  European countries that are also NATO members. Much like the grieving walrus of Lewis Carroll’s poem,  the EU and NATO leaders put on their gravest faces in stressing the inevitability of war preparations while in fact doing nothing to reduce the conflict and being nonchalant about the risk of nuclear escalation.

The possibilities for ending the war are already known and were discussed in the Minsk agreements and in the Istanbul peace negotiations. They would have to include Ukraine’s neutrality and the guarantee of Russian minority rights in Ukraine, which would be a far more effective means of undoing Putin’s influence than the sending of additional weapons.

In addition, the EU should support conscientious objectors from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The right to conscientious objection, upheld by article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights and by article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is not currently recognised by Ukraine and, albeit legally recognised in Russia for non-military personnel, it is disrespected in approximately 50% of cases according to the European Bureau for Conscientious Objection. Fewer than 10,000 of the estimated 250,000 Russians who have fled their homeland to avoid conscription have been granted asylum in the EU, despite the appeal made by 60 organisations already in June 2022 (EBCO annual report, p. 3). So this path to peace has not been pursued, presumably because refugees put a strain on the economy without profiting any powerful clique, whereas the military industry is highly profitable for certain people and exerts an ever greater influence on EU policies, as revealed in the Fanning the Flames report published by the Transnational Institute and the European Network Against Arms Trade and in the ENAAT report “From war lobby to war economy“.

It is high time for EU leaders to recover some shred of credibility by showing they are willing to make at least a modest investment in peace and peace negotiations in parallel with the unprecedented investment in war preparations. It is high time for EU leaders to place the interests of European citizens and of human beings in general ahead of those of the weapons industry.

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, April 11, 2023

NATO will be celebrating 75 years of itself — and plotting future wars and weapons sales — in Washington D.C. in July, and a lot of people are busy planning a counter-summit and rally to oppose NATO’s agenda.

For those who care about life on Earth, or who are upset by the horrors and risks of one of the current wars in Gaza or Ukraine, taking steps to move humanity away from the course plotted by the largest military alliance ever to exist may seem an obvious to-do-list item.

For those upset by the horrific war in Gaza, in particular, and inclined toward the common ritual of calling it “not a war” — as if there existed elsewhere some kind of war that wasn’t horrible or didn’t mass-murder families — paying any attention to NATO may seem like a distraction from the moral imperative to put a halt to a public genocide in Palestine sanctioned by the “rules based order.”

But the slaughter in Gaza could not exist without the U.S.-led military industrial complex, and its largest and most effective tool is NATO. One of NATO’s many partners around the globe is Israel. Israel’s horrific wars are of the same species as everybody else’s horrific wars. And without NATO, neither the U.S. nor Israel could make any claim to being part of an “international community” or a “rules based order.”

Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty limits new members of NATO to European nations that are invited by NATO to join it. But NATO has not limited itself to Europe. It does not view its purpose as merely “resisting armed attack” (in the language of that treaty). Not only has it reconceived the concept of resisting actual attacks as deterring potential attacks — often through behavior that is clearly more provocative than deterrent — but NATO also conceives of itself as a global alliance that will wage wars anywhere on Earth, regardless of any attack on a NATO member.

Outside of Europe, therefore, NATO has added dozens of additional nations as “partners” rather than members. To invite a nation to be a member, existing members must agree that, according to Article 5, an attack on one is an attack on all. To add a “partner,” however, no such commitment is required. NATO may very well go to war in the event that one of its partners goes to war, but it is not obliged to by treaty. It is thus free to do weapons deals with partner governments, embed partner militaries in its “interoperable” system of weapons types, trainers, and operators, and decide on an ad hoc basis what wars to wage.

Always viewing militarism as the answer to the problems it creates, NATO has established partnerships across the region of Western Asia that have wreaked havoc, spreading weaponry and instability. One initiative, the Mediterranean Dialogue, includes Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia. Another, the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. In addition, through what NATO calls “Partners Across the Globe,” NATO has established partnerships with Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. NATO partners Israel and Pakistan are estimated to possess 170 nuclear weapons each, both without joining the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

The Western Asian NATO partners include some of the most oppressive, authoritarian and dictatorial governments, deemed the least “free” by the U.S.-funded Freedom House rankings, and considered by the U.S. Department of State responsible for all variety of brutal human rights abuses — plus Israel, which is also one of the most brutal, warmaking governments — one that has recently been ordered to cease its murderous activities by the International Court of Justice and the United Nations Security Council — even if deemed flawless and “democratic” by the U.S. government that arms it.

NATO and NATO members have been supporting Israel since its creation by funding, arming, and training the Israeli military and providing diplomatic cover for Israel’s crimes. Israel imports weapons primarily from the United States and Germany, but also imports and exports weapons with other NATO members. In 2017, Israel established a permanent official mission to NATO headquarters in Brussels, and there have been efforts over the years to integrate Israel more closely into NATO to take advantage of Israel’s advanced weapons systems, so frequently tested and demonstrated on Palestinians.

NATO members have purchased billions in weapons from Israel, including the Arrow 3 missile defense system (sold to Germany for $3.5 billion) and “Kamikaze drones” and counter-drone systems. Israeli weapons exports soared after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, when NATO members saw a chance to acquire Israel’s advanced military technology. NATO is particularly interested in Israel’s use of artificial intelligence, which began with Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2021 but became a key component of its military strategy after October 7, 2023. In Israel’s targeting of Palestinians, the army has used an artificial intelligence-based program known as “Lavender,” which has played a central role in the bombing that has killed tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people in Gaza.

Israeli military officials have briefed NATO on Israel’s “innovations,” and Israel’s President Isaac Herzog visited NATO headquarters in 2023 — the first time an Israeli president has addressed NATO allies there. Like a pair of presidents, the president of Israel and the unelected-to-anything secretary general of NATO held a joint press conference.

NATO put out a statement on that occasion that read, in part: “NATO and Israel have worked together for almost 30 years, cooperating in domains such as science and technology, counter terrorism, civil preparedness, countering weapons of mass destruction and women, peace and security. Over the last year cooperation has grown, with NATO welcoming Israel’s intention to strengthen the naval interoperability by recognising Israel as a partner for NATO’s Operation Sea Guardian, and Israel’s Defence Force military medical academy now serving as a unique asset for NATO’s Partnership Training and Education Centres community.”

NATO’s Secretary General also claimed that Russia, China, and North Korea, were aligning with Iran as enemies of “freedom and democracy.” NATO and the Israeli government view Iran as an important enemy. Israel played a significant role in pushing for the disastrous war in Iraq, and has been a leading proponent of the still-threatened war on Iran for decades. “The illusion of distance can no longer hold. NATO must take the strongest possible stance against the Iranian regime including through economic, legal and political sanctions and credible military deterrence,” said NATO’s Secretary General.

NATO headquarters and the dominant decision-maker in NATO, the U.S. government, have been supportive of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, despite division among NATO member governments. Belgium, Spain, and Slovenia, have expressed some sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians, while European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has commented publicly to U.S. President Biden: “Well, if you believe that too many people are being killed, maybe you should provide less arms in order to prevent so many people being killed.” Such logic does not seem to penetrate NATO, which is increasingly taking over the role of governments in budgeting, warmaking, policing, scientific research, education, and diplomacy — all without any pretense of accountability to any public, as NATO wages and fuels wars for “democracy.”

Articles churned out in the past few months by NATO-aligned stink tankers have been pushing for much closer collaboration between Israel and NATO.

NATO

What You Need To Know

MEDEA BENJAMIN and DAVID SWANSON

“An indispensable primer. It can save your life — indeed all of our lives…NATO is a clear and present danger to world peace, a war machine run amok.”

— Jeffrey D. Sachs

“Read this book to understand how NATO promotes a logic of domination, not equality, or justice or peace.”

—Clare Daly, MEP

GET YOUR COPY HERE.

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, May 15, 2024

Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty declares that NATO members will assist another member if attacked by “taking action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.” But the UN Charter does not say anywhere that warmaking is authorized for whoever jumps in on the appropriate side.

The North Atlantic Treaty’s authors may have been aware that they were on dubious legal ground because they went on twice to claim otherwise, first adding the words “Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.” But shouldn’t the United Nations be the one to decide when it has taken necessary measures and when it has not?

The North Atlantic Treaty adds a second bit of sham obsequiousness with the words “This Treaty does not affect, and shall not be interpreted as affecting in any way the rights and obligations under the Charter of the Parties which are members of the United Nations, or the primary responsibility of the Security Council for the maintenance of international peace and security.” So the treaty that created NATO seeks to obscure the fact that it is, indeed, authorizing warmaking outside of the United Nations — as has now played out in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya.

While the UN Charter itself replaced the blanket ban on all warmaking that had existed in the Kellogg-Briand Pact with a porous ban plagued by loopholes imagined to apply far more than they actually do — in particular that of “defensive” war — it is NATO that creates, in violation of the UN Charter, the idea of numerous nations going to war together of their own initiative and by prior agreement to all join in any other member’s war. Because NATO has numerous members, as does also your typical street gang, there is a tendency to imagine NATO not as an illegal enterprise but rather as just the reverse, as a legitimizer and sanctioner of warmaking.

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty forbids transferring nuclear weapons to other nations. It contains no NATO exception. Yet NATO proliferates nuclear weapons, and this is widely imagined as law enforcement or crime prevention. The prime minister of Sweden said this week that NATO ought to be able to put nuclear weapons in Sweden as long as somebody has determined it to be “war time.” The Nonproliferation Treaty says otherwise, and the people who plan the insanity of nuclear war say “What the heck for? We’ve got them on long-range missiles and stealth airplanes and submarines?” The people of Sweden seem, at least in large part, to also want to say No Nukes — but when were people ever asked to play a role in “defending democracy”? The purpose of bringing nukes into Sweden, for those in the Swedish government who favor it, may in fact be purely a show of subservience to U.S. empire, driven by fear of its obliging partner in the arms race, the militarists in Russia.

Poland’s president says his country would be happy to have “NATO” nuclear weapons there, “war time” or not, and this proposal is reported in U.S. corporate media with no mention of any legal concerns and with the claim that it comes as a response to the Russian placement of nuclear weapons in Belarus. Last year I asked the Russian ambassador to the United States why putting nuclear weapons into Belarus wasn’t a blatant violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty, and he said, oh no, it was perfectly fine, because the United States does it all the time.

In fact, NATO itself owns and controls no nuclear weapons. Three NATO members own and control nuclear weapons. We cannot be certain how many weapons they have, since nuclear weapons are both justified with the dubious alchemy of “deterrence” and, contradictorily, cloaked in secrecy. The United States has an estimated 5,344 nuclear weapons, France an estimated 290, and Great Britain an estimated 240.

NATO calls itself a “nuclear alliance” and maintains a “Nuclear Planning Group” for all of its members — those with and those without nuclear weapons — to discuss the launching of the sort of war that puts all life on Earth at risk, and to coordinate rehearsals or “war games” practicing for the use of nuclear weapons in Europe. NATO partners Israel and Pakistan are estimated to possess 170 nuclear weapons each.

Five NATO members have U.S. nuclear weapons stored and controlled by the U.S. military within their borders: Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey. These are estimated at 35 nuclear weapons at Aviano and Ghedi Air Bases in Italy, 20 at Incirlik in Turkey, and 15 each at Kleine Brogel in Belgium, Volkel Air Base in the Netherlands, and Büchel Air Base in Germany. The United States is reportedly also moving its own nuclear weapons into RAF Lakenheath in the UK, where it has stored them in the past. The people of each of these countries routinely protest the presence of nuclear weapons and have never been asked to vote on the matter. The notion that the nuclear weapons in a European country are still U.S. nuclear weapons and thus haven’t been proliferated is an odd fit with the general understanding of international treaties, which are conceived and written as if there were no such thing as empire.

With so-called U.S. or NATO nuclear weapons in potentially eight nations in Europe — and perhaps South Korea as well, at least on U.S. submarines docked there to please certain war-crazed South Koreans — there could soon be more nations in the world with “U.S.” nuclear weapons than nations with anybody else’s.

In recent years, the United States has been replacing its nuclear bombs stored in European nations with a newer model (the B61-12), while NATO members have been buying new U.S.-made airplanes with which to drop them. Turkey has had U.S. nukes stored in it even while U.S.-backed and Turkish-backed troops have fought each other in Syria, and even during a non-U.S.-backed coup attempt at the very base where the nuclear weapons are stored.

Seven other NATO members are said to support “nuclear missions” using their non-nuclear militaries: The Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Norway, Poland, and Romania.

Poland and Romania also host new U.S./NATO missile bases that could launch missiles into Russia from very short distances, leaving the Russian government mere moments to decide whether the weapons are nuclear, or to decide whether to launch missiles of its own. The U.S. and NATO claim the bases are purely defensive, and various supporters of the bases have even claimed they had nothing to do with Russia—that they were either focused on Iran (then-U.S. President Barack Obama) or purely functioned as jobs programs for U.S. workers (former U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock).

Meanwhile, the U.S. has been manufacturing what many of its officials describe as “more usable” or “tactical” nuclear weapons (merely several times the destructive power of what was used on Hiroshima). At the same time, the U.S. military is aware that, in its war game scenarios, the use of a single so-called “tactical” nuclear weapon tends to lead to all-out nuclear war. Or, as then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee in 2018, “I don’t think there is any such thing as a ‘tactical nuclear weapon.’ Any nuclear weapon used any time is a strategic game-changer.”

The U.S.-made, disaster-prone F-35 is the first “stealth” airplane designed to carry nuclear bombs, meaning that it can in theory drop a nuclear bomb on a city with no warning from radar at all. The U.S./NATO have managed to sell F-35s to the U.S., UK, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Poland, Israel, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, with efforts under way to spread them to more nations, eventually perhaps creating a general need for them on the grounds of “interoperability.” The F-35 is currently being demonstrated on the people of Gaza.

The U.S. military has enough nuclear weapons in each of the following three forms to threaten all life on our planet: missiles on U.S. submarines in oceans around the world; bombs on U.S. airplanes circling the globe; and missiles in the ground in the United States. So why also keep nuclear bombs in European countries, where they would have to be loaded onto airplanes and flown (presumably to Russia) on missions either so “stealth” that they avoid all warning or so risky that they would have to be preceded by massive efforts to destroy air defenses?

If the decision to “go nuclear” were up to NATO, all members would have to reach a consensus on it. However, NATO has not always easily reached a consensus. For example, the U.S. attempted to bring NATO into its plans for a war on Iraq in 2003 but failed, in part because of huge public pressure against that war in NATO nations. Nuclear war is one of the least popular ideas ever, so the launch of a nuclear weapon might have to be “stealth” not only in relation to Russia but also in relation to the Western public. If the U.S. decides to use nuclear weapons, it almost certainly will not bother trying to use the ones it keeps stored in Europe. For that matter, were U.S. officials intent on reaching secret bunkers under hills some distance from Washington, D.C., they would need significant warning that a nuclear war had been secretly scheduled — a problematic concept for both the idea of deterrence and the idea of democracy.

The purpose of NATO in the North Atlantic Treaty is supposed to be defense against an attack on Europe, not deterrence. But in the event of responding to such an attack, whether the response were nuclear or not, the U.S. bombs stored in Europe would probably not be used. Threats in the name of deterrence have tended to fuel arms races and wars. But keeping U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe seems to fail even by the usual standards of deterrence theory, since their most likely use would be in an unlikely secret attack. Some U.S. officials believe those nuclear bombs serve no “military purpose” but only a “political” one, to reassure the host countries that the U.S. government cares about them.

The argument has also been made that, since Russia would like the nuclear bombs removed from Europe, the U.S. should either keep them there or demand something huge from Russia in exchange for removing them. Another argument is that this is part of making European nations share the burden, along the lines of making them spend more money on weapons. But if the burden serves no purpose, why should anyone share it? European government officials know the bombs are not useful as bombs. They know the bombs are provocative toward Russia. They know, in fact, that Russia is using the U.S. storage of nuclear bombs in European nations as an excuse to put Russian nuclear weapons into Belarus. So a more realistic understanding of the “political” purpose of U.S. nukes in Europe is probably a combination of the idea that the U.S. military will fight for any nation in which it has stored nukes, the perverse prestige that many imagine comes with possessing nukes (even if someone else actually possesses them on your land), and the general U.S. goals of keeping European governments intertwined with the U.S. military, supportive of U.S. military strategies, and willing to spend vast amounts on U.S.-made weapons.

Spreading along with nuclear weapons is nuclear energy — climate-disastrous, slow, expensive, super-dangerous nuclear energy, which creates permanent deadly waste, which poisons those around it, which no insurance company will insure, and the facilities for which constitute nuclear catastrophes waiting for accident or attack. Listen to Harvey Wasserman on what drugs you need to take in order to believe that nuclear energy is good for the climate. Not only are various nations pursuing nuclear energy in order to be closer to developing nuclear weapons, but nuclear NATO countries like the U.S. and UK are promoting this spread of nuclear technology at home and abroad because it is through nuclear energy that they maintain skills, training, and materials they want for nuclear weaponry.

There is a better way, and everyone who cares about avoiding nuclear apocalypse is invited to join in preparations for unwelcoming NATO to its 75th birthday party this July in Washington DC: https://nonatoyespeace.org.

David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is executive director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson’s books include his latest: NATO What You Need to Know with Medea Benjamin. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org. He hosts Talk World Radio. He is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and U.S. Peace Prize recipient.

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, May 20, 2024

The recent NATO “Youth Summit,” even on double speed, is over an hour and a half on Youtube. I couldn’t watch it all, as it just made me feel old — so old that I can remember when people could feel shame about profiteering from mass killing or promoting world wars likely to end in nuclear apocalypse.

The summit’s “youth” participants appear to have met some requirement of being roughly younger than either Biden OR Trump — and there may have been as many as tens of them participating. Mostly they let us know how hip and with-it NATO is.

After a while, the “summit” did haul up onto the stage for a couple of soundbytes each, three winners of a contest who had to be between 18 and 35 years old and have proposed a brilliant answer to the question “What is your role in shaping a secure future?” The first young woman was proposing an app in which a friendly NATO soldier from your country would help you play video games, mostly fun murder-simulation stuff, but also propaganda lessons (“how to spot disinformation!”). Added bonus: the app would serve to collect data on its users so that NATO could send them important messages. The second guy manufactured drones and wanted militaries to buy them. So cool! And the third woman said she was promoting studies of Ukraine in Western Europe with a fun pro-war perspective to aid in understanding that everything is Russia’s fault.

After all that invigoration, the old people came back on to recommend that everybody prepare for war and not be scared of it. This is called — not being an idiot, but — being “resilient.” Noticing that the get-ready-for-war guy was going to drone on for quite a while, I began feeling as though my lunch might be resilient enough to come back up, so I abandoned ship.

I’m very sorry that over a thousand people have watched this amazing global “youth summit” but feel somewhat better knowing that your average Youtube of baby hippos gets tens of millions of views.

By Colonel (Ret) Ann Wright, June 4, 2024

30% of Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) Naval Forces are from NATO Europe

As the United States increases its military confrontation with China through new military bases on Guam and the Philippines and more land, sea and air exercises with countries in the Asia-Pacific, the world’s largest naval war exercises are going to be held in the mid-Pacific from June 26 to August 2, 2024-and NATO is in the middle of it.

29 countries are participating in the 2024 Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) naval war practice that will bring 40 ships, 3 submarines, over 150 aircraft, 14 national land forces and 25,000 personnel to the island of Oahu and the waters off Hawaii.

One-third of Countries in RIMPAC NOT from the Pacific, but are from NATO-Europe

Incredibly, one-third of the countries bringing ships, submarines and aircraft to the middle of the Pacific are not from Asia and the Pacific, but are from Europe–all members of the North ATLANTIC Treaty Organization (NATO).

European NATO members Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and the United Kingdom are joining the United States and Canada as the full NATO members in RIMPAC.

Along with the full members of NATO, five countries in the Pacific are NATO “partners”- Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Republic of Korea and Colombia.  Each will be participating with ships, aircraft and personnel in RIMPAC.

Israel is in RIMPAC Despite its Continuing Genocide of Gaza-Perfectly Acceptable in the U.S. “Rules Based Dis-Order”

Because of its testing of US and NATO countries’ weapons on Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank, Israel has been given special status by NATO and keeps an office in NATO headquarters. The U.S. has continued its invitation to Israel to have a ship and personnel in Hawaii in RIMPAC despite the continuing Israeli genocide of Gaza with over 36,000 Palestinians killed, thousands dead in the rubble of destroyed buildings and over 100,000 injured.

Israeli impunity in its war on Palestinians is a harmful influence on militaries participating in RIMPAC and U.S. complicity in the genocide sends a signal to other countries that violation of international laws and norms are perfectly acceptable in the U.S. “rules based dis-order.”

Other countries sending ships, aircraft and military personnel to RIMPAC are Brazil, Brunei, Chile, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, the Republic of the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tonga.

NATO countries send ships on Freedom of the Seas Navigation Operations

Over the past two years, NATO countries have sent ships to the Western Pacific in tandem with the U.S.  Freedom of the Seas navigation operations in the South China sea.  In 2021, British HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier strike group and an American surface action group had exercises in the South China Sea.  Britain’s Ministry of Defense described the strike group as the largest concentration of maritime and air power to leave the UK in a generation. 

In May 2024, Germany sent two warships to the Indo-Pacific on the freedom of navigation and free passage missions as tensions are raised with  China over the status of Taiwan and over disputed South China Sea islands.

RIMPAC Destroys on the Land as well as the Sea

RIMPAC war exercises harm marine life in the Hawaiian waters. Whales, dolphins and fish are harmed by the ships and their weapons. Ships are sunk by bombs, missiles and torpedoes. Onshore animals are killed during military beach assault landings.  Pohakuloa Training Area on Hawaii Island, the largest U.S. military training area in the Pacific, is bombed from aircraft some of which fly thousands of miles to drop their bombs, artillery shelling, and troop training.  Human rights advocates are very concerned about human trafficking with military troops in tourist areas in Hawaii when the thousands of military arrive from around the world for RIMPAC.

Citizens in the Pacific Challenge RIMPAC and the Militarization and Contamination of the Pacific by Military Forcesl

Citizens in most of the countries in the Pacific challenge the need for the hugely expensive and destructive RIMPAC war practice.  Webinars, social media, conferences/town hall meetings and protests are held from San Diego, California in the eastern Pacific, through Hawaii and Guam to the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

In Hawaii, thousands of residents of Oahu are still dealing with the 2021 effects of fuel pollution from the giant underground Red Hill fuel tanks that leaked 19,000 gallons of toxic fuel into the drinking water and the 2014 leak of 27,000 gallons of fuel.  Several lawsuits against the U.S. military for the long term damage to the health of those who ingested the contaminated water are in federal courts with the military arguing that the contamination did NOT cause widespread harm as military family members were hospitalized for severe reactions to the fuel-laced drinking water.

Additionally, residents of Hawaii are demanding the return of 29,000 acres of state land that was leased to the U.S. military 65 years ago for…..$1 !!!  The lease of these areas on Oahu and Big Island ends in 2029.

Communities around U.S. military bases all over the Pacific are finding that their water sources have been contaminated by the U.S. military use of fire-fighting foam that contains PFAS, the “forever chemical.”  Bases on Okinawa, Japan and South Korea where the U.S. has had military bases since World War II and the Korean war have found high levels of contamination from PFAS.

Why Not Diplomacy Instead of Military Confrontation?

Instead of using diplomacy to resolve security and economic issues, RIMPAC is one of hundreds of U.S. sponsored military war exercises that fuel dangerous confrontations in Asia and the Pacific. 

It’s time for U.S. citizens to demand that elected officials/politicians use nonviolent methods to resolve conflicts—but we know we face great opposition to nonviolence from the manufacturers of violence, the weapons manufacturers who fuel the campaign coffers of politicians.  Until we elect those who stand for peaceful resolution of issues instead of using war, we will continue to face an ever increasingly dangerous world.

 NO TO NATO: YES TO PEACE conference July 6-7, 2024, Washington, DC

The No to NATO: Yes to Peace coalition will be in Washington, DC July 5-11, 2024 as a counterweight to the 75th Anniversary celebrations of the founding of NATO in Washington, DC.  The heads of state of the 32 NATO member states and “partner” and “wanna-be”  states will convene at the Washington Convention Center July 9-11.

Preceding the arrival of the heads of state, NO to NATO: YES to Peace will hold a one-day conference on July 6 with speakers from around the world.  July 7 will be a rally at Lafayette Square in front the White House.  July 9-11 concerned citizens will be at the Washington Convention Center.

About the Author: Ann Wright served 29 years in the U.S. Army/Army Reserves and retired as a Colonel.  She was also a U.S. diplomat for 16 years, but resigned in March 2003 in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq.  She lives in Honolulu, Hawaii and is a member of Hawaii Peace and Justice and Veterans For Peace. She is the co-author of “Dissent: Voices of Conscience.”