By Bob Travica
The NATO 75th annual summit occurred on July 9-11, 2024 in Washington D.C., USA. The war in Ukraine, which has been running since February 2022, dominated the agenda. The war in Gaza, which started in October 2023, wasn’t on the agenda. Around 11,000 civilians died in Ukraine, and at least three times that number in Gaza. The former started with Russia’s response to NATO’s advancement to its borders, and the latter began with Israel’s reaction to small-scale attacks on Israel proper by fighters from Gaza (two million strong Palestinian territory within Israel, which Israel sealed from the land and sea). Russia’s war is against Ukraine’s policies of endangering Russia’s borders, while Israel’s war is against the entire Gaza population (not just the Hamas government’s military) whom most Israelis deem a lower race and terrorists. Russia wants a neutral Ukraine, whereas Israel wants an ethnically cleansed Gaza for Israeli settlers. There are accusations of Israel being an apartheid state by many, including free-thinking Israelis, as well as genocide allegations. But these alarming characteristics of the Gaza war didn’t compel NATO to put it on the agenda. Neither did the similarities between these two wars.
[ “NATO calls out the U.S., as the decisive enabler of Israel’s war on Gaza, to cease all material and political support to Israel’s war effort.”
The NATO declaration could've read like this, had Gaza been on the agenda, but it was not. ]
Both the Ukrainian and Israeli
governments are backed by the Western powers, most notably the U.S. Both get
Western weaponry, surveillance on the battlefield, military training, etc. Neither war would be possible to sustain for longer without the support of NATO countries. Therefore, they could make an impact on the Gaza war
should they wish so. Moreover, both wars destabilize large geographical and
geopolitical spaces, pose significant security threats, and violate the values
alleged by NATO (peace, freedom, stability, democracy, rule of law). Still,
NATO remained mute on the Gaza problem as there’s no single cite of “Gaza” or
“Israel” in the summit’s declaration (https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_227678.htm).
Abundant shouting and rambling about Ukraine happened beside the elephant in the
room with the inscription “Gaza”. The aging military alliance chose to celebrate its
jubilee in furnishings of smoke and mirrors, covered by hellish-red domes.
Peons on the Eastern Flank
No observer has paid attention
to the racial dimension in the Ukrainian war. Russia is the largest Slavic
nation (144 million), and Ukraine is the third (38 million). In between lies
Poland (40 million) which plays a major role in NATO’s eastward expansion and support
to the Kyiv government. In this war, the West succeeded in turning the second and third-largest Slavic nations against the largest one. This is important because there are differences
in decision-making stemming from cultural differences between Slavs and Western
races (Germanic and Latin).
Roughly speaking, an elevated
emotionality outweighing rational reasoning pushes Slavs toward extreme decisions.
Specifically, Ukrainian officials don’t balk at the prospect of dragging the
world into an all-out war in order to beat Russia; in fact, they invite this!
Getting Ukraine into NATO at wartime, would mean that 32 NATO countries would
have to come to rescue, no matter that this would most likely cause a
devastating nuclear war that would first wipe out Ukraine itself. This
standpoint isn’t just irrational but it borders with an intelligence
insufficiency.
Enter Poland. It shows eagerness
to fight Russians by all means, for example as being the top dog in the American push
toward an integrated NATO missile defense system. Throughout its history, Poland
had been sandwiched between Russia, Prussia, and Austria, and parts of it were chopped
off. So, Poles’ animosity toward the conquering powers was coming in tides. It
was turned against Germany which started WWII by attacking and occupying Poland
(1939-1945). As Germany lost the war, sympathy turned toward Russians/Soviets
who defeated Germans. Poland’s capital was promoted into the formal center of the
military alliance of the Eastern block of communist countries: In 1949, the
Warsaw Pact was established in response to the formation of NATO. But the
period until the disbanding of the Eastern Block germinated an animosity
against the former liberators, who over time came to be viewed as occupiers. Since
the 1990s, the Polish tide of animosity targeted Russia, while the West (including
Germany) was embraced across the board (economy, geopolitics, popular culture,
military strategy). A desire for “revenge” against Russia became the backdrop to
Poland’s foreign policy and is visible to the naked eye in Poland.
Note that Poland holds grudges
against Ukraine due to some territorial disputes and still vivid memories of
atrocities that Ukrainian Nazis, serving under the German flag, committed
against Poles in WWII. But it appears willing to neglect this temporarily for
the sake of the larger vengeful cause. Similarly to Ukraine, it appears that
Poland is awaiting the U.S. cavalry to come and deal justice by killing the big
bad bear. To the extent that Poland would be targeted by Russia’s nuclear
arsenal early on in a war between NATO and Russia, Poland’s decisions aren’t
less irrational than Ukraine’s. (Or they may be an effect of film-binging
westerns after decades of deprivation.)
Ave, Caesar, Morituri Te Salutant
What about Russia? It certainly
fits the Slavic emotional pack: the culture of protecting the grand motherland
has been meticulously nurtured across generations of Russians. Even Stalin, a
Georgian by nationality, understood that when his propaganda machinery crunched
slogans of defending the Russian motherland against Germans in WWII rather than
the Soviet Union or communism. There’s no better way to consolidate the Russian
nation into a formidable fighting force than with the help of a real foreign
threat; Mongols, Swedes, French, and Germans know a thing or two about this. The
more NATO presses against Russia’s borders, the more it plays into the hands it
tries to cut off.
Cold-blooded decision-makers in NATO’s
decision rooms know how to account for nationalistic sentiments in decision-making. In the familiar divide and conquer approach, such a sentiment is an instant
yeast for fomenting problems and providing self-serving solutions for them.
Eager ears and willing bodies of executioners are ready, awaiting marching
orders. Those ready to die are greeting you, Cezar! Cezar of our days, the aged
Yankee, who’s six years older than NATO, demonstrated at the NATO summit how he
still draws fatal Cold Warrish energy from sending young men to die on the
battlefield.
And so, the NATO summit dropped the
topic of the devastating war in Gaza, since the master said so. However, it poked
China for being “a decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine through its
so-called ‘no limits’ partnership and its large-scale support for Russia’s
defence industrial base.” NATO even dared to call out China “to cease
all material and political support to Russia’s war effort.” Had Gaza been on
the Summit’s agenda, the NATO declaration could also read something like this: “NATO
calls out the U.S., as the decisive enabler of Israel’s war on Gaza, to cease
all material and political support to Israel’s war effort.”
The key conclusion of NATO’s summit is the promise to Ukraine that it’s on an “irreversible path” to future NATO membership. Ukraine is dissatisfied as there is no clear timetable for this promise, which is actually 20 years old. In fact, there has always been a timetable: Keep fighting against Russia until you reach the line where you fall dead (“deadline”, as ordinary people call it). Too cynical? No, just realistic: Only while being outside NATO can Ukraine be manipulated as an obedient fighting peon to keep straining and weakening Russia. Therefore, the US/NATO will keep fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.
As for the Kyiv regime, it can only hope that NATO will continue footing the war bill indefinitely or get tricked somehow to finally engage fully in the war. In any case, such a decimated Ukraine would eventually not be militarily worthy for inclusion in NATO. As for the democratic, economic, and security reforms required again for the membership, the road can even be much longer. It is no secret that Ukraine shares the destiny of the corrupted countries in East Europe, characterized by a strange mix of state, business, and organized crime structures. Therefore, the deadline for joining NATO is practically - never! It would be beneficial for Ukrainians, who awfully suffer, that their government start thinking realistically and cutting losses before these become unbearable.
The 75th NATO summit
confirmed its historical roots – it’s an instrument of the American empire for holding
Europe in a semi-colonial status. The degree of servitude Euro members exhibited by dropping the Gaza topic proves this. Israel is in Europe's backyard and wars in the Middle East endanger Europe's security. The summit also confirmed a newer principle set
with the cessation of the Cold War, when NATO transformed into a hot war-mongering alliance.
Isn’t this 75th anniversary also the 25th anniversary of
NATO’s first war of aggression on a sovereign country, FR Yugoslavia? That’s
when champions of the New World Order trampled over the international law and global
security guaranteed by the United Nations, and imposed an “order” based on “rules”
(the champions’ arbitrary decisions).
At that point, the history wheel was turned back to the Middle
Ages because the master could sue you, and
the master could judge and sentence you.
Vivere mori! Live and die much faster with NATO as a custodian of international security.
