The U.S. Statement Department web page shared a brief, paragraph-long, account of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s comments to a virtual NATO foreign ministers on June 1 presided over by Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. The cyber conference was held in advance of and in preparation for the military alliance’s summit on June 14.
As might have been expected, as could with a certainty have been predicted, the main thrust of his comments was to excoriate Russia and China for presenting “systemic challenges” to the thirty-member global military bloc. Five NATO members and six NATO partners now border Russia; six NATO partners border China. But according to U.S. and NATO logic China and Russia threaten NATO and not the other way around.
The State Department release also reported Blinken advocating that NATO strengthen its partnership with the European Union (with which it’s now virtually indistinguishable) and with the Asia-Pacific nations of Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea. Those four nations collectively were formerly what NATO termed Contact Countries, and all contributed to NATO’s war efforts in Afghanistan (along with fellow Asia-Pacific nations Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mongolia, Singapore, Thailand, Tonga and the United Arab Emirates) as Troop Contributing Countries. In 2012 the four countries became half of NATO’s Partners Across the Globe with fellow Asia-Pacific states Afghanistan, Iraq, Mongolia and Pakistan. (Colombia joined the program in 2017, thereby providing NATO with members and partners on six continents.)
The nations Blinken urged be brought deeper into NATO’s orbit also account for half of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, a military partnership established by the U.S. in 2007 with Australia, India and Japan, one increasingly utilized for war games and other activities aimed against China. In recent months there have been repeated calls for India to become a NATO partner, most likely a member of the Partners Across the Globe. Should this month’s summit offer that proposition to Delhi and the latter accept it, a blow would be struck against both China and Russia, India’s main military ally since its independence in 1947.
NATO arrogates to itself the right to intervene, and intervene militarily, in most any conflict in most any part of the world. It has waged war in Southeastern Europe, South Asia and North Africa and conducted operations in Bosnia, Kosovo, the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and the U.S., as well as deploying naval groups as far afield as the Persian Gulf and the Caribbean Sea, even circumnavigating the African continent. While the United Nations Security Council, United Nations General Assembly, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, European Union, Commonwealth of Independent States, Collective Security Treaty Organization, African Union, Non-Aligned Movement, Arab League, Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Organization of American States, Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and other organizations say not a word about this unparalleled threat to world peace. That is, when they don’t collaborate with it.
Rick Rozoff is a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. He has been involved in anti-war and anti-interventionist work in various capacities for forty years. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. He is the manager of Stop NATO. This originally appeared at Anti-Bellum.