Stephen Lendman

NATO was always more about offense than defense, about America controlling the policies of Alliance members, increasing their numbers, pressuring them to stress militarism more than they’d chose otherwise - and selling them lots of US weapons.

When founded in April 1949, Soviet Russia was a North Atlantic Alliance enemy in name only, ravaged by WW II - needing years after Stalin’s April 1953 death to regain pre-war normality, peace essential to restore it.

Washington controls NATO, covering 75% of its budget, calling the shots, installing subservient Alliance officials to serve its agenda.

At a time when no US enemies exist, they’re invented to justify NATO’s existence - including Milosevic, bin Laden and the Taliban, Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, Yemeni Houthis, Al-Shabaab in Somalia, and independent democratic leaders everywhere America doesn’t control.

Cold War II is much more intense than its earlier version, Putin bashed and denigrated shamelessly for not bowing to Washington’s will, for wanting multi-world polarity according to international rule of law principles.

Russia’s envoy to NATO, Alexandr Grushkko, understands how US-dominated NATO operates, its aims and ways its justifies its existence.

It pressured Europe to treat peaceful, good neighbor Russia as a major adversarial threat - at a time it seeks mutual cooperation among all nations, a world at peace, and nuclear disarmament, polar opposite America’s agenda.

Russian diplomacy can’t change US-led NATO’s rage for war, waging endless ones, spurning peace and stability, promoting American interests belligerently “from Greenland to the Caspian Sea, and from the Arctic Ocean to the Levant,” said Grushko.

“The question is where is the US and where is the Caspian Sea,” each distant from the other, Moscow not about to let it become a US-dominated NATO lake - while concentrating its own military strength within its borders, polar opposite America’s empire of bases.

Provoking Moscow with US-led NATO combat troops and warships near its borders, so-called missile defense systems entirely for offense, hyping nonexistent “Russian aggression,” denigrating its legitimacy, and falsely calling it America’s greatest threat risks East/West confrontation with super-weapons able to end life on earth.

Speaking in Warsaw on Tuesday, US-installed NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg hyped “the importance of collective security (and) NATO’s (so-called) essential role in continuing to keep the peace” while claiming a nonexistent “more assertive Russia intimidat(es) its neighbors and chang(es) borders by force.”

Truth is polar opposite his willful Big Lies, bashing Putin, claiming he threatens continental security, ignoring his preeminent peacemaker role.

Instead of Europe seeking peaceful, cooperative relations with its important Russian neighbor, it lets Washington bully it into being an imperial tool - harming its welfare and security in the process.

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Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks World War III".

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html