Russia, China, non-aligned countries should call to abolish NATO - expert

Click banner for more info

On 30 May 1982 Spain joined NATO and became its sixteenth member. Since NATO's formation in 1949 the organization accepted new members six times and as of 2014 NATO unifies 28 states in Europe and North America. Rick Rozoff, the owner and manager of the Stop NATO website and international mailing list, shared his views about the possibility of further NATO enlargement and on how should the international community and Russia react to it during his interview with VR.

What are your forecasts for the further NATO enlargement? Would the organization manage to move eastward in Europe?

And how much further does it have to move? As you indicated, it absorbed 12 new members in a decade, from 1999 to 2009, increased its collective membership by 75% and has encompassed the entire western frontier of Russia from the Barents to the Baltic Sea, from the black Sea to the Aegean Sea.

You've mentioned the 28 members of NATO and it also now has over 43, perhaps, closer to 50 partners around the world on every inhabited continent. It has an advanced integration program with Kazakhstan, which borders Russia and China. It has an individual partnership and cooperation program with Mongolia, which borders both Russia and China. And it has become a global military network.

I'm afraid that the world has sat back and permitted this to occur to the point where now it has reached a point of crisis, if not a catastrophe in Ukraine. And I hope against hope that there is still some possibility of reversing that momentum, though I'm not confident there is.

How should the international community and Russia react to this?

I think we are using the wrong tense. I don’t know what Russia could do now. What it should have done 15 years ago was to offer air defense systems and other military assistance to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to permit that small country to defend itself against the 78-day bombing onslaught by the collective NATO block.

Having failed to do that and having failed to prevent the first war in Africa three years ago against Libya, and having failed to prevent NATO establishing a permanent naval presence in the Mediterranean Sea and in the Arabian Sea, and in the Central Asia, and in other parts of the world, I wonder at this point what can be done.

Read also: NATO doesn't have role as defensive alliance since Cold War end - expert

Diplomatically, Russia, China and other nonaligned countries, there are very few of them, by the way, should both in the UN Security Council but in particular in the General Assembly call for the open abolition of NATO as an aggressive military block that has waged wars in three continents in 15 years, in Yugoslavia without any UN mandate, and in the other two cases by perverting the mandate they did have.

In 1954 the Soviet Union expressed its will to join NATO. However US, France and Great Britain rejected to add USSR. In your opinion what was the main reason for the refusal? Does it mean that NATO was formed in counterbalance Russia and the country was perceived as a main military and strategic enemy from very beginning and still is?

That is exactly the case. Whatever the Soviet motivation was in 1954, it could have been a public relations move basically putting the US on the spot – if NATO is in fact the defensive alliance you claim it is, then we would like to join too. They caught the US's bluff and the US rebuffed Russia by doing what? – the following year incorporating the Federal Republic of Germany into NATO as a full member. It was only after that, that the Soviets and their allies setup the Warsaw Treaty organization in that same year in response to the incorporation of West Germany.

Read also: Washington seeks to build up forces on Russia's border, restart Cold War - former Reagan advisor

So, NATO was setup explicitly and exclusively to contain and, ultimately, confront Russia. And that is its purpose in spades now, because with the fragmentation of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw pact in 1991 the US is far from disabling or packing up its military and going home. Instead, it exploited that situation to bring NATO military hardware and troops right up to Russia’s border in several instances.

NATO was initially managed and sort of created with the major push from the US, is that correct?

Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first top military commander for NATO. So, it was almost entirely a US-British development initially.

Is it reasonable to spend large amounts of money on the enlargement of the alliance, meanwhile many member states, especially the recent ones, suffer from the decay in the economy and social sectors? Why do these countries still agree with NATO’s policy?

Because their political elites, many of them are educated in the US and many of them are American citizens. Toomas Ilves from Estonia or recently Valdas Adamkus in Lithuania or the first lady of Ukraine up until four years ago Cathy Yushchenko who was born and raised here in the US. Mikhail Saakashvili in Georgia went to school at Columbia University. They were then sent back in the post Cold War period to govern nations the way that proconsuls governed on behalf of the Roman Empire.

Listen to VR's 'Burning Point': NATO stays in Afghanistan to expand to Central Asia

And it is surprising that they would subordinate the needs of their people and their nation to their masters in Washington and Brussels who are telling them, as you are alluding to, that NATO membership mandate dictates that a nation spends 2% of their GDP on weapons and those weapons, to be interoperable, to use NATO's term have to be purchased from – guess who? – the US, France, Britain, Germany, Italy and Sweden. And if you have any Russian arms, you better dump them and don’t think about buying any others, because those are not NATO interoperable.

So, basically, the hand stretches back to the US pocket. And as long as that is the case, we will see this sort of bow down mentality to the master at the expense of the countries.

Any country that joins NATO ipso facto sacrifices the last scrap of national sovereignty and national pride, and national integrity. And it has also mandated that its sons and daughters at the will of the US can be deployed to war zones around the world, kill and die for Washington foreign policy objectives, and no questions asked. If this isn’t the complete subordination of nations to a foreign entity, I don’t know what is.