NATO shows its true colors as war machine

The NATO summit held on Tuesday and Wednesday in Vilnius, Lithuania, did not bode well for world peace, for the simple reason that no one bothered to talk about peace but about prolonged war instead.

The United States announcement on July 7 that it would provide Ukraine with cluster bombs, which are banned by more than 120 countries, cast a shadow over the meeting of the 31 members before the summit started.

The deafening silence by leaders of NATO member states about the US decision reveals nothing but their cowardice and hypocrisy in a military alliance dictated by Washington.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, whose term has been extended for one more year due to his absolute obedience to the US, has indeed earned being called a “supreme fool”, as former Australian prime minister Paul Keating dubbed him in an opinion piece on Monday.

All the talk by Stoltenberg and most other NATO leaders is about support for Ukraine in military terms in its conflict with Russia, such as providing Ukraine with more munitions and training Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16 fighter jets.

No one has talked about or even showed any interest in a cease-fire, diplomatic solutions or negotiations for a lasting peace, which is what the rest of the world demands.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban might be one of the few exceptions. He tweeted on Tuesday that “instead of shipping weapons to Ukraine, we should finally bring peace”, a message he has repeated many times.

Stoltenberg touted that NATO members will hike their military spending by 8.3 percent in 2023, and he called for even more spending by NATO, despite the fact that the US alone spends more on the military than the next 10 countries combined.

What Stoltenberg was calling for was an arms race in the 21st century, when the biggest challenges facing humanity are climate change and sustainable economic development.

NATO, despite its flowery rhetoric, is by no means a defensive alliance, based on its notorious records in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars, invasions and occupations were participated in by mostly NATO members and have resulted in the deaths of countless innocent civilians.

No wonder the vast majority of countries are not on the side of the US and the European Union in imposing economic sanctions against Russia because no Western political leaders ever called the killing of innocent civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya by foreign forces war crimes.

NATO in its communique on Tuesday groundlessly accused China of “employing a broad range of political, economic and military tools to increase its global footprint and project power”. But it is NATO that has tried to subjugate the world militarily, in sharp contrast to China’s efforts to build roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects in the developing world and China’s record of not being involved in any war for decades.

NATO has refused to learn its lesson by doubling down on its reckless expansion. Many former US officials and foreign policy leaders believe that the NATO expansion since the 1990s was a major trigger of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

French President Emmanuel Macron put a halt to NATO’s plan to open a liaison office in Japan, but Stoltenberg insisted on Wednesday that he was not giving up and that the topic will be discussed in the future.

He is clearly trying to expand NATO, which by its charter is limited to the North Atlantic, into the Asia-Pacific region.

In Keating’s words, “exporting” NATO to Asia — a region that has not seen any war, but instead unprecedented peace and economic development, for decades — “would be akin to Asia welcoming the plague on itself”.

The saber-rattling by NATO in Vilnius shows its weakness and desperation, because the rest of the world — especially developing nations — is rising rapidly in a multipolar world. They have seen NATO’s true colors and will not kowtow to NATO.