The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : Search Results

NATO vs. ISIS?

Sunday September 21, 2014

NATO has struck in Iraq. Or, more precisely, two French Rafale warplanes bombed a storage depot in northern Iraq believed to be used by ISIS.

Washington cheered the French attack as the first wave of NATO military operations against the new enemy du jour, ISIS or the Islamic State. French president Francois Hollande, whose abysmal popularity ratings are now lower than Robespierre’s, butcher of the French Revolution, was elated by his show of machismo even if French voters were not.

What the French were really doing, of course, was show-casing their new Rafale fighter. There’s nothing like bombing Arabs to sell military hardware, as Israel has long shown.

Paris has been desperately trying to sell the Rafale, which is a very capable aircraft, to the Gulf Emirates, Saudi Arabia and India. Delhi signed an order for 126 Rafales in 2012 but has yet to implement it.
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Red Alert: NATO Mission Creep Advancing to Russian Border

Thursday August 28, 2014

Buried beneath news of the Ice Bucket Challenge, and the latest video release by the Islamic State was an interview by NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen that should be of immediate concern to everyone.

These days, the actual importance of a news story is inversely proportional to the number of American media outlets that refuse to touch it. That would explain the virtual non-existence of the NATO chief’s interview on Wednesday that he gave to a handful of European newspapers.

Never content to let a good war go to waste, Rasmussen said the 28-member military bloc would be“spearheading” its way into the fleshy flanks of Eastern Europe, just a missile lob away from the Russian frontier. The reason – “Russian aggression” – should surprise nobody who has been following Ukraine’s slow-motion meltdown ever since Kiev attempted to form a more perfect union with Russia instead of the European Union. That’s when the Western-backed fireworks display, complete with John McCain and Victoria Nuland agitating/feeding the crowds in central Kiev, exploded, leaving Ukraine on the verge of total collapse, and US-Russian relations in tatters.
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Crushing Protests in Kiev: Neocons Never Liberate Twice

Thursday August 7, 2014

Western media has ignored it, but protesters have occupied the Maidan square in Kiev since last October. They were successful in overthrowing the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, but they didn’t go home. They kept their tents, remained in occupied government buildings, and hunkered down.

Boxer-turned-revolutionary Vitali Klitschko was in the thick of the protests at the time, supported by the United States and its Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland. In fact, Nuland posed with protest leaders seeking to overthrow the government – including Klitschko – and even famously went down to the Maidan square to hand out cookies to the protesters. In her infamous intercepted telephone conversation with US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoff Pyatt, Nuland made it clear that the US was behind Klitschko and Arseniy “Yats” Yatsenyuk.

When then-President Yanukovych sent police down to the square to break up the violent protests, the US warned him not to crack down on them. Even peaceful moves by the authorities to clear out the square were met with firm US threats of sanctions.
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Breedlove...or Strangelove?

Friday July 25, 2014

NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Gen. Philip Breedlove, wants to light a torch under the rapidly reconstituting Cold War with Russia. According to the Times (UK), NATO's top military commander has plans to transform an old military base in Poland into a tip of the spear pointed at Russia.

At a briefing in Naples this week, Breedlove outlined his plan to supply the Multinational Corps Northeast, in Szczecin, Poland, with “pre-positioned supplies, pre-positioned capabilities and a basing area ready to rapidly accept follow-on forces," that would support a rapid deployment force of thousands of NATO troops into Russia.

Gen. Breedlove has been pushing an increased NATO presence on Russia's borders to counter what he claims are Russia's "aggressive" actions in the region, stating last month that "we may need to add additional rotational forces to cover the sustained, persistent presence that we are now envisioning."

Although Ukraine is not a NATO member and therefore would not be subject to NATO's Article 5 mutual defense provisions, the Baltics are in NATO and have taken a very hard line against Russia. These countries, along with Poland, have faced a long and steady economic decline and dream of a NATO base on their soil to funnel western funds into their economies.
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Inside the Strange Mind of NATO's Anders Fogh Rasmussen

Friday July 11, 2014

This week, I attended a talk here in San Francisco by NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, sponsored jointly by The World Affairs Council and The Commonwealth Club.

I have never heard remarks before quite like those made by Rasmussen, the former Prime Minister of Denmark.

In nearly perfect English, he called for the expanded role for NATO pretty much across the world. He said there was an "arc of crisis" around the world, from north and central Africa to Iraq and Syria. From the Baltics to the Black Sea and on the peninsula of Korea.

He stated that the answer to this global crisis was that NATO needed more ships, planes and troops on the ground. He called for all NATO countries to expand defense spending to two percent of their GDPs and said that the only NATO countries that currently spend above this level are the US, the UK, Greece and Estonia. He justified NATO, which was, of course, formed as a North Atlantic alliance, expansion into activities into the Pacific by pointing out that the NATO member, the US, has a Pacific coast line and that other NATO members have territories in the Pacific.
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Washington’s Iron Curtain in Ukraine

Saturday June 7, 2014

NATO leaders are currently acting out a deliberate charade in Europe, designed to reconstruct an Iron Curtain between Russia and the West.

With astonishing unanimity, NATO leaders feign surprise at events they planned months in advance. Events that they deliberately triggered are being misrepresented as sudden, astonishing, unjustified “Russian aggression”. The United States and the European Union undertook an aggressive provocation in Ukraine that they knew would force Russia to react defensively, one way or another.

They could not be sure exactly how Russian president Vladimir Putin would react when he saw that the United States was manipulating political conflict in Ukraine to install a pro-Western government intent on joining NATO. This was not a mere matter of a “sphere of influence” in Russia’s “near abroad”, but a matter of life and death to the Russian Navy, as well as a grave national security threat on Russia’s border.

A trap was thereby set for Putin. He was damned if he did, and damned if he didn’t. He could underreact, and betray Russia’s basic national interests, allowing NATO to advance its hostile forces to an ideal attack position.

Or he could overreact, by sending Russian forces to invade Ukraine. The West was ready for this, prepared to scream that Putin was “the new Hitler”, poised to overrun poor, helpless Europe, which could only be saved (again) by the generous Americans.
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Obama: Stop The Sanctimonious Kidstuff; Let Europe Fund Its Own Security

Tuesday June 3, 2014

The EU has a GDP of $17 trillion—-a figure approximately 9X that of Russia. If there is any one over there who actually believes that Putin is about to mobilize his troops on a reverse of Hitler’s march through the Ukraine and back into central Europe, let them make their case and take up a collection from the purportedly threatened states.

Quite obviously no one is making that case in Berlin, Brussels or any other significant European capital—for the simple reason that such a scenario is purely a figment of the Washington War Party’s imagination. So what we actually have is an American president on a photo op tour of Europe being importuned by local dignitaries for more Washington largesse. And the result will be more kidstuff maneuvers that are laughable in there own terms, but still another irritant in America’s utterly unnecessary confrontation with Russia.

In that regard, we have already witnessed the President of Poland, Bronislaw Komorowski, making this hideous remark as he stood with Obama alongside F-16s employed in joint training exercises between the two nations:

Mr. Komorowski said the U.S. and Poland are a “brotherhood in arms.”

Well, not at all. We are actually two nations at peace, and Poland is a fortunate nation that has been born again solely because of the sacrifices American taxpayers made for 50 years to first defeat its German occupiers and then to outlast its Soviet overlords.
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NATO Exploits Ukraine Crisis to Demonstrate Its Relevance

Friday April 4, 2014

NATO's bureaucrats — and the military-industrial complex that supplies them — are thrilled with the new lease on life given them by the Ukraine crisis. That is why NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen keeps telling anyone who will listen, that NATO is needed more than ever and it must be given even more new missions. Old cold warriors are coming out of the woodwork to wave NATO flags and talk about the glories of "collective security."

In the below edition of RT's Crosstalk, watch RPI academic advisor John Laughland and fellow NATO skeptic Eric Kraus debate a neoconservative hawk from the Heritage Foundation on the subject of whether NATO has any real value or purpose more than 20 years after the Warsaw Pact shut its doors. The inability of the hawk to provide any reasonable defense of NATO is very telling.
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Kto Kogo?* The NATO Syndrome, the EU’s Eastern Partnership Program, and the EAU

Friday March 21, 2014

In 2009, Poland and Sweden, ever attentive to the US’s geostrategic goals of isolating Russia and gaining control of China thereafter, initiated the Eastern Partnership program, which its sponsors said was intended to tighten ties with former Soviet Republics, such as Moldova, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine. A trade pact is a part of the Partnership’s Association Agreement (AA) deal.

What the Russians saw in the EU initiative was a repeat of the “NATO Syndrome,” in that what was promised would soon be betrayed, i.e. no NATO expansion in exchange for a Soviet agreement to the reunification of Germany.

To Russian eyes, NATO’s 1999 expansion throughout Eastern Europe and the subsequent celebratory bombing campaign against Serbia, inaugurated just one month later, and the still later Albanian annexation of Serbia’s heartland province of Kosovo, were altogether the Clinton Administration’s triple-combo opening salvos in an American campaign to recreate the Versailles Treaty’s cordon sanitaire. And the 2009 Association Agreement is but a Trojan horse whose only practical purpose is to advance US and EU interests at the expense of the former Soviet republics’ naïve hopes and Russian security.
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Disband NATO!

Monday March 17, 2014

In a recent New York Times op-ed, John McCain, the man who hoped to be president, said that Russia’s invasion of Crimea has nothing to do with NATO expansion into Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

Oh? Well, now, let’s see how McCain would be responding if the shoe were on the other foot.

Let’s assume that when the Cold War ended, the United States disbanded NATO. That, of course, wouldn’t have been too illogical given that NATO was brought into existence to protect Western Europe from Soviet aggression during the Cold War. Since the Soviet Union was dismantled with the Cold War’s end, there was certainly no reason to keep NATO in existence.

Let’s assume that Russia, on other hand, decided to keep the Warsaw Pact in existence, albeit with new members. Let’s assume that ever since 1990, the reconstituted Warsaw Pact expanded into the Western Hemisphere with such new members as Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Let’s also assume that Russia proposed a Warsaw Pact anti-missile system in Cuba, purely as a defensive measure.
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