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SCOTT RITTER: NATO Summit, a Theater of the Absurd

The scope and scale of the Ukrainian military defeat is such that the focus of many NATO members appears to be shifting from the unrealistic goal of strategically defeating Russia to a more realistic objective of bringing about a cessation to the conflict that preserves Ukraine as a viable nation state.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will attend the NATO summit. However, his demands for NATO membership will not be met.

Normalizing failure might best describe the best that NATO can accomplish in Vilnius.

By Scott Ritter, Consortium News, July 10, 2023

The unfulfilled goals and objectives from last year’s meeting in Madrid loom over the Atlantic military alliance. When the membership meets in Vilnius this week, normalizing failure might best describe the most that can be accomplished. 

The leaders of NATO’s 31 constituent member states have begun to assemble in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, for the alliance’s 33^rd summit, an event that has come to symbolize the military organization’s increasingly difficult task of transforming political will into tangible reality.

Since the Wales Summit of 2014, when NATO made Russia a top priority in the aftermath of the Russian annexation of Crimea, and the Warsaw Summit of 2016, when NATO agreed to deploy “battlegroups” on the soil of four NATO members (Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Poland) in response to perceived Russian “aggression” in the region, Russia has dominated the NATO agenda and, by extension, its identity.

The Vilnius summit promises to be no different in this regard.

One of the major issues confronting the NATO leadership is that the Vilnius summit operates under the shadow of last year’s Madrid summit, convened in late June in the aftermath of Russia’s initiation of military operations against Ukraine.

The Madrid summit came on the heels of Boris Johnson’s deliberate sabotage of a Ukrainian-Russian peace agreement that was supposed to be signed on April 1, 2023, in Istanbul, and the decision by the United States in May 2023 to extend to Ukraine military assistance exceeding $45 billion as part of a new “lend lease” agreement.

In short, NATO had opted out of a peaceful resolution to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and instead chose to wage war by proxy — with Ukrainian manpower being married with NATO equipment — designed to achieve what U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith, in May 2022, called the “strategic defeat” of Russia in Ukraine.

The Madrid summit generated an official NATO statement which declared that “Russia must immediately stop this war and withdraw from Ukraine,” adding that “Belarus must end its complicity in this war.”

When it came to Ukraine, the Madrid statement was equally firm. “We stand in full solidarity with the government and the people of Ukraine in the heroic defense of their country,” it read………………

Confidently Seeking a ‘Strategic Defeat’

NATO, it seemed, was supremely confident in its ability to achieve the outcome it so very much wanted — the strategic defeat of Russia.

What a difference a year makes.

NATO assistance to Ukraine resulted in a successful counteroffensive which compelled Russia to withdraw from territory around the city of Kharkov, as well as abandon portions of the Kherson Oblast located on the right bank of the Dnieper River. Once the Russian defenses solidified and the Ukrainian attack stalled, NATO and Russia both began preparing for the next phase of the conflict……………………………….

NATO had placed high hopes on the Ukrainian army being able to carry out a counteroffensive against Russia which would achieve discernable results both in terms of territory re-captured and casualties inflicted on the Russian army. The results, however, have been dismal to date — tens of thousands of Ukrainian casualties and thousands of destroyed vehicles while failing to breach even the first line of the Russian defenses.

One of the challenges NATO will face in Vilnius is the question of how to recover from this setback. Many NATO countries are starting to exhibit “Ukraine fatigue” as they see their armories stripped bare and their coffers emptied in what, by every measurement, appears to be a losing cause.

The scope and scale of the Ukrainian military defeat is such that the focus of many NATO members appears to be shifting from the unrealistic goal of strategically defeating Russia to a more realistic objective of bringing about a cessation to the conflict that preserves Ukraine as a viable nation state.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will attend the NATO summit. However, his demands for NATO membership will not be met — U.S. President Joe Biden himself has weighed in on the matter, saying this would not be possible while Ukraine is at war with Russia.

Face-Saving Gestures

There will be face-saving gestures from NATO, such as the creation of a NATO-Ukraine Council and talk of eventual post-conflict security guarantees. But the reality is Zelensky’s presence will do Ukraine more harm than good, since it will only accentuate the internal disagreement within NATO on the issue of Ukrainian membership and highlight NATO’s impotence when it comes to doing anything that can meaningfully alter the current trajectory on the battlefield, which is heading toward a strategic defeat for both Ukraine and NATO.

…………………………………………………………………. One can expect a plethora of rhetorical spin and posturing by the NATO membership, but the fact is the real mission of the Vilnius summit is how best to achieve a soft landing from the unfulfilled goals and objectives laid out last year in Madrid.

Normalizing failure might best describe the best that NATO can accomplish in Vilnius.

Any failure to try to stop the accumulation of debacles that represent the current NATO policy toward Ukraine will result in further collapse of the military situation in Ukraine, and the political situation in Europe, which, in their totality, push NATO closer to the moment of its ultimate demise.

This prospect does not bode well for those whose task it is to put as positive a spin as possible on reality. But NATO has long ago stopped dealing with a fact-based world, allowing itself to devolve into a theater of the absurd where actors fool themselves into believing the tale they are spinning, while the audience stares in dismay.  https://consortiumnews.com/2023/07/10/scott-ritter-nato-summit-a-theater-of-the-absurd/—

July 13, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | EUROPE, politics international | Leave a comment

Will the Ukraine war be the undoing for the European Union?

The European Union’s missed opportunities and self-destructive path

6 JULY 2023, MICHAEL VON DER SCHULENBURG

With the ending of the division of Europe, we will strive for a new quality in our security relations while fully respecting each other’s freedom of choice in that respect. Security is indivisible, and the security of every participating state is inseparably linked to that of all the others. We therefore pledge to cooperate in strengthening confidence and security among us and in promoting arms control and disarmament.

(Charter of Paris for a New Europe November 21, 1990)

The madness of war reigns again in Europe. The delusion that only weapons provide security is once again in high season among politicians, think tanks, and the media across Europe. It has become acceptable once again in Europe that human sacrifices are being offered at the altar of alleged decisive battles. As if we had learned nothing from the past, the Ukrainian counter-offensive is now supposed to become such a decisive battle that it should bring a military solution to what we could not or did not want to achieve politically. In doing so, we Europeans are leaving the future of Ukraine and Europe, and perhaps even that of the world, to the unpredictability, fury, and brutality of the battlefield. And all of this, although it remains completely unclear what “solution” could be expected through the present intensification of the war, will certainly not bring peace to Europe.

This war has increasingly become a war between Russia and NATO, with nuclear weapons playing a decisive role in military calculations. No one can say where the red lines would be in such a “decisive battle,” beyond which there could be a nuclear escalation. By ignoring this and continuing all-out war efforts, we are exposing not only ourselves but all of humanity to incalculable danger in a conflict that could have been resolved diplomatically.

Despite all those enormous dangers, finding a peaceful solution to the underlying conflict that triggered the war—NATO’s planned expansion into Ukraine and Georgia—appears no longer to be possible among NATO, Ukrainian, and Russian politicians. This is appalling political irresponsibility, for which we cannot blame only Ukraine, Russia, or the United States. The European Union and its member states also bear considerable responsibility for the catastrophe that has now befallen Europe. As this is a war on European soil and between European countries, the EU, as the largest community of states on the European continent, cannot just pretend it had no part in all of this. Indeed, the EU and its members carry heavy blame for failing to prevent this war, for escalating the war, and for refusing a negotiated solution to this war!

The 27 EU members hold the majority among NATO members and could, or better yet, should have used their influence to prevent this war and, once it had broken out, to end it as quickly as possible. In the conflict over NATO’s eastward enlargement, which had been brewing since 1994, the EU, in its own interests, should have tried to mediate between the geopolitical ambition of the USA in expanding its global dominance and Russia’s fears of being militarily encircled by NATO and cut off from its access to the Black Sea. After the war broke out, the EU should have supported the Russian-Ukrainian peace negotiations in March or April 2022 and attended the Istanbul peace summit. It could have ended the war one month after it started. However, the EU didn’t do either.

Instead, the EU aggressively supported NATO’s eastward expansion as well as its own eastward enlargement. It must have been clear to EU politicians that with their support, Europe has been put on a path of confrontation, a confrontation that has now led to war with Russia…………………………..

Yet peace, not war, should be the EU’s main concern. However, the EU has neither developed its own peace proposal nor undertaken any diplomatic peace initiative, and it remains firmly opposed to any immediate ceasefire. The EU continues to insist on the maximum demands in the Zelensky peace plan: that Russia must first be defeated militarily and that the entire Ukrainian territory must be recaptured before negotiations can take place. With this uncompromising stance, the EU stands alone in the world. None of the world’s major regional organizations, whether the G20, the BRICS countries, the states of Central Asia, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, ASEAN, the African Union, the OIC, or CELAC, support such a demand. Even the US is increasingly skeptical, and the voices of influential US politicians are growing stronger in favor of a negotiated peace with Russia to end the war.

This path of confrontation and escalation taken by the EU was in no way preordained or even inevitable.

In 1990, only one year after the end of the Cold War, all European states, as well as the USA and Canada, solemnly pledged, in the “Charter of Paris for a New Europe”, to build a common peaceful Europe spanning from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast, including Russia, a Europe that would be free of wars and military blocs. According to the Charter, the security of each state in Europe should now be regarded as inseparable from that of all other states, and any conflict that arises should be settled peacefully in accordance with the UN Charter. In other words, a lasting peace in Europe could only be created by working together and not against each other. There was no role envisaged for NATO; NATO was not mentioned once in the Charter of Paris.

And yet, early on, the EU abandoned the Charter of Paris for a New Europe and opted for a Europe dominated by NATO, a Cold War military alliance.  Such a drastic reorientation was not in Europe’s interest……………………………………………………………………………  It was NATO’s advance to Russia’s borders that triggered Russia’s military backlash, not the other way around.

The EU member states should have known better and avoided a war in Ukraine. Already in the First and Second World Wars, control of the territory that today constitutes Ukraine was of great strategic importance for Russia (the Soviet Union), and the German Kaiser-Nazi Reich, leading to some of the fiercest military battles in these wars. The recently discovered remains of German Wehrmacht soldiers found in the now dried-up riverbed of the Dnieper bear witness to these terribly bloody “decisive battles.” Is history repeating itself?

Then, as now, each side took advantage of the internal divisions among the Ukrainian population. Even after Ukraine’s independence in 1991, presidential and parliamentary elections regularly showcased the country’s deep division into two roughly equal parts with pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian loyalties, a division that also geographically divides the country between western and central Ukraine on the one hand and eastern and southern Ukraine on the other. 

In the last free all-Ukrainian elections in 2010 and 2012, in which people living in Crimea and the Donbass still participated, there was even a narrow majority for a pro-Russian president and pro-Russian parliament.

If the EU had really been concerned with preserving and strengthening Ukraine, it should have supported the cohesion and striving for harmony between the two populations and vigorously promoted the continuation of the project of a bi-national and federal Ukraine, as proclaimed in 1991. However, it did the opposite and sided with a policy of mono-ethnic Ukrainian nationalism.

In the last free all-Ukrainian elections in 2010 and 2012, in which people living in Crimea and the Donbass still participated, there was even a narrow majority for a pro-Russian president and pro-Russian parliament.

If the EU had really been concerned with preserving and strengthening Ukraine, it should have supported the cohesion and striving for harmony between the two populations and vigorously promoted the continuation of the project of a bi-national and federal Ukraine, as proclaimed in 1991. However, it did the opposite and sided with a policy of mono-ethnic Ukrainian nationalism…………………………………………………………………………….

While constantly proclaiming a desire to help Ukraine, the EU is de facto contributing to its destruction and immense human suffering. The weapons supplied by the EU not only prolong the war but also contribute to death and destruction on Ukrainian territory, just like Russian weapons do.

Today, Ukraine may not only be the most destroyed country in Europe but also the politically and ethnically most deeply divided country. After a year and a half of war, Ukraine, which was already the poorest country in Europe before the war, has been driven deeper into poverty and foreign debt while becoming the most militarized country in Europe. The Ukrainian economy is in ruins and plagued by one of the highest levels of corruption in Europe. Ukraine is also the country with the fastest-shrinking population in Europe. Moreover, Ukraine could lose up to 20% of its territory as well as its access to the Azov and Black Seas. How can Ukraine survive as a functioning state under such conditions?

…………………………………………………………………………………………………… The next president of the USA does not necessarily have to be called Trump, but we can assume that the USA will turn its back on the expensive Ukraine adventure after next year’s presidential election,

………………………………………………To prevent hurting itself and save Ukraine, the European Union must, out of its own self-interest, distance itself from its self-righteous war narrative, abandon the militarization of its foreign policy, and stop believing that NATO enlargement will bring security. The European Union must return to a language of peace and develop a peace plan for Europe that is built on the “Charter of Paris for a New Europe” and includes Russia and Ukraine. In doing so, the EU would prevent further bloodshed in Europe, forestall the danger of internal frictions breaking out within its members, and prevent its own economic decline. This would help improve the EU’s standing in the world as the peace project it was once conceived as after the Second World War. For this, it will need courage—peace requires a lot of courage!  https://www.meer.com/en/74782-will-the-ukraine-war-be-the-undoing-for-the-european-union

July 11, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | EUROPE, politics international | Leave a comment