By Jeffrey D. Sachs

September 29, 2023 – Information Clearing House

During the disastrous Vietnam War, it was said that the US government treated the public like a mushroom farm: keeping it in the dark and feeding it with manure.  The heroic Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers documenting the unrelenting US government lying about the war in order to protect politicians who would be embarrassed by the truth.  A half century later, during the Ukraine War, the manure is piled even higher. 

According to the US Government and the ever-obsequious New York Times, the Ukraine war was “unprovoked,” the New York Times’ favorite adjective to describe the war.  Putin, allegedly mistaking himself for Peter the Great, invaded Ukraine to recreate the Russian Empire.  Yet last week, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg committed a Washington gaffe, meaning that he accidentally blurted out the truth. 

In testimony to the European Union Parliament, Stoltenberg made clear that it was America’s relentless push to enlarge NATO to Ukraine that was the real cause of the war and why it continues today.  Here are Stoltenberg’s revealing words:

“The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course, we didn’t sign that.

The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second-class membership. We rejected that. 

So, he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite.” 

To repeat, he [Putin] went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.  

When Prof. John Mearsheimer, I, and others have said the same, we’ve been attacked as Putin apologists.  The same critics also choose to hide or flatly ignore the dire warnings against NATO enlargement to Ukraine long articulated by many of America’s leading diplomats, including the great scholar-statesman George Kennan, and the former US Ambassadors to Russia Jack Matlock and William Burns.

Burns, now CIA Director, was US Ambassador to Russia in 2008, and author of a memo entitled “Nyet means Nyet.”  In that memo, Burns explained to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the entire Russian political class, not just Putin, was dead-set against NATO enlargement. We know about the memo only because it was leaked.  Otherwise, we’d be in the dark about it.

Why does Russia oppose NATO enlargement?  For the simple reason that Russia does not accept the US military on its 2,300 km border with Ukraine in the Black Sea region. Russia does not appreciate the US placement of Aegis missiles in Poland and Romania after the US unilaterally abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty.

Russia also does not welcome the fact that the US engaged in no fewer than 70 regime change operations during the Cold War (1947-1989), and countless more since, including in Serbia, Afghanistan, Georgia, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, and Ukraine.  Nor does Russia like the fact that many leading US politicians actively advocate the destruction of Russia under the banner of “Decolonizing Russia.” That would be like Russia calling for the removal of Texas, California, Hawaii, the conquered Indian lands, and much else, from the U.S.  

Even Zelensky’s team knew that the quest for NATO enlargement meant imminent war with Russia.  Oleksiy Arestovych, former Advisor to the Office of the President of Ukraine under Zelensky, declared that “with a 99.9% probability, our price for joining NATO is a big war with Russia.” 

Arestovych claimed that even without NATO enlargement, Russia would eventually try to take Ukraine, just many years later. Yet history belies that.  Russia respected Finland’s and Austria’s neutrality for decades, with no dire threats, much less invasions.  Moreover, from Ukraine’s independence in 1991 until the US-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, Russia didn’t show any interest in taking Ukrainian territory.  It was only when the US installed a staunchly anti-Russian, pro-NATO regime in February 2014 that Russia took back Crimea, concerned that its Black Sea naval base in Crimea (since 1783) would fall into NATO’s hands. 

Even then, Russia didn’t demand other territory from Ukraine, only fulfillment of the UN-backed Minsk II Agreement, which called for autonomy of the ethnic-Russian Donbas, not a Russian claim on the territory.  Yet instead of diplomacy, the US armed, trained, and helped to organize a huge Ukrainian army to make NATO enlargement a fait accompli. 

Putin made one last attempt at diplomacy at the end of 2021, tabling a draft US-NATO Security Agreement to forestall war.  The core of the draft agreement was an end of NATO enlargement and removal of US missiles near Russia.  Russia’s security concerns were valid and the basis for negotiations.  Yet Biden flatly rejected negotiations out of a combination of arrogance, hawkishness, and profound miscalculation. NATO maintained its position that NATO would not negotiate with Russia regarding NATO enlargement, that in effect, NATO enlargement was none of Russia’s business. 

The continuing US obsession with NATO enlargement is profoundly irresponsible and hypocritical.  The US would object—by means of war, if needed—to being encircled by Russian or Chinese military bases in the Western Hemisphere, a point the US has made since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823.  Yet the US is blind and deaf to the legitimate security concerns of other countries.  

So, yes, Putin went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to Russia’s border. Ukraine is being destroyed by US arrogance, proving again Henry Kissinger’s adage that to be America’s enemy is dangerous, while to be its friend is fatal.  The Ukraine War will end when the US acknowledges a simple truth: NATO enlargement to Ukraine means perpetual war and Ukraine’s destruction.  Ukraine’s neutrality could have avoided the war, and remains the key to peace.  The deeper truth is that European security depends on collective security as called for by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), not one-sided NATO demands.  

Professor at Columbia University, is Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has served as adviser to three UN Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General António Guterres.   Article sent to Other News by the author. September 19, 2023

The current secretary-general’s position on resistance is just the latest manifestation of the UN’s long record of dispossessing the Palestinian people of their lands

By Joseph Massad

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City last week (AFP)

October 01, 2023 – Information Clearing House – A few weeks ago, Tor Wennesland, the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, condemned Palestinian resistance to Israel’s ongoing settler-colonial military occupation as “terrorism”.

Wennesland is the latest in a long line of Norwegian diplomats whose views have guided Norwegian policy towards Israeli settler-colonialism and Palestinian resistance since World War Two. This record includes Norwegian officials who held UN positions, not least of whom was the first UN Secretary-General, Trygve Lie.

During a press conference earlier this month ahead of the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly, the current UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres responded to a question on whether the Palestinian people have the right to resist the occupation. While he did not quote Wennesland verbatim, he declared that the Palestinians must only follow Gandhi’s example in resisting:

“Let’s not forget the example of Gandhi. I think it’s important to recognise, to fully recognise the rights of the Palestinian people. I think it’s important to condemn any attempt to undermine the two-state solution, construction of settlements, eviction of Palestinian families and many other aspects. But, I do not think that it is with violence that the Palestinians will be able to better defend their interests. That is my humble opinion.”

Humble his opinion is not, especially as he heads the very organisation that dispossessed the Palestinian people and legitimised (and continues to legitimise) the colonial theft of their homeland, which was brought about not solely by the machinations of the US and European powers, but also by UN personnel whose achievements in that regard continue to be celebrated today.

Like Wennesland, Guterres continues the tradition of UN officials furthering the oppression of the colonised Palestinians.

‘Sympathy’ for the Zionists

In August 1948, in the middle of the Zionist invasion of Palestine, the UN, under the leadership of the passionately pro-Zionist Secretary-General Lie, had dispatched the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte to mediate a ceasefire between the Israelis and the neighbouring Arab countries. But Bernadotte was assassinated in September by members of the terrorist and pro-fascist Jewish group Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang.

Bunche’s sympathy for the Zionists was in line with the pro-Zionist bias of the UN and the US government he served

He was replaced by his deputy, the African-American intellectual and former US government operative, Ralph Bunche, who, after Bernadotte’s murder, was the one who negotiated the armistice agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbours.

In 1941, Bunche had become the highest-ranking Black official in the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA. During his stint at the OSS, he wrote a series of propaganda pamphlets and handbooks for US military campaigns in North and West Africa. To control the local African populations, Bunche recommended that the US employ “carefully chosen American Negroes” who “could prove more effective than whites, owing to their unique ability to gain more readily the confidence of the Native”.

He was also in charge of preparing US soldiers for the African countries where they were to be stationed and advised them not to express their racial (read: racist) views. 

By the late 1940s, Bunche had been appointed as special assistant to the Secretary-General’s representative to the UN Special Committee on Palestine (Unscop). While the leaders of the Palestinians, represented by the Arab Higher Committee, refused to meet with Unscop or grant it legitimacy when it arrived in Palestine in the summer of 1947, Bunche was wined and dined by the Zionists, especially by the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann. He also met secretly with the then fugitive and wanted terrorist Menachem Begin, with whom he maintained secret and “warm” contacts later, and whom he told, according to Begin’s account: “I can understand you. I am also a member of a persecuted minority.”

Bunche did not mince words when he declared in regard to the Zionists: “I have had a purely personal sympathy for their cause.” It was Bunche who drafted the Unscop report based on which the 1947 UN Partition Plan was adopted by the General Assembly in November.

Meanwhile, Bunche’s boss, Lie, had been meeting secretly with representatives of the Jewish Agency almost daily at his home after April 1947. He even went as far as passing “top secret British intelligence to the Jewish Agency” through a Norwegian UN official in Jerusalem, whom he had previously appointed.

While Bernadotte was selected by the General Assembly on 14 May 1948 to be the UN “Mediator in Palestine”, Bunche was appointed by Lie as “Chief Representative of the General Secretary in Palestine”. Lie was so partial towards Israel that he advised the Israelis on how to deal with Bernadotte during the negotiations. Bunche knew well that Lie “was anything but objective on major issues such as Palestine”.

Yet Bunche’s sympathy for the Zionists was in line with the pro-Zionist bias of the UN and the US government he served. It was also in line with Bernadotte’s, for whom impartiality meant treating the Zionist colonists and the colonised natives as equals who had equal claims to Palestine.

‘Palestine Arabs lose’

Bunche described the Arab leaders as “children” and the Jewish leaders as “much more intelligent and sensible”. When the Israelis attacked him and Bernadotte for not allowing them to seize more territories in their conquest of Palestine, he was accused of being an “anti-Semite”.

The ultra-Zionist WEB Du Bois joined the pro-Israeli chorus in the US and Israeli press and, in an infamous speech he delivered to the American Jewish Congress, apologised “in the name of the American Negro for the apparent apostasy of Ralph Bunche…to the clear ideas of freedom and fair play, which should have guided the descendant of an American slave”. Du Bois added that Bunche was linked to the alleged “disgraceful betrayal” of the Jews by the US State Department. Bunche never forgave him, especially when Du Bois himself was targeted in 1951 by the US Justice Department for his opposition to the Cold War.

Bunche negotiated the armistice agreements between the Israelis and the neighbouring Arab countries in the first seven months of 1949, mostly in Rhodes, Greece. Expectedly, they were to the advantage of the Israelis in all cases, though with a good liberal’s acknowledgement that the agreements represented “another deal, and as usual the Palestine Arabs lose”.

For his efforts in advancing the settler-colonial Israeli regime and its expansion of its territories, Bunche received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 (the first Black man to ever do so). His defence of the US despite its white supremacist system of government remained constant, so much so that the 1960s Black radical student movement labelled Bunche an “Uncle Tom”.

Similarly, Adam Clayton Powell (who as a Protestant pastor had travelled to Palestine in 1938 during the Great Palestinian Revolt and wrote a pro-Zionist Orientalist book about his trip) and Malcolm X had both called him “an international Uncle Tom”.

Given Bunche’s celebration of the racist settler-colonial American democracy as “the greatest experiment in the history of human society”, his position on the Palestinians was hardly anomalous. Bunche also understood that European and US support for Jewish settler-colonialism was rooted in their anti-Semitism, writing that they “will support Jewish Agency claims for a Jewish State as a means of dumping world Jewry on the Arabs”.

He further quoted the Canadian delegate to Unscop, Ivan Rand of the Canadian Supreme Court, who supported a Jewish State in Palestine “so we can dispose of them [the Jews] once and for all and they won’t be bothering us all the time”.

Still, Bunche did not identify with the Palestinians as also the victims of European Jewish racism and colonialism. Rather, he identified with the Palestinians’ killers and usurpers as they had been the victims of European Christian anti-Semitism. It was as though identifying with European Jews was only possible through supporting Jewish settler-colonialism in Palestine.

Unlike Bunche or Du Bois, Malcolm X, who was highly influenced by the Bandung Conference of 1955 and Third World anti-colonial struggles, was clear when he wrote in his famed article “Zionist Logic” that what the Zionists had done to the Palestinians would be as legal and moral as for Black people in the Americas to return to Africa, dispossess the Africans living there, and establish a nation for themselves there:

“There are over 100 million of our people in the western hemisphere who are of African origin. Just because our forefathers once lived here in Africa would this give Afro-Americans the right to come back here to the mother continent to drive the rightful citizens of Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanganyika, or Uganda from their cities, confiscate all their property for ourselves and set up anew Afro-American nations…as the European Zionists have done to our Arab brothers and sisters in Palestine? According to this warped Zionist logic, all the whites would be forced to leave the entire western hemisphere, and those two vast continents turned back to the original owners, the American Indians.”

Unlike the African diaspora, European Jews, of course, did not go to Europe from Palestine but were European converts to Judaism. Malcolm X ridiculed the religious-based claims of the Zionists to Palestine and wondered if Ralph Bunche was “the Messiah of Zionism”. Yet Bunche continues to be celebrated at the United Nations today, with a new adulatory biography of his life published earlier this year.

The recent condemnation of Palestinian resistance as “terrorism” and Guterres’s advice that the Palestinians abandon armed resistance to unrelenting Israeli colonial violence are just the latest manifestations of the UN’s long record of dispossessing the Palestinian people of their lands and expecting them to go on hunger strikes and write letters of protest in response.

Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of many books and academic and journalistic articles. His books include Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan; Desiring Arabs; The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, and most recently Islam in Liberalism. His books and articles have been translated into a dozen languages.

Caitlin Johnstone, Consortium News, September 30, 2023

That weapons systems are being tested on human bodies to the immense benefit of war profiteers over a completely avoidable and provoked war is nightmarishly depraved. 

Ukrainian trenchline at the Battle of Bakhmut, November 2022. (Mil.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

By Caitlin Johnstone

A heartbreaking graphic is going around right now showing the almost microscopic changes that have occurred to the frontline of the war in Ukraine this year despite nonstop death and destruction of unfathomable horror the entire time.

The graphic comes from a New York Times article titled “Who’s Gaining Ground in Ukraine? This Year, No One,” which eventually gets around to acknowledging that Russia has actually gained more ground than Ukraine in 2023 despite Kiev’s much-hyped counteroffensive, which began in June.

“When both sides’ gains are added up, Russia now controls nearly 200 square miles more territory in Ukraine compared with the start of the year,” the Times reports.

As “Left I on the News” noted on Twitter, this contradicts the titular claim in another New York Times article published last week under the headline “Ukraine Has Gained Ground. But It Has Much Further To Go.”

As the map of gains and losses shows, so much has been given up for so very, very little. At least tens of thousands have died in this war with hundreds of thousands wounded, all for those little blips on the map.

Ukraine is now freckled with more landmines than anywhere else on Earth, which experts say will take decades to clear. This giant deathtrap is exacerbated by the cluster munitions that are spreading across the land, which will go on to detonate and kill civilians (mostly children) for years to come.

The mines and artillery fire on the frontline of this war are reportedly creating tens of thousands of amputees, numbers comparable to what was seen in World War I.

And all for what? Essentially nothing. A few inches gained here, a few inches lost there. The meaninglessness of it all is probably one of the reasons why military-aged Ukrainian men have been fleeing and attempting to flee the nation in droves to avoid conscription.

And now we see Western officials and media outlets telling us all to prepare for this war to drag on for years, potentially into the 2030s. 

This nonsensical violence, which even the head of NATO now admits could have been avoided by simply ceasing to amass a Western military threat on Russia’s doorstep, is scheduled to drag on as long as possible for no grander reason than the advancement of U.S. strategic interests.

This news from The New York Times comes out at the same time as a Wall Street Journal article titled “The War in Ukraine Is Also a Giant Arms Fair,” subtitled “Arms makers are getting orders for weapons being put to the test on the battlefield.”

“The Panzerhaubitze howitzer is part of an arsenal of weapons being put to the test in Ukraine in what has become the world’s largest arms fair,” writes WSJ’s Alistair MacDonald.

“Companies that make the weapons being used in Ukraine have won orders and resurrected production lines. The deployment of billions of dollars worth of equipment in a major land war has also given manufacturers and militaries a unique opportunity to analyze the battlefield performance of weapons, and learn how best to use them.”

If you contemplate those words the meaning is so deeply evil it will give you nightmares. The fact that weapons systems are being tested on human bodies to the immense benefit of war profiteers over a completely avoidable and deliberately provoked war is one of the most depraved things you can possibly imagine, and is a clear sign that we are living in a profoundly sick society.

This is so, so ugly, and it’s slated to get even uglier — these freaks haven’t even gotten started on China yet. The sooner this monstrous power structure can be brought to its knees, the better it will be for everyone.

Andrew Murray, Morning Star, Sept 28, 2023

FORMER SS soldier Yaroslav Hunka, whose standing ovation in the Canadian parliament this week scandalised the world, was given refuge in Britain after World War II, the Morning Star can reveal.

Despite having served in the Galician division of the Waffen-SS, a unit associated with massacres of Jews, Poles and other civilians during the war, Mr Hunka was allowed to settle in Britain.

He emigrated to Canada in 1954 and was presented to that country’s House of Commons as a hero this week, receiving an enthusiastic reception from, among others, visiting Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Commons Speaker Anthony Rota was forced to resign amid a firestorm of global protest once Mr Hunka’s Nazi-aligned past had been revealed. The Polish government has pledged to seek his extradition.

During his time in this country, Mr Hunka worked as an aircraft fitter, lived in Northamptonshire and was an active member of the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain (AUGB).

He was one of many Ukrainian Waffen-SS veterans allowed to live in Britain after the war. Whitehall decided to regard them as “stateless,” meaning that they could not be returned to face justice in the countries in which their atrocities had been committed.

There were so many anti-Soviet Ukrainian ex-soldiers living in Britain that a separate organisation, the Association of Ukrainian Former Combatants in Great Britain (AUFC), was formed in London on July 30 1949.

At its peak, the AUFC had 5,800 members, of which an estimated 84 per cent had served in the Waffen-SS Galicia division. The AUFC no longer appears to function.

Responding to the Star’s investigation, a spokeswoman for the AUGB stressed that Mr Hunka and those like him “were allowed by the British government to come to Britain. He was allowed in legally.

“People use the word ‘nazi’,” she added, asking: “What is behind that? At that time, people in western Ukraine were against the communist regime.”

When asked about the Galicia division’s record of slaughter of civilians, the spokeswoman responded: “It doesn’t mean that they all did that.”

Other Ukrainian Nazi fighters may still be at large in Britain.

Last year, the Manchester Evening News interviewed a 98-year-old Ukrainian named Iwan Kluka, who boasted of having “fought against Stalin’s Red Army.”

The newspaper deleted the article online after outraged readers pointed out that Mr Kluka had clearly fought alongside the Nazi invaders from Germany.

Many people equate Islamist with Islamic and Islam with Muslims. It happens everywhere. But these words need to be differentiated.

— Nasir Khan

For the last three decades, the term ‘Islamist’ has frequently been used in political discourse about political Islam. It stands for those misguided and indoctrinated ignorant people whose aim is to impose their fanatical versions of Islam on others.

But we should keep in mind that Islam as a world religion is followed by people with different world outlooks who are divided into numerous sects. Furthermore, these followers have varying interpretations of the role of political power, about the leaders of the Islamic community (Ummah) and the rights and obligations of the rulers and the ruled, etc. etc. These views of Islamic law, Sharia, cover civil and criminal law that again are subject to four main schools of jurisprudence within Sunni Islam while the Shias have their own jurisprudence. There is little chance of any unity of ideas among them.

What is most alarming about Islamists’ general worldview is their negation of the universal dimension and inherent tolerance of this world religion. Instead, they put forward a narrow and anti-social version that goes against all principles of democracy, respect for religious minorities and inculcates bigotry against the followers of other faiths. The whole process can be termed as creating mental and religious ghettos, absolutely closed to rational thought but hell-bent on myopic divisions and conflicts. In such a suffocating universe, there is no room for mutual accommodation, or acceptance of secularism in a multi-religious and multi-cultural world in which we live in Europe, some parts of America or Australia.

Islamists’ misuse of Islam is a dangerous phenomenon for democracy and common social and political values of the present age.

— Nasir Khan

The original teachings of the Buddha (The Enlightened One) had only one aim: To end human suffering. His thought expressed in the “Four Noble Truths” in his first sermon at Benares dealt with the problem. He did not ask people to search for any solution to their worldly problems in any outside source or any heavenly power but only in themselves.

There were too many gods in a society where he was born and lived. But he showed no interest to dabble into the mysteries of such supernatural beings. For him the cause of human suffering was in human desires, temptations and greed. Was a solution possible? Yes. There was a solution. That was the message of the Buddha to humanity.

Incidentally, what the Buddha had taught and how the coming generations of his followers transformed him and his teachings are two different things. The Enlightened One was made into a universal god, the Universal Buddha, towards whom his followers directed their prayers. In this way, a unique thinker in human history, a humanist par excellence, who had nothing to do with any supernatural beings at all, was himself made a god!

–

A statue of Buddha from Gandhara, now in Pakistan

By Tom O’Connor, Newsweek, Sep. 21, 2023

The head of NATO asserted today that weakening Russia in Ukraine could allow the United States to intensify its efforts in countering China.

Speaking at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday that the primary goal of his visit “is to mobilize support for Ukraine.” A victory for Kyiv in resisting the war launched by Moscow more than a year and a half ago is “in our security interest,” Stoltenberg said.

The consequences of such a loss, he warned, would be felt beyond Europe and extend into Asia as well, where Chinese President Xi Jinping has vowed to retake the disputed island of Taiwan.

“It will be a tragedy for Ukraine if President [Vladimir] Putin wins, but it will also be extremely dangerous for us,” Stoltenberg said. “It will make the world more dangerous and more vulnerable, because then the message to President Putin and also to President Xi is that when they use military force, when they violate the international order, when they invade another country, they get what they want.”

“So, if the United States is concerned about China and wants to pivot towards Asia, then you have to ensure that Putin doesn’t win in in Ukraine,” he added, “because if Ukraine wins, then you will have the second biggest army in Europe, the Ukrainian army, battle-hardened, on our side, and we’ll have a weakened Russian army, and we have also now Europe really stepping up for defense spending.”

Such a scenario, Stoltenberg said, “will make it easier” for the U.S. “to focus also on China,” as Washington can be “less concerned about the situation in Europe.”

While NATO is a transatlantic alliance, the 31-member bloc has increasingly expanded its presence in the Asia-Pacific region, engaging with partners such as Australia, Japan and New Zealand. Under Stoltenberg, who will have presided over the coalition for at least a decade after his term was extended through next October, NATO has also enhanced its focus on China, whose diplomatic, economic and military power has accelerated rapidly throughout Xi’s own past decade in power.

Stoltenberg made numerous mentions of China throughout his comments at the event Wednesday, including references to Beijing’s robust partnership with Moscow. He dismissed the notion that security issues in Europe and Asia could be completely separated as “wrong, for many reasons, not least because we see Beijing and Moscow are coming more and more closely together.”

The NATO chief noted the “no-limits” partnership declared by Putin and Xi just two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine and the increasingly frequent joint aerial and naval patrols conducted by Chinese and Russian forces in the Asia-Pacific. He also took aim at China’s position on the war in Ukraine, on which Beijing has remained officially neutral but has at times echoed Moscow’s criticisms of NATO’s post-Cold War expansion into Eastern Europe, viewed by the Kremlin as justification for the conflict.

“The reality is that China is supporting the Russian war effort by propping up the economy and also by spreading the Russian false narrative of what this war is about, this war of aggression against Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said. “So, what happens in Europe, that matters for Asia, what happens in Asia matters for Europe.”

“And that’s one reason why countries like South Korea and Japan are extremely concerned about the war in Ukraine,” he added, “because they know that if President Putin wins, it lowers the threshold for President Xi to use force.”

Newsweek has reached out to Stoltenberg via the Council on Foreign Relations for comment.

Contacted for comment, Chinese Embassy to the United Nations spokesperson Liu Pengyu told Newsweek that Stoltenberg’s remarks demonstrate that “more than 30 years after the Cold War ended” NATO’s “legacy remains trapped in a zero-sum mindset and views the world as opposing blocs.”

“Despite the global community’s call for peace, development, and common progress, NATO continues to act against the prevailing trend and seek to turn back the wheel of history,” he added.

Liu argued that, rather than the potential aggressor described by the NATO secretary-general, “China is a force for world peace, a contributor to global development, a defender of the international order, and a source of public good.” Liu said that “China is committed to the international system with the UN at its core, the international order underpinned by international law and the basic norms governing international relations that stem from the purposes and principles of the UN Charter.”

And “on the question of Ukraine,” Liu argued, “we have worked actively to encourage all parties to seek a political solution.”

“It is time that NATO should leave behind the outdated Cold War and zero-sum mentality. Instead of placing single-minded belief in military force for absolute security, NATO needs to reflect on its role in the Ukraine crisis and what responsibilities it should take,” Liu said. “Instead of underscoring ideological differences and bloc confrontation, NATO needs to act truly constructively for world peace and stability.”

Earlier this month, China’s ambassador to Canada, Cong Peiwu, criticized NATO’s decision to include language critical of China in its latest communique as well as the alliance’s overtures in the Asia-Pacific region.

“NATO not only attacked and defamed China in their Communiqué, but the Alliance members also constantly reached beyond their geographical scope as laid down in its treaty to accelerate NATO’s eastward expansion into the Asia-Pacific region,” Cong wrote in a September 11 op-ed published in Canada’s Esprit de Corps magazine. “After stirring up turmoil in Europe, NATO is now attempting to disrupt the Asia-Pacific region and the entire globe.”

Cong added that “at the behest of the U.S., NATO is attempting to start a New Cold War in the Asia-Pacific region.”

by Jeffrey D. Sachs. Antiwar. com, posted on Sep 20, 2023

The American people urgently need to know the true history of the war in Ukraine and its current prospects. Unfortunately, the mainstream media – The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, MSNBC, and CNN – have become mere mouthpieces of the government, repeating US President Joe Biden’s lies and hiding history from the public.

Biden is again denigrating Russian President Vladimir Putin, this time accusing Putin of a “craven lust for land and power,” after declaring last year that “For God’s sake, that man [Putin] cannot stay in power.”  Yet Biden is the one who is trapping Ukraine in an open-ended war by continuing to push NATO enlargement to Ukraine.  He is afraid to tell the truth to the American and Ukrainian people, rejecting diplomacy, and opting instead for perpetual war.

Expanding NATO to Ukraine, which Biden has long promoted, is a U.S. gambit that has failed.  The neocons, including Biden, thought from the late 1990s onward that the US could expand NATO to Ukraine (and Georgia) despite Russia’s vociferous and long-standing opposition.  They didn’t believe that Putin would actually go to war over NATO expansion.

Yet for Russia, NATO enlargement to Ukraine (and Georgia) is viewed as an existential threat to Russia’s national security, notably given Russia’s 2,000-km border with Ukraine, and Georgia’s strategic position on the eastern edge of the Black Sea.  U.S. diplomats have explained this basic reality to U.S. politicians and generals for decades, but the politicians and generals have arrogantly and crudely persisted in pushing NATO enlargement nonetheless.

At this point, Biden knows full well that NATO enlargement to Ukraine would trigger World War III.  That’s why behind the scenes Biden put NATO enlargement into low gear at the Vilnius NATO Summit.  Yet rather than admit the truth – that Ukraine will not be part of NATO – Biden prevaricates, promising Ukraine’s eventual membership.  In reality, he is committing Ukraine to ongoing bloodletting for no reason other than U.S. domestic politics, specifically Biden’s fear of looking weak to his political foes.  (A half-century ago, Presidents Johnson and Nixon sustained the Vietnam War for essentially the same pathetic reason, and with the same lying, as the late Daniel Ellsberg brilliantly explained.)

Ukraine can’t win.  Russia is more likely than not to prevail on the battlefield, as it seems now to be doing. Yet even if Ukraine were to break through with conventional forces and NATO weaponry, Russia would escalate to nuclear war if necessary to prevent NATO in Ukraine.

Throughout his entire career, Biden has served the military-industrial complex. He has relentlessly promoted NATO enlargement and supported America’s deeply destabilizing wars of choice in Afghanistan, Serbia, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and now Ukraine. He defers to generals who want more war and more “surges,” and who predict imminent victory just ahead to keep the gullible public onside.

Moreover, Biden and his team (Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland) seem to have believed their own propaganda that Western sanctions would strangle the Russian economy, while miracle weapons such as HIMARS would defeat Russia.  And all the while, they have been telling Americans to pay no attention to Russia’s 6,000 nuclear weapons.

Ukrainian leaders have gone along with the US deception for reasons that are hard to fathom. Perhaps they believe the US, or are afraid of the US, or fear their own extremists, or simply are extremists, ready to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to death and injury in the naïve belief that Ukraine can defeat a nuclear superpower that regards the war as existential. Or possibly some of the Ukrainian leaders are making fortunes by skimming from the tens of billions of dollars of Western aid and arms.

The only way to save Ukraine is a negotiated peace. In a negotiated settlement, the US would agree that NATO will not enlarge to Ukraine while Russia would agree to withdraw its troops.  Remaining issues – Crimea, the Donbas, US and European sanctions, the future of European security arrangements – would be handled politically, not by endless war.

Russia has repeatedly tried negotiations: to try to forestall the eastward enlargement of NATO; to try to find suitable security arrangements with the US and Europe; to try to settle inter-ethnic issues in Ukraine after 2014 (the Minsk I and Minsk II agreements); to try to sustain limits on anti-ballistic missiles; and to try to end the Ukraine war in 2022 via direct negotiations with Ukraine. In all cases, the US government disdained, ignored, or blocked these attempts, often putting forward the big lie that Russia rather than the US rejects negotiations. JFK said it exactly right in 1961: “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.”  If only Biden would heed JFK’s enduring wisdom.

To help the public move beyond the simplistic narrative of Biden and the mainstream media, I offer a brief chronology of some key events leading to the ongoing war.

January 31, 1990.  German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich-Genscher pledges to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that in the context of German reunification and disbanding of the Soviet Warsaw Pact military alliance, NATO will rule out an “expansion of its territory to the East, i.e., moving it closer to the Soviet borders.”

February 9, 1990.  U.S. Secretary of State James Baker III agrees with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that “NATO expansion is unacceptable.”

June 29 – July 2, 1990.  NATO Secretary-General Manfred Woerner tells a high-level Russian delegation that “the NATO Council and he [Woerner] are against the expansion of NATO.”

July 1, 1990.  Ukrainian Rada (parliament) adopts the Declaration of State Sovereignty, in which “The Ukrainian SSR solemnly declares its intention of becoming a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs and adheres to three nuclear free principles: to accept, to produce and to purchase no nuclear weapons.”

August 24, 1991.  Ukraine declares independence on the basis of the 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty, which includes the pledge of neutrality.

Mid-1992.  Bush Administration policymakers reach a secret internal consensus to expand NATO, contrary to commitments recently made to the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation.

July 8, 1997.  At the Madrid NATO Summit, Poland, Hungary, and Czech Republic are invited to begin NATO accession talks.

September-October, 1997.  In Foreign Affairs (Sept/Oct, 1997) former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski details the timeline for NATO enlargement, with Ukraine’s negotiations provisionally to begin during 2005-2010.

March 24 – June 10, 1999.  NATO bombs Serbia.  Russia terms the NATO bombing “a flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter.”

March 2000.  Ukrainian President Kuchma declares that “there is no question of Ukraine joining NATO today since this issue is extremely complex and has many angles to it.”

June 13, 2002.  The US unilaterally withdraws from the Anti-Ballistic Weapons Treaty, an action which the Vice-Chair of the Russian Duma Defense Committee characterizes as an “extremely negative event of historical scale.”

November-December 2004.  The “Orange Revolution” occurs in Ukraine, events that the West characterizes as a democratic revolution and the Russian government characterizes as a Western-manufactured grab for power with overt and covert US support.

February 10, 2007.  Putin strongly criticizes the U.S. attempt to create a unipolar world, backed by NATO enlargement, in a speech to the Munich Security Conference, declaring: “I think it is obvious that NATO expansion … represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?”

February 1, 2008.  US Ambassador to Russia William Burns sends a confidential cable to U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, entitled “Nyet means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines,” emphasizing that “Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region.”

February 18, 2008.  The US recognizes Kosovo independence over heated Russian objections.  The Russian Government declares that Kosovo independence violates “the sovereignty of the Republic of Serbia, the Charter of the United Nations, UNSCR 1244, the principles of the Helsinki Final Act, Kosovo’s Constitutional Framework and the high-level Contact Group accords.”

April 3, 2008.  NATO declares that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO.” Russia declares that “Georgia’s and Ukraine’s membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security.”

August 20, 2008.  The US announces that it will deploy ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems in Poland, to be followed later by Romania.  Russia expresses strenuous opposition to the BMD systems.

January 28, 2014.  Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt plot regime change in Ukraine in a call that is intercepted and posted on YouTube on February 7, in which Nuland notes that “[Vice President] Biden’s willing” to help close the deal.

February 21, 2014.  Governments of Ukraine, Poland, France, and Germany reach an Agreement on settlement of political crisis in Ukraine, calling for new elections later in the year.  The far-right Right Sector and other armed groups instead demand Yanukovych’s immediate resignation, and take over government buildings.  Yanukovych flees.  The Parliament immediately strips the President of his powers without an impeachment process.

February 22, 2014.  The US immediately endorses the regime change.

March 16, 2014.  Russia holds a referendum in Crimea that according to the Russian Government results in a large majority vote for Russian rule.  On March 21, the Russian Duma votes to admit Crimea to the Russian Federation. The Russian Government draws the analogy to the Kosovo referendum.  The US rejects the Crimea referendum as illegitimate.

March 18, 2014.  President Putin characterizes the regime change as a coup, stating: “those who stood behind the latest events in Ukraine had a different agenda: they were preparing yet another government takeover; they wanted to seize power and would stop short of nothing. They resorted to terror, murder and riots.”

March 25, 2014.  President Barack Obama mocks Russia “as a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors – not out of strength but out of weakness,”

February 12, 2015.  Signing of Minsk II agreement.  The agreement is unanimously backed by the UN Security Council Resolution 2202 on February 17, 2015.  Former Chancellor Angela Merkel later acknowledges that the Minsk II agreement was designed to give time for Ukraine to strengthen its military.  It was not implemented by Ukraine, and President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged that he had no intention to implement the agreement.

February 1, 2019.  The U.S. unilaterally withdraws from the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty.  Russia harshly criticizes the INF withdrawal as a “destructive” act that stoked security risks.

June 14, 2021.  At the 2021 NATO Summit in Brussels, NATO reconfirms NATO’s intention to enlarge and include Ukraine: “We reiterate the decision made at the 2008 Bucharest Summit that Ukraine will become a member of the Alliance.”

September 1, 2021.  The US reiterates support for Ukraine’s NATO aspirations in the “Joint Statement on the U.S.-Ukraine Strategic Partnership.”

December 17, 2021.  Putin puts forward a draft “Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees,” based on non-enlargement of NATO and limitations on the deployment of intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles.

January 26, 2022.  The U.S. formally replies to Russia that the US and NATO will not negotiate with Russia over issues of NATO enlargement, slamming the door on a negotiated path to avoid an expansion of the war in Ukraine.  The U.S. invokes NATO policy that “Any decision to invite a country to join the Alliance is taken by the North Atlantic Council on the basis of consensus among all Allies. No third country has a say in such deliberations.”  In short, the US asserts that NATO enlargement to Ukraine is none of Russia’s business.

February 21, 2022.  At a meeting of the Russian Security Council, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov details the U.S. refusal to negotiate:

“We received their response in late January. The assessment of this response shows that our Western colleagues are not prepared to take up our major proposals, primarily those on NATO’s eastward non-expansion. This demand was rejected with reference to the bloc’s so-called open-door policy and the freedom of each state to choose its own way of ensuring security. Neither the United States, nor the North Atlantic Alliance proposed an alternative to this key provision.”

The United States is doing everything it can to avoid the principle of indivisibility of security that we consider of fundamental importance and to which we have made many references. Deriving from it the only element that suits them – the freedom to choose alliances – they completely ignore everything else, including the key condition that reads that nobody – either in choosing alliances or regardless of them – is allowed to enhance their security at the expense of the security of others.”

February 24, 2022.  In an address to the nation, President Putin declares: “It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts at pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns. Its military machine is moving and, as I said, is approaching our very border.”

March 16, 2022.  Russia and Ukraine announce significant progress towards a peace agreement mediated by Turkey and Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.  As reported in the press, the basis of the agreement includes: “a ceasefire and Russian withdrawal if Kyiv declares neutrality and accepts limits on its armed forces.”

March 28, 2022.  President Zelensky publicly declares that Ukraine is ready for neutrality combined with security guarantees as part of a peace agreement with Russia.  “Security guarantees and neutrality, the non-nuclear status of our state – we’re ready to do that. That’s the most important point … they started the war because of it.”

April 7, 2022.  Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov accuses the West of trying to derail the peace talks, claiming that Ukraine had gone back on previously agreed proposals.  Prime Minister Naftali Bennett later states (on February 5, 2023) that the U.S. had blocked the pending Russia-Ukraine peace agreement.  When asked if the Western powers blocked the agreement, Bennett answered: “Basically, yes. They blocked it, and I thought they were wrong.”  At some point, says Bennett, the West decided “to crush Putin rather than to negotiate.”

June 4, 2023.  Ukraine launches a major counter-offensive, without achieving any major success as of mid-July 2023.

July 7, 2023.  Biden acknowledges that Ukraine is “running out” of 155mm artillery shells, and that the US is “running low.”

July 11, 2023.  At the NATO Summit in Vilnius, the final communique reaffirms Ukraine’s future in NATO: “We fully support Ukraine’s right to choose its own security arrangements.  Ukraine’s future is in NATO … Ukraine has become increasingly interoperable and politically integrated with the Alliance, and has made substantial progress on its reform path.”

July 13, 2023.  US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin reiterates that Ukraine will “no doubt” join NATO when the war ends.

July 13, 2023.  Putin reiterates that “As for Ukraine’s NATO membership, as we have said many times, this obviously creates a threat to Russia’s security. In fact, the threat of Ukraine’s accession to NATO is the reason, or rather one of the reasons for the special military operation. I am certain that this would not enhance Ukraine’s security in any way either. In general, it will make the world much more vulnerable and lead to more tensions in the international arena.  So, I don’t see anything good in this. Our position is well known and has long been formulated.”

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (2020). Other books include: Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable (2017), and The Age of Sustainable Development, (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.

– Nasir Khan

The Abraham Accords were a deceptive ploy used by former President Trump and his son-in-law, whereby more Arab despots would accept the apartheid and murderous regime of Zionists by ignoring the legitimate rights of the occupied Palestinians. This was a conspiracy against the people of Palestine. In addition, they were never meant to stop Israeli expansion or curb the settlers’ attacks and violence against the Palestinians. Those who took this fraud as a genuine initiative by Washington live in a make-believe world of buffoons.

Editorial, Morning Star, 19 September, 2023

NATO’S remobilised chief Jens Stoltenberg told us over the weekend to “prepare for a long war in Ukraine.”

This is an admission by the Nato secretary-general that the much-heralded Ukrainian offensive is failing and that even more of Ukraine’s youth must die in what is now commonly described as the “meat grinder” in the south and east of the country.

Stoltenberg said at the alliance’s July summit that Ukraine had “moved closer to Nato.” Whether he grasps the irony of his comment that “when this war ends, we need security guarantees for Ukraine. Otherwise, history could repeat itself,” is an unknown.

It was precisely Russia’s anxiety about its own security that lies at the centre of this conflict.

If Ukraine and the Nato powers had implemented the Minsk agreements Ukraine would have retained its territorial integrity, remained outside of Nato and have benefited from a guaranteed peace in central and eastern Europe and the economic growth that is transforming the central Asian landmass, but from which Europe is isolated because of the sanctions regime against Russia which has sent our energy costs skyrocketing.

In fact, the Nato summit was where the divisions over the alliance’s formal strategy emerged, with Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria each with their own concerns about the direction of the conflict, with Poland heading a bloc that refuses to allow Ukrainian dumping of its cereal production and Germany insisting on civil society reforms and an end to corruption.

Prominent among French President Emmanuel Macron’s proposals for a larger EU and Nato was a clear recognition that a failure of the Ukraine offensive would necessarily entail both a re-evaluation of support for Ukraine and a negotiated compromise with Vladimir Putin.

That moment, as the Stop the War Coalition, has argued for many months is now nearing.

Stop the War, meeting over the weekend, has been a voice of reason and humanity in a narrative characterised by a pronounced indifference to the human cost of a war fought in the service of the US strategic drive to punish Russia and challenge China’s growing influence and economic power.

According to the UN High Commission for Refugees, as of last week, there are 6,199,700 Ukrainian refugees abroad. Just under three million fled to Russia and over 20,000 to Belarus. Six million economic migrants left Ukraine before the war and the population is greatly reduced.

The country is an economic ruin, with its state budget buttressed by a punishing mixture of subventions and loans that will need to be repaid.

Only 9.5 million Ukrainians have a job — six to seven million if state employees are excluded. These must support the remaining 23m people including pensioners, children, students, the unemployed and dependants. The fertility rate has fallen below 1.0 since the war started.

On highly speculative US figures alone, half-a-million Russian and Ukrainian military personnel have died or been wounded. Neither country gives credible figures and the US estimate that Russian figures dwarf the Ukraine body count seems counterintuitive given that the Russians are currently fighting an artillery war behind minefields and with air superiority.

The US says 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died and 120,000 wounded. Who knows? No propaganda estimate, especially the US, can be trusted, but one Ukrainian commander is quoted this week as saying that the recently mobilised troops are suffering 90 per cent losses.

This is a tremendous human tragedy that demands a ceasefire and negotiations.

Those who insist on preconditions for a ceasefire and negotiations — and who thus anticipate an unlikely victory or an unending war to the last Ukrainian — and who say Putin doesn’t want negotiations, need to ask themselves how it is that he is in accord with Nato’s strategy.

Put him on the spot. Offer a ceasefire and talks without preconditions.

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https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/article/e/long-war-ukraine-unthinkable-peace-talks-are-needed-now