* A protracted record of bloody wars and conflicts involving NATO international locations suggests the bloc is greater than a grave problem to international peace and stability.
* “After the end of the Cold War, NATO should have logically disappeared, but it didn’t and is still looking for new enemies.”
WARSAW, July 11 (Xinhua) — As NATO is holding its annual summit on Tuesday in Vilnius, Lithuania, it could be a wake-up name to the peace-loving nations to take a glimpse of what the army bloc has bedeviled the world because the finish of the Cold War.
A protracted record of bloody wars and conflicts involving NATO international locations suggests the bloc is greater than a grave problem to international peace and stability.
RECKLESS EXPANSION
NATO, as each historical past and related theories on army alliance would dictate, is destined to disintegrate as soon as the Cold War ended. Unfortunately, this has not been the case. Far from disbanding, the alliance has been bent on reckless growth.
NATO’s growth has turn out to be a petri dish of conflicts and chaos. Experts say NATO’s eastward growth and the strain it has been exerting on Russia are responsible for the continuing Ukraine disaster.
Since 1999, the bloc has made six eastward expansions, advancing greater than 1,000 km all the best way to the Russian border, thereby pushing Russia right into a nook.
Even after the Ukraine disaster started, NATO has not slowed its tempo with Finland formally accepted as its thirty first member in April.
“Sizeable” is the culpability of the United States and its NATO allies, wrote Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow for protection and overseas coverage research on the Cato Institute, after the Ukraine disaster broke out.
“Moving an alliance that one great power dominated to the border of another major power is inherently destabilizing and provocative,” Carpenter noticed.
Many European international locations had opposed NATO’s reckless growth out of safety issues, however Washington apparently selected to show a blind eye to the misgivings from throughout the Atlantic.
“The Americans wanted us to immediately integrate Ukraine in its entirety into NATO, and it was the French and the Germans who halted the idea, saying, non, beware, it’s very sensitive for Russia, and it must not be done so fast. Now in effect, we witness the prediction coming true,” mentioned Pierre Conesa, a former senior official with the French Defense Ministry.
CULPRIT OF CONFLICTS
The U.S.-led NATO was the chief perpetrator of a collection of brutal conflicts, placing in grave peril individuals’s lives in several components of the world.
“NATO is not a defense alliance; it is an alliance which wages illegal wars,” mentioned Sevim Dagdelen, a member of the German Left Party.
NATO forces launched 78 days of bombardment in opposition to Yugoslavia in 1999, inflicting over 8,000 civilian casualties and displacing about 1 million.
Other international locations, together with Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, have additionally fallen sufferer to the U.S.-led NATO’s belligerence and violations of human rights.
In the two-decade-long Afghanistan struggle fought nominally to guard civilians, NATO’s airstrikes killed 1000’s of civilians.
At the identical time, the army alliance engages in an aggressive arms race and is thwarting all negotiation efforts associated to the Ukraine disaster, Dagdelen added.
Despite all of the chaos and battle already inflicted, NATO is spreading its tentacles to the Asia-Pacific area with an specific intention of containing China.
In current years, NATO members constantly despatched jets and warships for army workout routines in China’s surrounding waters, which heightened tensions within the area.
Earlier this 12 months, NATO introduced the choice to arrange a liaison workplace in Tokyo in 2024, which has triggered excessive alert amongst international locations world wide, not least within the Asia-Pacific area.
As manifested within the wars exterior the alliance space, NATO, below the management of the United States, aspires to worldwide affect and international hegemony, Dagdelen mentioned.
“Japan is not located in the North Atlantic either. NATO’s desire for the Indo-Pacific to be in its zone of influence is part of this fatal expansion policy,” she mentioned. “If we picture this conflict as a game of chess, then NATO is looking for pawns that can be sacrificed, if need be, to secure a better position.”
In an announcement launched by the general public coverage journal platform Pearls and Irritations on Monday, Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating additionally slammed NATO’s continued existence and its try to increase into Asia.
“Exporting that malicious poison to Asia would be akin to Asia welcoming the plague upon itself. With all of Asia’s recent development amid its long and latent poverty, that promise would be compromised by having anything to do with the militarism of Europe — and militarism egged on by the United States,” mentioned Keating.
Leaders of regional international locations like Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong additionally cautioned in regards to the hazard of being compelled to choose sides within the bloc confrontation being compelled upon the area by Washington.
MOUNTING CRITICISM
Given its spectacular acts of peace sabotage, the army bloc has been extensively criticized for interfering within the inner affairs of different international locations and undermining regional peace and stability.
“The problem with NATO is that we’re at the service of the person in charge, the United States, who are in favor of war. They want us to be at war all the time, and it doesn’t stop,” mentioned Marie-Ange Le Fleche, a participant in a parade held in Paris final week in opposition to the army pact.
The continued existence of NATO means there shall be no peace in Europe, mentioned Pere Ortega, honorary president of the Delas Centre, including that the submissive overseas coverage of European international locations is because of the armed army intervention of the United States and its NATO allies.
“The EU was founded to avoid intra-European conflicts, and the countries that are members of the EU have achieved this, which is the right path, but we have not been able to get rid of the U.S. military intervention,” Ortega instructed Xinhua in a current interview.
“After the end of the Cold War, NATO should have logically disappeared, but it didn’t and is still looking for new enemies,” the knowledgeable mentioned. (Video reporters: Zhao Wencai, Feng Yasong, Chen Chen, Zhang Zhang, Li Jizhi, Meng Dingbo, Ren Ke, Li Chao, Zeng Yan, Fu Yiming, Zhang Yuliang; video editors: Hu Yousong, Cao Ying, Li Qin)