Category: Russia

Years ago I was arrested in downtown Chicago for protesting against NATO, an organization that OUGHT to have been disbanded immediately after the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Its continuous expansion eastward, creeping threateningly country by country toward Russia’s western border, has triggered the current war between Russia and Ukraine — exactly as many had warned.

NATO is continuing its eastward expansion by embracing more Russian neighbors as it is poised to welcome Finland and Sweden into the western, military alliance.

Smart people will recognize the additional threats to European stability found at the heart of these new, senseless memberships being pushed by the US government.

Unfortunately, however, our current crop of foreign policy leaders demonstrate that high SAT scores do not necessarily translate into the considerable wisdom needed to engage in foreign affairs with even a modicum of humility, foresight, and restraint.

How many more times will we throw fuel onto the Ukraine/Russian fire while wringing our bloody hands in feigned innocence and refusing to take any responsibility for our criminal instigations?

As with so many problems in this world, the roots of this war can be traced back to America’s lust for world dominance. Rather than sit down and talk with others about how we might share the global pie, we can’t help but connive in hostile, surreptitious strategies for consuming more and more of the pie for ourselves.

Allow me to add — especially on this 4th of July weekend — that it is much easier for the thoughtful Christian to recognize and identify one’s own nationalistic foolishness — such as belittling Russians, valorizing Ukrainian Nazis, and waving the American flag while imagining that American intervention is the exemplary solution to this world’s problems — once we grasp what it means to “seek FIRST God’s kingdom and his righteousness.”

Once my priorities are properly arranged around the supreme priority of learning to be like Jesus and elevating my KINGDOM CITIZENSHIP above every other loyalty,  I will see excessive patriotism and all forms of nationalism for what they are — IDOLS waiting to be burned in the fires of kingdom living.

Below is an excerpt from a recent article titled “NATO and a War Foretold” by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies, published in Counterpunch.

The entire article is well worth reading as it walks through the history of expert, authoritative warnings against NATO expansion, the very thing we continue to do:

. . . This was indeed a war foretold. Thirty years of warnings and predictions turned out to be all too accurate. But they all went unheeded by an institution that measured its success only in terms of its own endless expansion instead of by the security it promised but repeatedly failed to deliver, most of all to the victims of its own aggression in Serbia, Afghanistan and Libya.

Now Russia has launched a brutal, illegal war that has uprooted millions of innocent Ukrainians from their homes, killed and injured thousands of civilians and is taking the lives of more than a hundred Ukrainian soldiers every day. NATO is determined to keep sending massive amounts of weapons to fuel the war, while millions around the world suffer from the growing economic fallout of the conflict.

We can’t go back and undo Russia’s catastrophic decision to invade Ukraine or NATO’s historic blunders. But Western leaders can make wiser strategic decisions going forward. Those should include a commitment to allow Ukraine to become a neutral, non-NATO state, something that President Zelenskyy himself agreed to in principle early on in the war.

And, instead of exploiting this crisis to expand even further, NATO should suspend all new or pending membership applications until the current crisis has been resolved. That is what a genuine mutual security organization would do, in sharp contrast to the opportunistic behavior of this aggressive military alliance.

But we’ll make our own prediction based on NATO’s past behavior. Instead of calling for  compromises on all sides to end the bloodshed, this dangerous Alliance will instead promise an endless supply of weapons to help Ukraine “win” an unwinnable war, and will continue to seek out and seize every chance to engorge itself at the expense of human life and global security.

While the world determines how to hold Russia accountable for the horrors it is committing in Ukraine, the members of NATO should do some honest self-reflection. They should realize that the only permanent solution to the hostility generated by this exclusive, divisive alliance is to dismantle NATO and replace it with an inclusive framework that provides security to all of Europe’s countries and people, without threatening Russia or blindly following the United States in its insatiable and anachronistic, hegemonic ambitions.

Click here to read the entire piece.