Paul Keating labels Nato chief a ‘supreme fool’ and ‘an accident on its way to happen’

Keating said that Asia’s “promise” after its recent development “would be compromised by having anything to do with the militarism of Europe – and militarism egged on by the United States”.

“Of all the people on the international stage the supreme fool among them is Jens Stoltenberg, the current secretary-general of Nato.

“Stoltenberg by instinct and by policy, is simply an accident on its way to happen.”

Link here.

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

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. There were ample warnings, not only from Russia but also from Western political personalities, about the possibility that this could lead to war. The EU decided to ignore them. Now, with the outbreak of the war, the EU has failed to calm the situation. On the contrary, after some hesitation, the EU pursues a military escalation of the war, which today surpasses even that of the USA. Several EU countries, for example, have described the Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory as legitimate, although the USA has strictly opposed them. And while the US tends to hold back on the supply of such sophisticated weapons systems, it is the EU countries that, together with the UK, are supplying the most advanced tanks, war drones, long-range missiles, and uranium munitions. It is also a European coalition that now plans to provide F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine. Even the EU Commission has become an arms dealer; its multi-billion-dollar ammunition purchases for Ukraine are ironically financed through the European Peace Facility (EFF).

Link here.

Review Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands by Richard Sakwa review – an unrivalled account (from 2015)

The second crisis arises from the internationalisation of the struggle inside Ukraine which turned it into a geopolitical tug of war. Sakwa argues that this stems from the asymmetrical end of the cold war which shut Russia out of the European alliance system. While Mikhail Gorbachev and millions of other Russians saw the end of the cold war as a shared victory which might lead to the building of a “common European home”, most western leaders saw Russia as a defeated nation whose interests could be brushed aside, and which must accept US hegemony in the new single-superpower world order or face isolation. Instead of dismantling Nato, the cold-war alliance was strengthened and expanded in spite of repeated warnings from western experts on Russia that this would create new tensions. Long before Putin came to power, Yeltsin had urged the west not to move Nato eastwards.

Even today at this late stage, a declaration of Ukrainian non-alignment as part of an internationally negotiated settlement, and UN Security Council guarantees of that status, would bring instant de-escalation and make a lasting ceasefire possible in eastern Ukraine.

The hawks in the Clinton administration ignored all this, Bush abandoned the anti-ballistic missile treaty and put rockets close to Russia’s borders, and now a decade later, after Russia’s angry reaction to provocations in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine today, we have what Sakwa rightly calls a “fateful geographical paradox: that Nato exists to manage the risks created by its existence”.

Link here.

NATO: Expansion Critics Write To Clinton (from 1997)

Washington, 27 June 1997 (RFE/RL) - Americans opposed to NATO expansion are stepping up a campaign to win public support for their concerns and writing to President Bill Clinton, asking him to reconsider his NATO policy.

Two senators of Clinton's own Democratic party -- Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Paul Wellstone (D-Minnesota) -- sent a letter to Clinton this week, requesting "comprehensive responses" to more than two pages of questions they raise about the enlargement process.

Another letter was sent to the White House Thursday by more than 40 former senior officials, ambassadors and government experts, asking Clinton to halt the expansion effort.

They called it "a policy error of historic proportions" and urged Clinton to explore other options for European security through the European Union, arms control, and NATO's Partnership for Peace program.

Link here.

Consumer Checkpoint Higher-income pullback

"The highest 40% of the households by income account for over 60% of overall consumer spending (Exhibit 7)."

Link here.

Muslim-Majority Countries Doubt U.S. Motives (4/7/23)

"Twenty years after the U.S. launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, despite stated U.S. desires, relatively few Iraqis or people living in 12 other Muslim-majority countries view the U.S. as committed to supporting democracy in their region or empowering them to chart their own political futures."

Link here.

Arab Youth Survey

"Now in its milestone 15th year, the annual ASDA’A BCW Arab Youth Survey is largest study of its kind of the Arab world’s largest demographic – its over 200 million youth. The survey presents evidence-based insights on the hopes, attitudes and aspirations of Arab youth, informing governments, the private sector, multilateral institutions and academics on policymaking, business strategy and emerging trends."

Link here.