Hacker Perspective: NATO - OTAN (a cold-war relic!)

  1. Prelude:
    • In 1935, retired US Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler wrote the book War is a Racket
    • In his 1946 essay titled "Politics and the English Language", author George Orwell (author of: Nineteen Eighty-Four), said "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
    • In 1961, US President Dwight D Eisenhower (previously a 5-star Army General during world-war-2) warned of the dangers of the military industrial complex which since has spawned the military industrial media complex as well as the military entertainment complex to convince the American public that war is good.
    • Art imitates life? Here are the lyrics of a popular British song from 1970 titled War Pigs

      Generals gathered in their masses ° Just like witches at black masses ° Evil minds that plot destruction ° Sorcerer of death's construction ° In the fields, the bodies burning ° As the war machine keeps turning ° Death and hatred to mankind ° Poisoning their brainwashed minds ° Oh lord, yeah!

      Politicians hide themselves away ° They only started the war ° Why should they go out to fight? ° They leave that role to the poor, yeah ° Time will tell on their power minds ° Making war just for fun ° Treating people just like pawns in chess ° Wait till their judgement day comes, yeah!

      Now in darkness, world stops turning ° Ashes where their bodies burning ° No more war pigs have the power ° Hand of God has struck the hour ° Day of judgement, God is calling ° On their knees, the war pigs crawling ° Begging mercy for their sins ° Satan laughing, spreads his wings ° Oh lord, yeah!
  2. USA geopolitical confusion will start the next world war (because it played a huge role in the recent Russia-Ukraine conflict)
    Jeffrey Sachs: U.S. Policy & "West's False Narrative" are Stoking Tensions with Russia and China
    comments:
     
  3. The history of NATO - OTAN
    • 1949: NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) also known as OTAN (Organisation du Traité de l'Atlantique Nord) began as an alliance of twelve countries to provide: collective protection from Joseph Stalin.
      • comment: while no rational person would have ever supported Stalin or his actions, history now shows that the USA was treating its largest two WW2 allies, Britain and Russia, very differently (eg. sharing technical information with Britain while withholding information from Russia). This Russia-phobia seems to be common amongst many English-speaking nations.
    • 1953: Stalin died but NATO was not disbanded. NATO's mission quietly shifted to: offering collective protection from Russia and the USSR.
    • 1954: Eastern bloc countries expressed interest in joining NATO but were refused.
    • 1955: the Warsaw Pact was created after it became clear that Western countries would never allow Eastern bloc countries to become NATO members. Food for Thought: could the building of the Berlin Wall (and all the associated cold-war drama) have been avoided if NATO, or Western hardheadedness, had not existed? Imagine an alternative world in which Germany was not split into two countries. Imagine no Checkpoint Charlie? Rather than the path to military tribalism which led to a 34-year cold war, the simpler philosophy of Sun Tzu "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" would have yielded better results.
    • 1989: German citizens breached the Berlin Wall and Mikhail Gorbachev allowed it.
    • 1991: the USSR dissolved but NATO was not disbanded. As part of the German reunification deal, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved after the USA promised Russia to not engage in NATO expansion "East of Germany" but the USA broke that promise or perhaps never intended to honor it.
      Comment: if the United States of America could make this promise, then it is the United States of America that controls NATO.
      Anyway, if you've read this far then you might wish to read this now-declassified document
    • 1996: As part of his reelection campaign, and to short-circuit his Republican opponent, Bob Dole, who was going to use the lack of NATO expansion as one of his campaign issues, Bill Clinton called for former Warsaw Pact countries and post-Soviet republics to join NATO, and made NATO enlargement a part of his foreign policy. Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic officially joined NATO in March 1999 as a result of Clinton's actions (but Bob Dole might have done the same)
    • 1997: NATO and Russia sign a deal in 1997 but not very much comes of this. NATO's diplomatic cooling might have something to do with Russia condemning the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999
    • 2000: Vladimir Putin asked Bill Clinton when it would be possible for Russia to join NATO. Apparently Clinton did not object but nothing came of this.
    • 2002: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia were invited to begin accession talks at the Alliance's Prague Summit in 2002. On 29 March 2004, they officially became members of the Alliance, making this the largest wave of enlargement in NATO history.
    • According to recently declassified NATO documents, we now know that NATO's original objective (according to first NATO Secretary General - Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay of Great Britain) was to "keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down” and I wondered what modern citizens might think about that. Especially those in Germany. And even though NATO is headquartered in Brussels, I wonder if "keeping the Americans in" was accomplished by always ensuring that the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) has always been an American officer.
      quote from here: Since 1950, when the post of SACEUR becomes vacant, the North Atlantic Council asks the President of the United States to nominate an American officer to fill the post.
    • Since actions speak louder than words, many citizens now wonder if NATO is nothing more than a sales channel for the military industries of NATO countries, which has grown from twelve to thirty. Some of them are not geographically connected to the Atlantic Ocean (Turkey first springs to mind. The Czech and Slovak Republics are two more)
    • Americans are always banging on about capitalism and free markets but never offered Russia a helping hand up after the USSR collapsed. This would have been a huge opportunity for American businesses had they been thinking more clearly. The world would be a different place had either George H W Bush or Bill Clinton reached out to Russia like Nixon did with China in 1972
    • From Wikileaks, and other sources, we learned that Barack Obama's Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, took credit for instigating the NATO attack on Libya in 2011 which destroyed that country while destabilizing the region (a decade later the Libyan economy has never recovered). Was Obama aware of this? German chancellor, Angela Merkel, was commenting on the large volume of African refugees entering Europe then asked, "why are the countries responsible for this mess not doing more?"
    • While observing the international actions of Joe Biden's Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, after the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, it appears that the American Secretary of State answers more to the American defense Industry than the President.
    • Do Americans know that continually supporting their own defense industry (which includes sales or gifts to other countries) is unconstitutional? Article 1 Section 8 of the American Constitution states: The Congress shall have Power To raise and support Armies, but no appropriation of money to that Use shall be for a longer term than two years. America's founding fathers knew that the Roman Empire collapsed partly due to excessive military spending and did not want the USA to repeat that mistake.
    • No western politician was ever allowed to question the value of NATO, but in 2016 we heard then presidential candidate, Donald Trump, referring to NATO as being obsolete, and now I cannot stop thinking that it is.
    • This article from the State Department website boasts that the USA has been continually delivering weapons to Western Ukraine for almost two decades (from 2004-to-2023). This one-sided destabilization may have contributed to the fact that a civil war in East Ukraine has been on going since 2014. This once-simmering war situation boiled over after Kiev began using American military hardware to attack targets in the breakaway Donbas region (Donetsk and Luhansk) in 2021 (long before the Russian invasion).  
      comment: Unlike the Ukrainian people, Ukrainian politicians have been considered some of the most corrupt in the democratic world. That is one reason why Ukraine elected a comedian as president rather than someone from one of the main political parties, but even he went over to the dark side.
    • 2017: (answer from MS-copilot): Donald Trump authorized lethal aid to Ukraine in December 2017. This decision marked a significant shift in U.S. policy, as it included the provision of Javelin anti-tank missiles to help Ukraine defend itself against Russian-backed separatists. This move was part of a broader strategy to support Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
      comment: Trump probably did this because Obama refused to do it
    • 2021: https://www.jeffsachs.org/newspaper-articles/nato-chief-admits-expansion-behind-russian-invasion
      Damning quote from NATO-chief, Jens Stoltenberg: “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 to 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.”
    • 2022: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/06/25/not-justification-provocation-chomsky-root-causes-russia-ukraine-war
      Chomsky continued, "Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise, they wouldn't refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion.
  4. The Russia - Ukraine conflict
    2022-02-01 We learn that Kiev was using American military hardware to attack targets in the breakaway Donbas region (Donetsk and Luhansk). Did the USA not realize that their gifts to one side would inflame the situation by upsetting the balance? Did no one in the state department learn anything from this 1968 Star Trek episode?
    2022-02-18 Russian-backed separatists evacuate residents from east Ukraine
    2022-02-19 BBC America showed video of Donbas citizens being placed on buses destined for temporary safety in western Russia
    2022-02-20 BBC America showed video of Donbas citizens exiting buses in Western Russia. The total number of Donbas refugees was said to be 93,000
    2022-02-24 Russia enters Ukraine with a three-pronged attack: Belarus from the North, Russia from the East. Crimea from the South.
    2022-02-25 Putin would have been considered a hero by many had he only ordered Russian troops into the Donbas region to end the 8-year civil war while protecting the lives of Donbas citizens from further aggression. But he did not so Putin's place in history will be forever soiled (both inside Russia as well as outside).
    comments: if Putin wanted to stop NATO encroachment around Russia, he could have done something similar to what John F Kennedy did in 1962 when the USA learned that Russia had been installing missiles in Cuba (in response for the USA installing missiles in Turkey). But Putin missed this opportunity so I fear that many people will die on both sides.
    2022-06-30 (article) quote: "NATO has been preparing for a war with Russia since 2014, said NATO" said Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg
    2022-06-30 (article) quote: "NATO radically redefined its mission to reflect a new mantra which could be encapsulated as: keep the Russians down, the Americans in, and the Chinese out" (Scott Ritter)
  5. Gwynne DyerEditorial (2025-03-03): The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) retired to its sickbed as soon as Donald Trump won the presidential election last November. It finally died last Friday, Feb. 28, in the White House, when Trump and Vice-President JD Vance launched a vicious attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy before the massed cameras of the American media. Vance, who began the assault, never conceals his contempt for Ukraine. As he said in 2022, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.” But the attack seemed scripted and Trump joined in right away; there are grounds to suspect that it was a pre-planned ambush. At any rate, the confrontation ended with Zelenskyy and his team being told to leave the White House, and the sound of doors being metaphorically slammed shut resounded all across Europe. In fact, the doors had already been closing quietly for some time, as various Western leaders concluded that the United States is no longer really an ally. As Germany’s freshly-elected Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, put it, one of his chief goals is to “strengthen Europe as quickly as possible, so that we achieve independence from the US.” He has realised that Trump is probably closer to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin than he is to the leader of any NATO country in Europe. Or to Canada either, for that matter. Most of those leaders were in London on Sunday to welcome Zelenskyy back from his ordeal in Washington, and even King Charles III came out to greet The Man Who Stood Up To Trump. It was an unscheduled summit with no Americans present, and the real topic was whether Europe could be defended from Russia without American support. Of course it can, at least in principle. The population of the European NATO countries (not counting the United States, Canada or Turkey) is 480 million; Russia has only 144 million people. NATO Europe’s GDP is $21 trillion, compared to only $2 trillion for Russia. That should be enough. NATO military forces in Europe outnumber Russian forces about two-to-one. The three million NATO troops in Europe serve in 29 different armies, so they may be less effective per person than 1.5 million Russian troops concentrated in a single army, but on the other hand, most of the Russians are fully employed in trying to conquer Ukraine. However, NATO Europe has many gaps in its capabilities due to the fact that there was a division of labour within the alliance. Some of the technically more demanding tasks, like manned and unmanned intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft, were largely outsourced to the United States long ago. There are plenty of European fighter jets, for example, but far fewer of the tankers that would extend their range. Similarly, NATO Europe depends heavily on the United States for radar detection and jamming aircraft and for navigation and surveillance satellites. However, these gaps can be filled in a few years if the European countries are willing to spend the money. What will be harder for post-NATO European countries to replace is the American nuclear deterrent. France and the United Kingdom have a couple of hundred nuclear warheads each, but they are under exclusive national control. If the European NATO countries have really decided to build a new alliance that doesn’t rely on the whims of a pro-Moscow US administration, they will have to figure out how to extend those modest British and French nuclear forces to protect all the NATO countries of Europe. Astonishingly, they seem ready to give it a try. “We have a shield and [the non-nuclear NATO countries] don’t,” French President Emmanuel Macron told Le Parisien newspaper on Saturday, “and they can no longer depend on the American nuclear deterrent. We need a strategic dialogue with those who don’t have it.” Germany’s Friedrich Merz agrees, and Macron adds that he is ready to build an “autonomous European (nuclear) defence independent of NATO,” although he reckons that it will take five to 10 years to complete. This is a momentous event: an entire continent is taking its leave from an alliance that has lasted for eight decades, although its ghost may be around for some time. Trump and his acolytes may be gone in four years (or not, as the case may be), but it’s very unlikely that Humpty Dumpty can be put back together again. U.S. President Donald Trump, left, welcomes Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House in Washington, DC, prior their talks on Feb. 28, 2025. Trump-Zelensky meeting cut short after contentious Oval Office exchange Columnist Scott Taylor discusses the latest negotiation tactics U.S. President Donald Trump has made when it comes to Ukraine and Russia. The war in Ukraine will continue, at least for a while, because Putin wants to keep all the territory he has conquered and probably some more besides. There will be no cease-fire or NATO ‘peacekeepers’ in Ukraine; the Russians think they are on a winning streak. And although nobody loved the old world order, we’ll miss it now that it’s gone. It was at least orderly. The next phase won’t be.
  6. Comments (2023-11-30): I have some training in martial arts which includes Boxing, Jujitsu, GoJu-Ryu Karate (black belt), and Kobuto (black belt) so here's my perspective:
    1. In the west, Boxing is a regulated sport so "the referee will be guilty of a crime"
      1.  if he allows any match to continue past the first serious injury.
      2. or if one fighter is unable to properly defend themselves (which could lead to serious injury or death)
    2. Some locations (based on local laws) mandate that a doctor must also be onsite to stop a fight.
    3. Since the fighter's manager or trainer doesn't want to loose a client, he can forfeit a fight by "throwing in the towel".
    4. Most full contact Karate matches will be stopped at the sign of "first blood" (even a tiny drop)
    7. I fear that the constant supply of weapons by NATO countries into Ukraine is causing Ukrainians to engage in wishful thinking, rather than "throwing in the towel to save human life".  Sure, some see the invaded land is the ultimate prize but almost everyone else places a higher value upon human life. And speaking of human life, who speaks for the elderly (too old to fight) or the children (who are loosing their childhood as well as formative education)?

External Links (to learn more)

  1. https://natowatch.org/
  2. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early
  3. https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard