La politique, quand elle est un art et un service, non point une exploitation, c’est une action pour un idéal à travers des réalités.

Politics, when it is an art and a service, not an exploitation, is about acting for an ideal through realities.

Charles de Gaulle

At a time in history when there is said to be a “new” Cold War, it is not surprising that many people in Europe feel a need to side with Ukraine – portrayed as the victim of Russian aggression in every US and British mainstream media source from the center-left rightward.

Animated map: Note how NATO continued to expand after its raison d’etre, the Soviet Union, was gone. Reasons for this continued presence were flimsy, ranging from hypothetical missile threats in Iran to, now, “Russian aggression” in Ukraine.

The reason it has come to this restoration of the Cold War is the result of one organization: NATO. Even if everything they say about Russia’s aggression is true (all substantive evidence for this has been absent, over and over again) it does nothing to vindicate NATO’s responsibility for the current crisis and the reversion to cold hostility between east and west. NATO’s very raison d’etre is based on that hostility. NATO is based upon systematic, organized aggression and wars of conquest against regimes it considers to be “rogue”. This arrogance affects every one of us, and is reducing the chances of survival for civilization itself. It is pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war, knocking at the doors of sovereign states firmly outside the region this alliance was originally devised to protect.

Let’s consider this: If the Soviet Union hadn’t collapsed, how do you think they would have reacted to NATO expanding eastward to include western Germany and the Baltics? Worse, how would the USSR have reacted to NATO asserting claims to Crimea as an integral part of its own security area? Such madness would have provoked a nuclear war. None of us would be here to reflect on it. Even the craziest warmongers in the United States would not have disputed this outcome. Sadly, those hypothetical events really have taken place – only gradually. They may have happened over the course of years, but for Russia’s security concerns they might as well have happened in days.

In the year 2014, we have found NATO entrenching itself in territories it was never conceived to defend, even threatening the world with nuclear war over territories inessential to its own security like Lithuania and Latvia. It has become a reckless blackmailer intent on world conquest, pushing the “red lines” and bellicose security commitments deep into regions it should never have had any designs on. With every withdrawal of the Soviet nuclear threat in Europe, it appears that the NATO nuclear shadow has grown, leaving all of Europe at the mercy of the most brutal and relentless war machine ever to menace the international community.

I wish I was exaggerating, but I’m not. It would be false for me to say the United States wants the whole world join NATO, even if NATO is an apparatus for world conquest. In many ways, the NATO expansion and collision with Russia is a geopolitical accident. Less to do with encircling Russia, the true reason for the expansion was to recruit new NATO armies in eastern Europe to participate in American-led wars. This is a point that has been made quite resolutely by US social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein in a recent commentary, in which he lays the blame  for NATO expansion on the US disenchantment with its traditional allies in France and Germany. The US saw eastern European countries as more reliable recruits for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and so it tried to add these other countries to NATO.

The Baltics don’t have any reason to feel secure by joining NATO. NATO would never force the US to defend the Baltics against Russian “aggression” (which will never come), but it will force the Baltics to send human shields to bolster the US military in any further pointless wars in the Middle East.

NATO: Danger to World Peace – The official mythology is that between 1945 (or 1946) and 1989 (or 1991), the United… http://t.co/ZZR42mItJl

— Immanuel Wallerstein (@iwallerstein) November 17, 2014

.@iwallerstein: ‘Renouncing @NATO as a structure would be a first step towards #sanity and the world’s survival.’ #Russophobia #Ukraine.

— Harry J. Bentham (@hjbentham) November 18, 2014

The success of the Novorossiya rebellion in Eastern Ukraine isn’t just essential to Russia obtaining a buffer zone against NATO aggression and strategic nuclear realignments in Ukraine, but to the security of Europe itself. Peace is non-alignment, and the forces for peace in Ukraine are the forces for peace in Europe. Our very lives may depend on their ability to deter the regime patched together by Doctor Frankenstein and others from the US State Department in Kiev.

Get some of my best commentaries on world affairs in The Global Tyrant: Collected Foreign Policy Commentaries (2014), and, as always, look out for more of my analysis of international relations in the press.

By Harry J. Bentham