The Push to Expand NATO Could Cost Countless Lives. It’s Time to Stop It.

Nearly 60 years ago, Bob Dylan recorded “With God on Our Side.” You probably haven’t heard it on the radio in a very long time, if ever, but right now you could listen to it as his most evergreen of topical songs:

I’ve learned to hate the Russians
Through my entire life
If there is another war
It’s them we must fight
To hate and fear them
To run and hide
Accept it all with courage
With God by my side

Recent media coverage about a possible summit between Presidents Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin, has taken on almost wistful characteristics, as if the horsemen from the apocalypse have already left the barn. Fatalism is easy for the laptop warriors and blow-dried studio pundits who keep insisting on the need to get tough with “the Russians,” by which they mean the Russian government. Real people who die and suffer in war can easily be reduced to abstract abstractions.

“And you never ask questions / When God’s on your side.”

During the last six decades, the religiosity of U.S. militarism has faded into a more generalized set of assumptions — shared, in the current crisis, across traditional political spectrums. Ignorance about NATO’s history feeds into the good vs. evil bromides that are too easy to ingest and internalize.

On Capitol Hill, it’s hard to find a single member of Congress willing to call NATO what it has long been: an alliance for war (Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya) with virtually nothing to do with “defense” other than the defense of vast weapons sales and, at times, even fantasies of regime change in Russia.

The Capitol and corporate media are filled with reverence, adulation and praise. NPRAnd PBS) toward NATO and its U.S. leadership are wonders of thinly veiled jingoism. About other societies, reviled ones especially, this would be deemed “propaganda.” Here the supposed truisms are laundered and flat-ironed as common sense.

Inconvenient truths have eluded mainstream media outlets in the United States only very rarely, but are more common in Europe.

“Biden has said repeatedly that the U.S. is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized — NATO enlargement — there has been no American diplomacy at all,” Jeffrey Sachs wroteThis week’s Financial Times article. “Putin has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.”

As Sachs noted, “For the past 30 years, Russia has been steadfastly opposed to NATO expansion towards the East, first under Boris Yeltsin then under Putin. Neither the U.S. nor Russia wants the other’s military on their doorstep. Pledging “no NATO expansion” is not appeasement. It does not cede Ukrainian territory. It does not undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty.”

Speaking Monday Democracy Now, Katrina vanden Heuvel — editorial director of The Nation and a longtime Russia expert — said that implementing the Minsk accordsThis could be a way to bring about peace in Ukraine. Also, she pointed out, “there is talk now not just of the NATO issue, which is so key, but also a new security architecture in Europe.”

A new European security framework to demilitarize the United States and its allies. It is urgently needed. But the same approach that for three decades pushed to expand NATO to Russia’s borders is now gung-ho to keep upping the ante, no matter how much doing so increases the chances of a direct clash between the world’s two nuclear-weapons superpowers.

Jack Matlock was the last American ambassador to the Soviet Union. wroteLast week: “Since President Putin’s major demand is an assurance that NATO will take no further members, and specifically not Ukraine or Georgia, obviously there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.” But excluding Russia from security structures, while encircling it with armed-to-the-teeth adversaries, was a clear goal of NATO’s expansion. It was less obvious that NATO’s goal of making Eastern European countries into large arms sales customers was realized.

A gripping chapter in “The Spoils of War,” a new book by Andrew Cockburn, spells out the mega-corporate zeal behind the massive campaigns to expand NATO beginning in the 1990s. Lockheed Martin, one of the largest Pentagon contractors, was worried about the dissolution and that military sales would continue to slump. There were still some big markets that could be opened up.

“One especially promising market was among the former members of the defunct Warsaw Pact,” Cockburn wrote. “Were they to join NATO, they would be natural customers for products such as the F-16 fighter that Lockheed had inherited from General Dynamics. One minor obstacle was the [George H. W.] Bush administration had already promised Moscow that NATO would not move east, a pledge that was part of the settlement ending the Cold War.”

At the time, George F. Kennan, a legendary foreign-policy sage, had already published his unequivocal warning in 1997 — “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era” — the expansion was already happening. As Cockburn notes, “By 2014, the 12 new members had purchased close to $17 billion worth of American weapons.” If you think those weapons transactions were about keeping up with the Russians, you’ve been trusting way too much U.S. corporate media. “As of late 2020,” Cockburn’s book explains, NATO’s collective military spending “had hit $1.03 trillion, or roughly 20 times Russia’s military budget.”

So let’s leave the last words here at this solemn time to Bob Dylan, from another song that isn’t on radio playlists: “Masters of War.”

Let me ask you one question
Is your money truly that good?
It will buy forgiveness
Do you believe it could?