| The
NATO Declaration and the
Deadly Strategy of
Neoconservatism Jeffrey D. Sachs | July 13, 2024 | Common Dreams For the sake of America's security and world peace, the U.S. should immediately abandon the neocon quest for hegemony in favor of diplomacy and peaceful co-existence. In
1992, U.S. foreign-policy
exceptionalism went into
overdrive. The
U.S. has always viewed
itself as an exceptional
nation destined
for leadership, and the demise
of the Soviet Union in
December 1991 convinced a
group of committed
ideologues—who came to be
known as neoconservatives—that
the U.S. should now rule the
world as the unchallenged sole
superpower. Despite countless
foreign policy disasters at
neocon hands, the 2024
NATO Declaration continues
to push the neocon agenda,
driving the world closer to
nuclear war. The
neoconservatives were
originally led by Richard
Cheney, the Defense Secretary
in 1992. Every President since
then—Clinton, Bush, Obama,
Trump, and Biden—has pursued
the neocon agenda of U.S.
hegemony, leading the U.S.
into perpetual wars of choice,
including Serbia, Afghanistan,
Iraq, Syria, Libya, and
Ukraine, as well as relentless
eastward expansion of NATO,
despite a
clear U.S. and German
promise in 1990 to Soviet
President Mikhail
Gorbachev that
NATO would not move one inch
eastward. The
core neocon idea is that the
U.S. should have military,
financial, economic, and
political dominance over any
potential rival in any part of
the world. It is targeted
especially at rival powers
such as China and Russia, and
therefore brings the U.S. into
direct confrontation with
them. The American hubris is
stunning: most of the world
does not want to be led by the
U.S., much less led by a U.S.
state clearly driven by
militarism, elitism and greed. The
neocon plan for U.S. military
dominance was spelled out in
the Project
for a New American Century.
The plan includes relentless
NATO expansion eastward, and
the transformation of NATO
from a defensive alliance
against a now-defunct Soviet
Union to an offensive alliance
used to promote U.S. hegemony.
The U.S. arms industry is the
major financial and political
backer of the neocons. The
arms industry spearheaded
the lobbying for NATO's
eastward enlargement starting
in the 1990s. Joe Biden has
been a staunch neocon from the
start, first as Senator, then
as Vice President, and now as
President. To
achieve hegemony, the neocon
plans rely on CIA
regime-change operations;
U.S.-led wars of choice; U.S.
overseas military bases (now
numbering around 750
overseas bases in at least
80 countries); the
militarization of advanced
technologies (biowarfare,
artificial intelligence,
quantum computing, etc.); and
relentless use of information
warfare. The
quest for U.S. hegemony has
pushed the world to open
warfare in Ukraine between the
world’s two leading nuclear
powers, Russia and the United
States. The war in Ukraine was
provoked by the relentless
determination of the U.S. to
expand NATO to Ukraine despite
Russia’s fervent opposition,
as well as the U.S.
participation in the violent
Maidan coup (February 2014)
that overthrew a neutral
government, and the U.S.
undermining of the Minsk II
agreement that called for
autonomy for the ethnically
Russian regions of eastern
Ukraine. The
NATO Declaration calls NATO a
defensive alliance, but the
facts say otherwise. NATO
repeatedly engages in
offensive operations,
including regime-change
operations. NATO led the
bombing of Serbia in order to
break that nation in two
parts, with NATO placing a
major military base in the
breakaway region of Kosovo.
NATO has played a major role
in many U.S. wars of choice.
NATO bombing of Libya was used
to overthrow the government of
Moammar Qaddafi. The
U.S. quest for hegemony, which
was arrogant and unwise in
1992, is absolutely delusional
today, since the U.S. clearly
faces formidable rivals that
are able to compete with the
U.S. on the battlefield, in
nuclear arms deployments, and
in the production and
deployment of advanced
technologies. China’s GDP is
now around 30% larger than the
U.S. when measured at
international prices, and
China is the world’s low-cost
producer and supplier of many
critical green technologies,
including EVs, 5G,
photovoltaics, wind power,
modular nuclear power, and
others. China’s productivity
is now so great that the U.S.
complains of China’s
“over-capacity.” Sadly,
and alarmingly, the NATO
declaration repeats the
neoconservative delusions. The
Declaration falsely declares
that “Russia bears sole
responsibility for its war of
aggression against Ukraine,”
despite the U.S. provocations
that led to the outbreak of
the war in 2014. The
NATO Declaration reaffirms Article
10 of the NATO Washington
Treaty, according
to which NATO’s eastward
expansion is none of Russia’s
business. Yet the U.S. would
never accept Russia or China
establishing a military base
on the US border (say in
Mexico), as the U.S. first
declared in the Monroe
Doctrine in 1823 and has
reaffirmed ever since. The
NATO Declaration reaffirms
NATO’s commitment to
biodefense technologies,
despite growing evidence that
U.S. biodefense
spending by NIH financed
the laboratory creation of the
virus that may have caused the
Covid-19 pandemic. The
NATO Declaration proclaims
NATO’s intention to continue
to deploy anti-ballistic Aegis
missiles (as it has already
done in Poland, Romania, and
Turkey), despite the fact that
the U.S. withdrawal from the
ABM Treaty and placement of
Aegis missiles in Poland and
Romania has profoundly
destabilized the nuclear arms
control architecture. The
NATO Declaration expresses no
interest whatsoever in a
negotiated peace for Ukraine. The
NATO Declaration doubles-down
on Ukraine’s “irreversible
path to full Euro-Atlantic
integration, including NATO
membership.” Yet Russia will
never accept Ukraine’s NATO
membership, so the
“irreversible” commitment is
an irreversible commitment to
war. The Washington
Post reports that
in the lead-up to the NATO
summit, Biden had serious
qualms about pledging an
“irreversible path” to
Ukraine’s NATO membership, yet
Biden’s advisors brushed aside
these concerns. The
neoconservatives have created
countless disasters for the
U.S. and the world, including
several failed wars, a massive
buildup of U.S. public debt
driven by trillions of dollars
of wasteful war-driven
military outlays, and the
increasingly dangerous
confrontation of the U.S. with
China, Russia, Iran, and
others. The neocons have
brought the Doomsday
Clock to just 90
seconds to midnight (nuclear
war), compared with 17 minutes
in 1992. For
the sake of America's security
and world peace, the U.S.
should immediately abandon the
neocon quest for hegemony in
favor of diplomacy and
peaceful co-existence. Alas, NATO has just done the opposite. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/nato-neoconservatism-empire |