I have always considered neutrality to be the gold-standard geopolitical status for any country, permitting a country and its people to avoid involvement in unnecessary wars and to offer their good offices as impartial mediators to seek solutions to conflicts involving countries that are less wise or fortunate -- in short, to play a constructive role in the world.
In its 1991 Proclamation of Independence, Ukraine declared itself to be "a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs", and this principle was incorporated in Ukraine's 1996 constitution.
Of course, this changed after the US-directed 2014 coup d'état against Ukraine's democratically elected and pro-neutrality president, and, in 2019, under NATO pressure to poke a stick in the eye of the Russian bear, the Ukrainian government amended the country's constitution to renounce neutrality and declare NATO membership to be a strategic foreign policy and security objective -- even though there was never any realistic prospect that NATO's member states would approve Ukrainian membership by the required unanimity.
For the past four years, the Ukrainian people have been paying an enormous price for this spectacular act of self-harm.
While I cannot imagine any circumstance in which a traditionally neutral country's renouncing its neutrality and declaring itself to be the enemy of a much larger and more powerful neighboring country would enhance the security of the country and people whose government had done so, the governments of Finland and Sweden, by joining NATO, chose, astonishingly, to do so soon after Ukraine started to pay the price for having done so.
Perhaps, as the six GCC countries continue to pay a considerable price for permitting their countries to be militarily occupied by the United States, both they and other countries will reconsider the potential advantages of genuine neutrality or at least of avoiding or withdrawing from participation in military blocs.
In this context, transmitted below is a post by my distinguished recipient Pascal Lottaz, a Swiss citizen living in Japan, in which he considers the critical choice facing the people of Switzerland, whose government was once so sensitive to any potential weakening of its neutral status that Switerland only joined the United Nations in 2002 but which has recently been flirting dangerously with NATO, in a referendum this fall.
In Switzerland, the Real Left Fights for NeutralityWhile the Swiss Social Democrats decided to oppose an initiative for a neutrality definition in the constitution, a new left-wing alliance has formed in support of the pivotal upcoming referendum.
In the fall of 2026, the Swiss will vote on a popular initiative (a referendum) called ‘Preserving Swiss Neutrality,’ which aims to enshrine strict neutrality in the country’s constitution, prohibiting the government from joining military alliances or participating directly or indirectly in military conflicts. While the constitution currently only mentions the word ‘neutrality’ but does not define it, this amendment would, for the first time, explicitly prohibit not only military involvement in conflicts but also unilateral coercive measures—aka sanctions—and reverse the dangerous trend of Switzerland copy-pasting EU sanctions. While some denigrate the initiative as ‘right-wing’, ‘populist’, or even ‘pro-Putin’, a left-wing, internationalist committee has recently formed in support of the initiative. It advocates for Switzerland to be non-aligned and peaceful on the international stage. The committee’s founding text is the following. A Pacifist and Internationalist Committee for NeutralityConvinced that Switzerland must urgently put a stop to its dangerous rapprochement with NATO and to the automatic adoption of the bellicose rhetoric of the Euro-Atlantic camp, progressive organizations, political parties, and figures on the left have come together to form a pacifist and internationalist committee for neutrality. Although the concept of neutrality has been misused by this country’s bourgeois forces and its application has often been inconsistent, we believe that, in the present situation, it is a central task of progressive forces to defend this neutrality in our country. This committee holds that:
Pacifist and Internationalist Committee for Neutrality
Their homepage in french can be found here: https://www.comite-gauche-neutralite.ch/le-comité |