NATO Nihilism, Media Malice and the Prospects for Peace

Introduction

11 min readMar 10, 2023

Since at least 2020, The United States has engaged itself in a New Cold War against both China and Russia, and by extension the majority of the world’s population. Since February of 2022 the conflict in Ukraine has spiraled from sanctions, disinformation campaigns, and a stream of military aid to a torrent of economic and military warfare as hostilities broke out. The Ukrainian people are now openly reduced to simple proxies. In the short term, this conflict is designed to weaken Russia and re-subjugate it after Putin’s turn towards independence following his infamous speech in Munich in 2008. The reversal in Russian politics towards the growth of domestically funded regional markets and away from Western-dominated investments was an unacceptable demonstration of sovereignty. Longer term, weakening Russia serves as a prerequisite for United States aspirations to go to war with China, to contain and suppress its growth, to keep it in a lowly state of dependence and as a source of inexpensive labor. This article will lay out the way in which Ukraine has been vital for the development of American Imperialism and put the focus on the imperative of peace advocates to prevent such conflict in China.

NATO Nihilism

An interesting phenomena occurred in the media in February of 2022: a signature wave of historical nihilism. Gone were the days of drawing attention to the rising far right militancy in Ukraine, or the corruption that has deemed it the one of the most corrupt states in Europe. No longer did anyone seem to remember that in 2014, the US supported and initiated a ‘color revolution’ in the country, a type of coup de’tat that relies on spurring on an organic movement to agitate for and create an opening for the deposition of the current power system in a target country, with successors hand picked by the aggressor country (in this case the US). It suddenly became taboo to speak of the oppressed Russian-speaking people in the Donbass region, who had spent years under assault by the far right ethno-nationalist regime in Kyiv, in what is effectively a civil war/war for sovereignty.

In its place, we saw a new, unified and fabricated view of Ukraine: a defenseless democracy, victimized by a historically predatory Russian bear who thirsts for imperial conquest. A country that could be trusted to safely handle billions in aid, despite the aforementioned corruption. A country that was only now threatened with a crisis of sovereignty, despite its policy shifting decidedly in a US-centric direction post-2014. This is a one sided caricature and an insult to your intelligence.

The media has played a nearly unprecedented role in shaping public discourse around the Russo-Ukraine crisis, and it will take a lot of work for Americans to come to grips with the historical realities of the region. This work is crucial in order to make a legitimate and consistent push for diplomacy and peace, and to be sure a crisis of this nature is out of the cards going forward. In order to do that, we need to assign blame where it belongs: with NATO and its proxies, with the media and the politicians, with a military superpower that has caused more damage, death and poverty than any other in the history of the world, the United States of America.

How did we get here?

Well, Secretary of State James Baker told Mikaela Gorbachev that NATO would not ‘move one more inch eastward’. Unfortunately, the US did not keep its word, as objectively displayed below (despite the fact that even Russia itself applied to join NATO):

Establishment in 1949 to aim at the USSR
Greece and Turkey — 1952
West Germany — 1955
Spain — 1982
Rest of Germany — 1990
Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic — 1999
Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia — 2004
Albania and Croatia — 2009
Montenegro — 2017
North Macedonia — 2020

This timeline doesn’t actually tell a complete story. It more or less outlines the major plot advancements, but fails to tell the details. Countries such as Libya, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, etc reveal these details: bloody, systematic violence against any that resisted the gravitational pull (more of a yank) of the US military machine.

These countries were bombed, invaded and devastated by NATO, which laid the geopolitical groundwork for the expansions outlined above. Libya was once the most prosperous country in Africa, but Barack Obama and the Hilary Clinton State Department leveled it. The country still lacks anything in the way of a central state. Yugoslavia represented a final frontier of Eastern socialism outside of China, and was crippled by IMF debt traps and subsequent NATO bombing campaigns. The country no longer exists, and was balkanized completely as a result of the ‘defensive’ NATO actions, despite the conflict never reaching American shores. Afghanistan was bombed under the pretense of ‘fighting terrorism’ for a crime they did not commit. The claim is that they aided Bin Laden and helped perpetrate 9/11. Despite overwhelming proof they did, this did little to deter decades of American occupation, looting, and brutality. Currently, after Biden ‘froze’ (stole) billions in dollars of US assets in the country (something they then did for Russia as well in 2022), the people are 90% impoverished. If freedom, democracy, and whatever cliches the US touts were truly its values no matter the form of government in these countries, to deny their own funds as they attempt to alleviate their wartorn nation is unconscionable.

For these countries, and even the ones that joined subsequently, there wasn’t a serious level of sovereign choice on the table. It’s the height of delusion or imperial grandeur to assume that nations would goad the US, a nuclear-armed power into attacking them with no practical way to defend themselves. Think of it like a police no knock warrant…you either let the United States in or you are in severe danger. The assertion that the countries above ‘voluntarily’ joined NATO is cast into serious doubt when you look at the real history of the alliance. Bush said rather it simply: “You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

The definition if who is a ‘terrorist’ is subject to continual US editing. How about Israel, a country engaged in a genocidal campaign of settler colonialism against Palestinians? No, the US instead pays for these efforts. Or Saudi Arabia, a country behind the Yemen humanitarian crisis, whose efforts have been historically supported largely by US funding and who will weaponize the petrodollar regularly if asked (see 2014 Obama effort to destabilize Russia post-Maiden)? Nope, they’re ‘a flawed democracy’ in the Middle East and useful vessel for US hegemonic interests. Or Ukraine, who’s been accused of ethnic cleansing, severe corruption, institutionalized fascist elements in the military and political sphere, and at least 14k deaths in the Donbass region since 2014? Of course not, they are the United States current ally, and part of the ‘axis of democracy’.

In order to understand NATO’s actions, and the United States specific role in guiding its policies and conflicts, we need to look at a bit of a different timeline:

1950 — Leaked documents reveal US plans to nuke the majority of the USSR and parts of China, with an estimated 125–425 million deaths, in order to establish full dominance in the world after WWII
1958 — Leaked NSC68 documents reveal US Cold War Strategy to gain ‘primacy’ over the rest of the world: military, economic and cultural
1994 — Wolfowitz Doctrine: this is the policy of unilateralism that still holds tremendous influence on the psyche and trajectory of US politics. It justified pre-emptive military action in the interest of “national security” and to prevent “dictatorships” from rising to a status that would challenge US dominance. This plan made the prevention of other countries from achieving ‘rival’ status core to US foreign policy.
1997 — Project for a New American Century: a document that shines with pure imperial arrogance, the United States came off of the dissolution of the USSR feeling as if ‘history had ended’. They believed that we now lived in a unipolar world with the US as the benevolent leader. This was short lived and counter-historical.
2014 — Obama ‘Pivot to Asia’ sets the sights on China. Many see the war of aggression against Russia as part of a larger strategic goal to balkanize Russia, but mainly to isolate and contain China.
2014 — Ukraine Euromaidan Coup: Victoria Nuland said to Jeffrey Piat “Yatz is our guy. He’s got the economic experience, the governing experience…” (Yatzenyuk would then go on to become the head of Ukraine)
New Cold War, as evidenced by NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept Documents, which labeled Russia as a ‘serious issue’ but China as a ‘malicious actor’ and main threat
2014 — Minsk Protocol (Minsk I): drafted by the Trilateral Contact Group in an attempt to end hostilities and death in East Ukraine, mediated by France and Germany. The bombing continued, provoked by Kiev.
2015 — Minsk II, signed in February. This agreement consisted of a package of measures, including a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front line, release of prisoners of war, constitutional reform in Ukraine granting self-government to certain areas of Donbas and restoring control of the state border to the Ukrainian government. While fighting subsided following the agreement’s signing, it never ended completely, and the agreement’s provisions were never fully implemented.
December 2021 — Russian President Vladimir Putin tries one last time for a peace settlement, asking the US government for security guarantees. This was denied and/or ignored. Even if the US or international community disagrees with aspects of the demands, negotiation is absolutely crucial in this case.
Early 2022 — Buildups of NATO equipment, Ukrainian armaments and soldiers along the eastern ‘front’ lead to a symmetrical Russian response, eventually cascading into a Russian escalation via invasion.
May 2022: United Kingdom, on the United States authority presumably, rejects and suppresses peace negotiations, signaling that peace is not priority for the United States in this area.
June 2022 — US Congress holds briefing on ‘decolonizing Russia’, signaling that sovereignty is also not a United States priority.
February 2022-Present: US sends over $100 billion dollars in aid to Ukraine, effectively outspending the military of Russia itself to uphold Ukraine long enough to weaken Russia, regardless of how many people on both sides perish.

The above documents and events paint a fairly clear picture of the role the United States has played and intends to keep playing post WWII. It is ‘full spectrum dominance’, a vain attempt at hegemony, which began showing cracks as soon as it was formed. The world has become increasingly fed up with the United States meddling in their affairs, and countries like China and Russia are attempting to establish a new system of world affairs that respects the tenets of the UN charter, focuses on peace, cooperation and win-win diplomacy. This is surely a ‘threat’, but only if you are an empire that requires expansion and external threats to mobilize its economy.

Media Malice

This isn’t the first time the US media has been complicit in goading on an international conflict/crisis. One need not look further than Michael Gordon, who originally lied about WMDs in Iraq. This media and the uncritical spread of the information provided fodder for Bush Jr. and Tony Blair to create the pretext for invasion. Most of the media cheer-leaded the 2002 Shock and Awe invasion that followed.

Just this month, this same columnist published a new article, the first in a series, on the United States New Cold War (dubbed Era of Great Power Conflict). This article complains the US is not ready to invade Taiwan, a province of China being fueled and groomed for another proxy conflict in the coming years. These sorts of articles may appear to pour water on the United State’s prospects in China, but the reality is that they continue to the process of manufacturing consent for these wars, and serve to boost investment and funding to the Military Industrial Complex.

These sorts of articles and opinions erode the ability of the American public to resist the attempt to manufacture consent for present and future conflicts. They should be considered psychological war on the brains of your own citizens, with the frequency and intensity they have been used with since early 2022 at least (really the last 75 years).

A real journalist and media company would throw a little caution in their words as the United States engages in nuclear brinkmanship with two nuclear armed countries. Instead, they tow the line and take up the airwaves. Combine that with the corporate owned search and browser industries that decide what order search results pop up in to an extent, and the numerous ‘disinfo’ sites that are waiting to trap you if you search the right keywords, and even our brains are not sovereign.

A Prospect for Peace

The first and most important aspect of pushing for peace is to know what you are dealing with. Does the United States, and NATO by extension, want peace? It’d be hard to believe most of Europe wouldn’t want this crisis to end, with the situation they’ve been facing. But why haven’t they resisted the orbit of the United States? Instead, they’ve largely fallen on their own swords to engage in economic warfare with Russia, much of which promptly backfired. Germany hasn’t even made much of a fuss out of the sabotage done to the Nordstream pipeline. These sorts of contradictions can help show who is calling the shots in this ‘alliance’.

I don’t think anyone can really argue the United States is interested in peace. Peace lovers do not pump billions of dollars in weapons to prolong a conflict at the cost of tens of thousands of the people they claim to support.

What does the United States want then?

I believe the article thus far has made a case that maintaining primacy is the long term goal of these policies, support and political theater. And if that doesn’t work? Well then, Wall Street and the weapons manufacturers can at least have a day privatizing and dismantling the entirety of the Ukraine economy, restructuring it around United States profits like a leech. The IMF debt trap in Ukraine is the most current example in a long line of internationally enforced austerity and neocolonial institutions spearheaded by the United States.

What do we want? (By we, I mean normal, everyday people and advocates for peace).

We want diplomacy, negotiations, security guarantees and sovereignty established for everyone involved! It’s quite simple, we don’t want perpetual war or nuclear annihilation. We want a new world order that respects the UN charter, focuses on win win cooperation, and solves the world’s most pressing issues, together. Poverty, education, climate change…all solvable problems with understanding and cooperation.

Now…I’ll leave you with one of many hard-to-believe headlines in the news these days. This is what the WSJ, a premier publication, has to say about peace.

Applying the analysis that has been developed this article we can form a few questions:

What is a ‘premature’ negotiation? As mentioned, Russia had already taken part in 8 years of negotiations, culminating in two failed Minsk accords and 14k lost lives. Putin recognized the LPR and DPR in early 2022, hoping to stop weapons and troop stockpiling in West Ukraine. This too failed... Are these just super premature? No, of course not. It’s never been more imperative to talk peace.
The subtitle…what is NATO doing in Eastern Europe anyway? The USSR is gone, dismantled by the same powers pushing up against Russia’s borders. Countries in NATO are forced to spend certain percentages of GDP on military buildups…how is this democratic, peace-loving or defensive?

Supporting peace is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a testament to ‘media malice’ that this topic is practically taboo in the country right now, seen as some sort of concession to Putin’s power trip.

No to more escalation! We don’t want it! We want schools, we want investment in infrastructure!

The only thing we want to go to war with is poverty, climate change and hunger.