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Once upon a time there was an organization called North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO for short. It was founded in 1949, and today consists of a group of 30 countries from Europe and North America. NATO supposedly exists to protect the people and territories of its members. Of the 30 member countries, 28 are in Europe and only two, the US and Canada, are in the Americas.

As part of NATO’s “Open Door Policy”, meaning that any country in the Euro-Atlantic area is free to join NATO if it is prepared to meet the standards and obligations of membership, contributes to the security of the Alliance, and shares NATO’s values of democracy, reform, and the rule of law. That’s part of what the NATO rules say.

Since 1949, NATO’s membership has grown from 12 to 30 countries. In 2020 NATO welcomed North Macedonia as the 30th member of the NATO Alliance.

NATO was created by the US Pentagon in close collaboration with the CIA, after WWII, under the pretext of providing “collective security against the threat posed by the Soviet Union.” So, NATO laid the groundwork for cheating the world into believing that the Soviet Union, just having lost some 30 million people in WWII and with a destroyed infrastructure – would be a threat to Europe. But big wonder, the deceit-media propaganda worked, as it does today with Covid, and as it does most of the times, currently painting another hot war on the wall.

Fearmongering is part of the strategy. For everything. Keep people in fear and they are vulnerable for any kind of manipulation. This is an old axiom, going back even farther than the Roman Empire. And it still works. People haven’t caught on to it – yet.

When that will happen – namely that people see behind this farce, behind the Bluff, the world will change. We will suddenly – or gradually, but ever faster – realize, the power is with us, the people.

Well-off people, especially in the US and Europe, living in the cocoon of a “comfort zone” believe anything they are told by the authorities, and by extension – by the bought media. These people obey the authorities, because after all, why thinking for themselves, if you pay a government that is supposed to do the thinking for you – right? The better off they are, the better they may be enslaved – and what’s worse, they become adamant and stubborn and righteous. They behave exactly as the “authorities” want them to behave to transform society into a tyranny, still under the pretext – “we are a democracy.” And yes, as long as we go along, we are doomed.

NATO should have taught us a good lesson. But if it had not been for Russia and China, we would still be crawling on our knees to please NATO, not even noticing that NATO is an empty shell, has no power and all they have left is some pompous people on top and in the middle, who would love to continue just for a bit longer keeping control over Europe and – well, they would like to believe – over the rest of the world.

One of the founding principles of NATO is Article 5 of its charter, which states that an armed attack on one member nation would be considered as an attack on all; insinuating a threat that NATO could start a WW if a country aggressed and provoked enough by NATO – say, the Soviet Union, now Russia, and / or China, would retaliate against NATO’s constant aggressions and provocations.

That was NATO then, and that’s what NATO would like to be today, and what they still pretend to be. But pretending is just about all they are able to muster at this point. Pretending is just another word for nothing left to lose (quote from Janis Joplin’s Bobby McG, “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose”). That’s NATO at its worst.

For some strange reason, until very recently, Russia has remained in an observer status associated with NATO, actually it’s hard to believe, associated with the arch-enemy number one? – The only and maybe THE explanation could be that by preserving this observer status they thought they were also some kind of an insider — but, that was an illusion from day one onwards.

Although there has never been a written record found to attest that NATO promised Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, in 1990, not to move an inch beyond Berlin, Moscow believed the Genscher promise and that of other senior West German officials, in order to agree to the German unification. Today NATO supporters, even in German, say the only way a unified Germany could come about, was a “Germany unified in NATO”. It was a sheer lie, as none of NATO’s rules can legally negate a member country’s sovereignty. But the lie was swallowed and became the precedent-setting expansion of NATO.

That was then. Now is Now – 30 years later. NATO has expanded all the way to the doorsteps of Moscow. They would love to make Ukraine a NATO member, to move even closer to Moscow. One of the reasons for the “western fabricated” conflict with and in Belarus, is that toppling Lukashenko, would give the west an opportunity to put in a pro-western dictator, who eventually would open Belarus’s doors for NATO. The west is arrogantly and unrealistically dreaming. Mr. Putin and the Kremlin as whole will, of course, never allow such a move. But megalomania doesn’t see any limits.

In a related note, to better understand the whereabouts and purpose of NATO, faced with increasing pressure to dissolve the five member UN Security Council, President Putin warned on October 21, 2021: “If we remove the veto right of the permanent members, the UN would die the very same day – it would turn into the League of Nations. It would simply become a discussion platform”.

It may well be that the UN Security Council with five veto votes – as fragile as it may be – may fall apart, in which case the “geniuses” behind NATO may have thought, NATO may take over the role of the UN Security Council, all in the interest of the dying western empire.

NATO was created in 1949, just after WWII, very much with the League of Nations in mind. Created in 1919, just after WWI, the League of Nations was an imperial hoax, pretending and selling its world peace interests to a WWI beaten-down world as the last and greatest hope for “lasting peace”. By now we know the real history.

Fast forward. As RT aptly analyses on 25 October 2021,

“NATO’s bullish new plan to fight Russia on the seas, the skies and in space could backfire, igniting a catastrophic nuclear conflict. NATO’s new strategy to fight Russia across the width of Europe – from Baltic to Black Sea – has been approved. Unsurprisingly, the details are secret, but bloc officials have confirmed it includes nuclear, cyber and space warfare.”

“As you would expect, NATO insists that this cross-continental strategy will serve only defensive purposes and the US-led group has also emphasized that it does not believe that Russian attacks are imminent. In other words, NATO presents this initiative as an act of due diligence: Preparing for the worst imaginable scenario, while helping to avoid it ever becoming a reality by deterrence, as German Minister of Defense Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer has duly underlined.”

In other words, despite everything that was said and promised during Germany’s recent election campaign, to keep an open door to improve relations with Russia, is out of the window with the German Defense Minister’s statement. The “deterrence” argument is a sheer aggression towards Russia. It surely pleases NATO and much of the west’s neoliberal leadership, but certainly not a vast majority of Germans, and European citizens, who are eager to improve relations with a peaceful neighbor.

Yes, Russia is a peaceful neighbor.

Russia has never aggressed anybody – other than in self-defense, i.e., beating Nazi-Germany back to Berlin in WWII. Aggression is not in Russia’s nature. This contradicts all of western mainstream media lies. But like with other lies and hoaxes, the well-being living standards of Europeans bars them from seeing the light, from even wanting to see the truth. That’s sad. As when they will see the truth, because it crushes in on them, on us Europeans, it might be too late.

Of course, Moscow sees things differently – and rightly so. For the Kremlin expansion of NATO eastward has been an issue since the early 1990s, since the broken promise by German Foreign Minister Genscher – “NATO will not expand an inch towards the east”. As President Putin indicated on many occasions, there will be no expansion of NATO into Ukraine, nor into Belarus – or else. And the “else” is important, as NATO well knows.

Russia’s defense system is exponentally more efficient and more powerful and faster than that of the west. Therefore, continuing on this abysmal note, as NATO does, is not more than a bluff, and of course, an attempt to keep the west believing that NATO still has teeth, when in fact NATO is an empty shell; an empty over-stretched shell, with members, whose population would by a vast majority want to exit NATO – for whom NATO has no purpose anymore. It’s a sheer threat to peace. As the people and that’s what eventually counts – are not afraid of Russia or China.

It’s the fear-machine spreading false information – the western amply paid and ”subsidized” media – that make believe the danger is in the east. In fact, they keep building and maintaining a Manichean wall and view throughout the west. The Manichean philosophy is an old religion that breaks everything down into good or evil. It also means “duality,” so if your thinking is Manichean, you see things in black and white. And that’s precisely what the west is doing. It’s a reborn philosophy out of Washington. Massive cold war propaganda spread during the four decades after WWII throughout Europe, and by extension parts of Asia and Latin America.

NATO is spread so thinly around the globe – take the many direct or loaned military bases in the South China Sea, and surrounding China and Russia on land – some 3,000 bases – how could they be effective against the latest state of the art weaponry of Russia and China. None of the two countries are boasting with “deterrents”. They don’t need to.

They know and the west, especially Europe, should wake up to the idea – the hard reality – that the future is where the sun rises – in the East.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He is also a non-resident Sr. Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.