‘The ever more extensive breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and the former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia, correlated with – and more than correlated with – the development of NATO as an expansionist, aggressive and bellicose regional and global military force.”  Rick Rozoff, researcher and journalist

A political analyst says the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are “expansionist and aggressive” forces that seek to continue the Cold War.

“The ever more extensive breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and the former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia, correlated with – and more than correlated with – the development of NATO as an expansionist, aggressive and bellicose regional and global military force,” Rick Rozoff wrote on the Global Research website.

He said the 21 nations and five smaller breakaway states (including Kosovo), where earlier there had been only two, have created that many more opportunities for the West to “expand southward and eastward from Cold War-era NATO territory.”

Every one of the 21 former Soviet and Yugoslav federal republics is now either a full member of NATO or engaged in a partnership program. Thirteen of them have troops serving under NATO command in Afghanistan.

Recently NATO’s Allied Command Operations website announced the resumption of what had been annual military exercises employed to integrate partners in the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf.

The dual exercise, Cooperative Longbow and Cooperative Lancer, respectively a command and a field exercise, will take place in Macedonia from May 21-29 this year with the participation of several NATO members.

The exercise, like its predecessors, is based on a “crisis response” scenario and a United Nations mandate. “Like Libya last year, for instance,” Rozoff said.

Two years ago 12 nations were involved in the exercise, by last year there were 13 – Albania, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Georgia, Greece, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine – and this year 19. The six new participating nations have not been named.

In 2009 Armenia, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Serbia withdrew beforehand because of the Georgia-Russian war of a few months earlier and Estonia and Latvia did also because of an anti-government mutiny staged the day before the almost month-long exercise began.

“What role the NATO and partnership troops may have played had the military uprising progressed further than it did can be easily imagined,” Rozoff said.

“The US Marine Corps is not only building bilateral and multilateral ties with nineteen countries in the Balkans, the Black Sea region and the Caucasus and other parts of the former Soviet Union, it is also consolidating NATO’s expansion into those areas with the ultimate aim of full Alliance membership for those not already among the bloc’s 28 member states,” he concluded.