Negotiating for peace. « The Standard

By Medea Benjamin and Nicholas Davies. Reprinted from A common dream

After NATO’s disastrous and illegal invasion of Syria Yugoslavia, Libya and AfghanistanOn July 9, NATO planned to invade Washington, D.C. The good news was that it only planned to occupy Washington for three days. The British would not burn down the U.S. Capitol as they did in 1814, and the Germans would still meekly pretend that they have no idea Russia, which blew up the Nord Stream gas pipeline. So expect smiling photo ops and an exaggerated feast of mutual congratulations.

this detail At a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Prague at the end of May, the agenda for NATO’s Washington summit was revealed. NATO will drag its members into the US’s cold war with China by accusing China of supplying dual-use weapons technology to Russia, and will unveil new NATO plans to spend our taxpayers’ money on a mysterious “drone wall” in the Baltics and expensive “integrated air defense systems” across Europe.

But the summit will be characterized by a superficial display of unity, an attempt to convince the public that NATO and Ukraine can defeat Russia and that negotiating with Russia would be tantamount to surrender.

On the surface, this should be hard to accept. The only thing most Americans agree on about the war in Ukraine is that they support a negotiated peace. In a November 2023 interview, when asked The Economist/YouGov In the poll “Do you support or oppose a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia now?”, 68% of people answered “support”, only 8% answered “oppose”, and 24% were unsure.

Yet, while President Biden and NATO leaders have engaged in endless debates about different ways to escalate the war, they have repeatedly rejected peace talks, especially in April 2022, November 2022 and January 2024even if their Failed war plan This has worsened Ukraine’s negotiating position.

The end result of this non-strategy is that Ukraine will only be allowed to negotiate with Russia if it faces total defeat and has no bargaining chips left – a scenario NATO says it wants to avoid.

As other countries have pointed out at the United Nations General AssemblyThe United States and NATO have rejected negotiations and diplomacy, choosing instead to “weaken” Russia through a protracted war, in blatant violation of the “Pacific Dispute Settlement Mechanism” to which all UN member states are legally committed. Chapter Six Article 33, paragraph 1, of the Charter of the United Nations provides that:

“The parties to any dispute, the persistence of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall first seek a solution by negotiation, inquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, recourse to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.”

But NATO leaders did not come to Washington to discuss how to fulfill their international obligations or negotiate peace in Ukraine. Quite the opposite. At a meeting in June in preparation for the summit, NATO defense ministers approved a plan to “put NATO’s military support for Ukraine on a voluntary basis.” A more solid foundation “In the next few years.”

this effort The headquarters will be located at the U.S. military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, and will involve nearly 700 employees. It is described as “Trump proves“NATO supports Ukraine in case Trump wins the election and tries to reduce US support.

At the summit, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg wants NATO leaders to commit to supplying Ukraine with $43 billion worth of equipment every year, indefinitely. Echoing George Orwell’s doublethink that “war is peace,” Stoltenberg said: “Paradoxically, the longer we plan, the longer we are in (the war), the sooner we will have peace in Ukraine.”

The summit will also discuss how to bring Ukraine closer to joining NATO, a move that would ensure the war will continue since Ukraine’s neutrality is Russia’s main war goal.

Ian Davis of NATO Watch ReportedThe rhetoric coming from NATO echoes what he has heard during two decades of war in Afghanistan: “The Taliban (and now Russia) can’t wait for us to quit.” But this vague hope that the other side will eventually give up is not a strategy.

There is no evidence that the situation in Ukraine is different from that in Afghanistan. The United States and NATO make the same assumptions, with the same results. The underlying assumption is that NATO’s higher GDP, extravagant and corrupt military budget, and fascination with expensive weapons technology will somehow magically enable Ukraine to defeat Russia.

When the US and NATO finally admitted defeat in Afghanistan, the Afghans paid the price in blood for the West’s folly, while the US-NATO war machine simply moved on to the next “challenge” without learning any lessons and instead using the failure for political gain. Strongly deny.

Less than three years after the Afghan debacle, U.S. Defense Secretary Austin recently called NATO is “the most powerful and successful alliance in history.” Most Ukrainians support NATO, which is good news for Ukraine’s future. They are hesitant Wasting their lives in NATO’s garbage dump.

exist an article “Western planning remains strategically backward,” wrote Mark Episcopos of the Quincy Institute in an article titled “The New Theory of Victory in Ukraine Is the Same as the Old.” “Aiding Kyiv has become an end in itself, disconnected from a coherent strategy to end the war.”

Episkopos concluded: “The key to effective (Western) influence is to finally abandon the zero-sum victory framework…”

We would add that this is a trap set by the United States and the United Kingdom for Ukraine and their NATO allies. The United States and the United Kingdom refused to support Ukraine at the negotiating table in April 2022, and instead demanded this “zero-sum victory framework” as a condition for NATO support, thereby escalating what could have been a short war into a protracted, potentially nuclear war between NATO and Russia.

Turkish leaders and diplomats complain How their American and British allies undermine their peacebuilding efforts, while France, Italy and Germany They struggled for a month or two, but soon surrendered to the war camp.

When NATO leaders met in Washington, they had nothing more to do than figure out how to comply with Article 33(1) The core spirit of the United Nations Charter is soberingly examining how an organization that claims to be a force for peace has repeatedly escalated unwinnable wars and left nations in ruins.

The fundamental question is whether NATO can be a force for peace or whether it can only become a dangerous, subservient extension of the American war machine.

We believe that NATO is an anachronism in today’s multipolar world: an aggressive, expansionist military alliance whose inherent institutional shortsightedness and narrow, self-serving threat assessments will lead us to endless war and potential nuclear annihilation.

We believe that the only way for NATO to become a true force for peace is for it to announce that it will take the same steps by this time next year that its Warsaw Pact counterpart did in 1991, ultimately dissolving what Secretary Austin more wisely calls “the most dangerous military alliance in history.”

However, people around the world who are oppressed by militarism cannot wait for NATO to give up and leave. Our fellow citizens and political leaders need to listen to us about the dangers posed by this irresponsible, nuclear-armed war machine, and we hope you will. join us— whether in person or virtually — use this NATO summit as an opportunity to sound the alarm loudly.

Medea Benjamin is CODEPINK Peace. Nicolas Davies is an independent journalist, CODEPINK researcher and We Have Blood on Our Hands: America’s Invasion and Destruction of Iraq

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