Eric Zuesse

Headlining "'More US troops at our borders' - Russian Defense Ministry”, Russian Television (whose U.S. broadcasts the U.S. Government is considering to ban) reported, on Friday, October 13th, that “On Thursday, the U.S. announced the presence of a second [U.S.] regiment in the already very tense Baltic region, and Poland, and that’s a move which Moscow claims violates that fundamental peace treaty signed between Russia and NATO.”

This report was referring to the NATO Founding Act, which had been signed in 1997 after Russian President Boris Yeltsin learned that the verbal promise which the agents of America’s President George H.W. Bush had made to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would not move “one inch to the east”, was soon going to be broken, and that Hungary, Czech Republic, and Poland would be the first former Warsaw Pact nations to be added to NATO. Yeltsin was furious to learn of this, and so there were negotiations; and, this time around, Russia got the West’s signatures upon what was to be the contractual relationship between the by-now clearly expanding NATO, and the post-communist and now lone nation of Russia. The NATO Founding Act promised that:

NATO reiterates that in the current and foreseeable security environment, the Alliance will carry out its collective defence and other missions by ensuring the necessary interoperability, integration, and capability for reinforcement rather than by additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces. Accordingly, it will have to rely on adequate infrastructure commensurate with the above tasks. In this context, reinforcement may take place, when necessary, in the event of defence against a threat of aggression and missions in support of peace consistent with the United Nations Charter and the OSCE governing principles, as well as for exercises consistent with the adapted CFE Treaty, the provisions of the Vienna Document 1994 and mutually agreed transparency measures. Russia will exercise similar restraint in its conventional force deployments in Europe.

The key phrase there is “permanent stationing,” and, as is common in treaties, it isn’t defined. Russia had wanted it to be defined, but the U.S. refused.

Back on 4 September 2014, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was asked at a press conference, "How would you respond to US President Barack Obama’s statement that the Russia-NATO Founding Act may be amended?” And Lavrov said: “This document was elaborated by all countries that are members of the Russia-NATO Council, and can only be amended collectively. Unilaterally, it is possible only to withdraw from the act, but this would apply only to the country that makes this decision. Declaring that 'I, a single country, have decided to amend a collective document signed by 28 nations' is not entirely appropriate, either legally or politically.”

On 9 March 2017, Deutsche Welle bannered "Hopeful for more troops, US scouts basing options in Germany” and reported that, “Eastern European countries, including Poland, have pushed for permanent troops in their territory, but Western allies, including Germany, have resisted, citing the 1997 NATO Founding Act, an agreement with Russia that they argue limits permanent deployments in former Warsaw Pact nations.”

So: the U.S. is doing it regardless of what the leadership of Germany or any other NATO-member-nation want. The U.S. had been behind the East European regimes that want to go to war against Russia, and it’s providing them the men and materiel in order to lead them in that invasion. Russia is in no position to be able to respond in-kind against the United States, because not only does Russia no longer control the nations that are on and near its own borders, but it doesn’t have, and never did have, control over any of the nations that are on or near America’s borders, except for tiny Cuba, back when both Cuba and the U.S.S.R. were communist. The current U.S.-NATO buildup along and near Russia’s borders would be more similar to a Russian buildup along America’s borders with Canada and Mexico, which Russia wouldn’t be able to do, even if Russia’s Government wanted to.

The American news-site Newsweek (formerly a major glossy magazine but now only online) headlined on October 12th, “U.S. Military Sends Troops to Russian Border, Officials Say They Want ‘Peace, Not War’ With Russia”, and noted that though Russia said the NATO Founding Act prohibited this deployment, “Since Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula amid political unrest in neighboring Ukraine in 2014, however, NATO has significantly expanded its military presence near Russia, especially among the three Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — and Poland. These four nations were designated by the U.S. last year to host NATO battle groups, but the multinational coalition has expanded its forces beyond these countries, drawing further Russian fury.” In other words: the U.S. designated these countries, on and near the Russian border, to precipitate the final war, which the U.S. intends to finish. And the U.S. then approved even more countries, for the task.

Back on 13 June 2015, the New York Times had headlined "U.S. Is Poised to Put Heavy Weaponry in Eastern Europe” and reported:

In a significant move to deter possible Russian aggression in Europe, the Pentagon is poised to store battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and other heavy weapons for as many as 5,000 American troops in several Baltic and Eastern European countries, American and allied officials say.
The proposal, if approved, would represent the first time since the end of the Cold War that the United States has stationed heavy military equipment in the newer NATO member nations in Eastern Europe that had once been part of the Soviet sphere of influence. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine have caused alarm and prompted new military planning in NATO capitals.

What had actually happened is that starting by no later than 2011, the Obama Administration was planning a coup to overthrow the democratically elected Ukrainian President who had been elected in 2010, and the resulting coup — which was carried out in 2014 by Ukraine’s two racist-fascist or ideologically nazi political Parties, the Right Sector, and the Svoboda Party (the latter of which Party was renamed from its original “Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine” name, at the demand of the CIA) — was very violent and bloody, and terrified the residents in the Ukrainian regions that had voted over 75% for the elected President (whom Ukraine’s nazis had just overthrown), especially Crimea and Donbass, so these supporters of the elected President (these people being Russian-speakers) clamored for Russian protection, and Russia provided it. (Here is what Russia was protecting them against in Crimea; and, here is what Russia was protecting them against in Donbass.) By no later than two days after the coup was over, the top officials of the EU knew that it had been a coup and was not a ‘democratic revolution’ such as was being publicly reported. They kept silent about it, and the regimes in the former Warsaw Pact nations have prevented their publics from knowing that Ukraine had suffered a nazi-executed and U.S.-financed coup; and, so, the people in those Eastern European countries think that the imperialistic nation is Russia (like the former Soviet regime was), and not the U.S. (which in recent decades was taken over by fascists, America’s oligarchs).

And, so, since the U.S. Government is gearing up for war with Russia, Russia is preparing to defend itself — against the U.S., and against at least the nations that are bordering or close to Russia (maybe including Ukraine itself), which are providing the military bases and allowing the missiles and other weapons to be installed there (in the participating countries) for the invasion. If and when the invasion happens, it will be completed within less than an hour, the idea being to destroy Russia’s retaliatory weapons by a blitz-attack before they can be fired and before their warheads can reach their destinations, for which reasons Lockheed Martin’s ABM (or BMD) system (called “Aegis Ashore”) is being deployed around Russia’s borders: to nullify all retaliatory capability (as if that were even possible to do).

Anyway, regardless of whether Russia violated the NATO Founding Act by its having accepted the 90%+ plebiscite results in Crimea on 16 March 2014 favoring to become again a part of Russia (as they had been until the Soviet dictator transferred them to Ukraine in 1954), there can be no question that, under U.S. President Obama, and now continuing under U.S. President Trump, the NATO Founding Act has itself been nullified, and there is no longer exists what had been the only peace treaty that the U.S. ever signed with Russia. We’re now in not the Cold War, which was accepted on both sides as being a balance of terror in order to maintain the peace (Mutually Assured Destruction or “MAD”); we’re in the situation where the U.S. Government believes instead in “Nuclear Primacy", or America conquering Russia. If that weren’t the case, then America wouldn’t have been doing what it has been doing since 2011.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.
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