21st Century Wire says…
According to someone named Jean-Claude Juncker (we’re told he is ‘President’), the European Union needs a standing army – supposedly to “defend its values” from the sudden existential evil menace known as Moscow.
NATO is not amused by this latest call from Brussels for a new EU Army, but Jucker’s announcement was only an opening salvo in a larger transatlantic political shift taking place right now.
Despite all of its high-flying summits, pomp and circumstance, no one in their right mind could argue (except NATO, of course) what a rounding failure NATO has been, and how cynically it has been used by war planners in Washington DC since the end of WWII – undoubtedly a major contributor to instability worldwide.
When it comes to any action or policy, NATO’s European member states are clearly puppets of Washington DC. The reason for this is not rocket science. The US supplies NATO with approximately 75% of its funding which guarantees that NATO is always under Washington’s control. The chief winners of NATO are two-fold. First and foremost are the defense contractors who have been able to tap into the lucrative NATO market. Secondly are Wall Street and the Pentagon – who have been able to use NATO in order to wiggle into areas of the world in which Congress would never allow a declaration of war.
With that in mind, despite the united facade presented by German and French leaders Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande, Europeans are well aware of the crass nature and true contempt that war hawks in Washington have for the EU. This reality was solidified by the US State Department’s Secretary for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland, whose phone conversation was leaked to the world saying, “F**k the EU”, as she and US Ambassador to the Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt planned who they would install as the new Ukrainian leader after Washington helped to depose the elected Viktor Yanukovych. Washington’s complete absence at the Minsk Peace Talks last month confirmed that from a European perspective, Washington’s days of dictating Europe’s geopolitical affairs may be numbered.
21WIRE analyst Patrick Henningsen explains the historical significance of Nuland’s remarks:
“Although this comment by Victoria Nuland was severely downplayed in the US and in Europe, too, it was the first time that the general public, and even your average MP, got a glimpse of how certain US figures view the world and its ‘foreign’ leaders – as insignificant and irrelevant in the shadow of Washington’s grand goals. Unknowingly, Nuland created a quiet groundswell of opposition to the US below the surface of day-to-day cordial diplomatic activity. As a result, Europeans can now view Washington’s obsession with pitting Europe against Russia as manipulative at best, and at worst, dangerous. The incident also revealed that despite which party is in the White House, a Neoconservative element is still firmly entrenched in Washington’s political establishment and remains at the core of most major foreign policy maneuvers. Nuland represents the narrow interests of what was previously the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), of whom her husband, Robert Kagan, was a founding member. That relationship, alongside her actions, should speak volumes as to what is turning the gears of power inside the Beltway.”
In reality, Nuland’s rude gaff only helped fast-track what was already on the cards – for 70 years in fact. Jucker claims that the EU needs a powerful military structure which would undoubtedly have Germany, France, the Netherlands and Belgium at the center, a view which can only be described as a the culmination of the very same Fourth Reich which leading Nazi officers had drawn up during a secret meeting in Maison Rouge Hotel in Strasbourg in 1944. This meeting’s natural extension was in fact, the Bilderberg Group.
If NATO was the defacto global government military force of the latter half of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st century, then the EU Army is the incubating structure for a ‘One World Army’.
If the EU is already unaccountable to the voters in its ‘member states’ – then the EU Army will also be unaccountable, and therefore completely corporate in its form. At the very top of the EU hierarchy is an entrenched civil service on steroids. Expect an EU military structure to mirror this.
That is the true horror of what is being proposed right now in Brussels, and by unelected Mandarins like EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.
Although the author below breaks down the current spat which has developed between the EU and Washington – spurred on mainly by Washington’s obsession with restarting an arms race with Russia and China, the real point of all this has been left unaddressed. The mere idea of raising a formal military force for a confab like the EU – which is not a sovereign state and therefore, should not have a standing army – is a move to nullify and phase out the modern nation-state altogether.
Financial and political hegemony, the world’s largest bureaucracy and the accumulation of corporate power into the hands a few; In a word, it’s called fascism. That is the legacy of the EU.
And now they want an army?
NATO Lies and Provocations: Splitting the Atlantic Alliance
Mike Whitney
Counter Punch
“The war has been provoked to destroy the Russian World, to draw Europe into it, and to surround Russia with hostile countries. Unleashing this world war, America is trying to deal with its own internal problems.”
– Sergei Glazyev, Advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin
The fabrications of NATO’s top commander in Europe, General Philip Breedlove, have driven a wedge between Germany and the United States that could lead to a collapse of the Atlantic Alliance. According to the German news magazine, Der Spiegel, Breedlove has repeatedly sabotaged Chancellor Angela Merkel’s attempts to find a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine by spreading “dangerous propaganda” that is misleading the public about Russian “troop advances on the border, (and) the amassing of munitions and alleged columns of Russian tanks.” But while the unusually critical article singles out Breedlove for his hyperbolic exaggerations of so-called Russian aggression, the real purpose of the Spiegel piece is to warn Washington that EU leaders will not support a policy of military confrontation with Moscow.
Before we explain what’s going on, we need to look at an excerpt from the article. According to Spiegel:
“…for months now, many in the Chancellery simply shake their heads each time NATO, under Breedlove’s leadership, goes public with striking announcements about Russian troop or tank movements … it is the tone of Breedlove’s announcements that makes Berlin uneasy. False claims and exaggerated accounts, warned a top German official during a recent meeting on Ukraine, have put NATO — and by extension, the entire West — in danger of losing its credibility.
There are plenty of examples….At the beginning of the crisis, General Breedlove announced that the Russians had assembled 40,000 troops on the Ukrainian border and warned that an invasion could take place at any moment. The situation, he said, was “incredibly concerning.” But intelligence officials from NATO member states had already excluded the possibility of a Russian invasion. They believed that neither the composition nor the equipment of the troops was consistent with an imminent invasion.
The experts contradicted Breedlove’s view in almost every respect. There weren’t 40,000 soldiers on the border, they believed, rather there were much less than 30,000 and perhaps even fewer than 20,000. Furthermore, most of the military equipment had not been brought to the border for a possible invasion, but had already been there prior to the beginning of the conflict. Furthermore, there was no evidence of logistical preparation for an invasion, such as a field headquarters.
Breedlove, though, repeatedly made inexact, contradictory or even flat-out inaccurate statements.”…On Nov. 12, during a visit to Sofia, Bulgaria, Breedlove reported that “we have seen columns of Russian equipment — primarily Russian tanks, Russian artillery, Russian air defense systems and Russian combat troops — entering into Ukraine.” It was, he noted, “the same thing that OSCE is reporting.” But the OSCE had only observed military convoys within eastern Ukraine. OSCE observers had said nothing about troops marching in from Russia.
Breedlove sees no reason to revise his approach. “I stand by all the public statements I have made during the Ukraine crisis,” he wrote to SPIEGEL in response to a request for a statement accompanied by a list of his controversial claims.”
(Breedlove’s Bellicosity: Berlin Alarmed by Aggressive NATO Stance on Ukraine, Der Spiegel)
While it’s easy to get swept up in the Spiegel’s narrative of a rabid militarist dragging Europe closer to World War 3, the storyline is intentionally misleading. As anyone who’s been following the Ukraine fiasco for the last year knows, there’s nothing particularly unusual about Breedlove’s distortions. Secretary of State John Kerry has made similar claims numerous times as have many others in the major media. The lies about “Russian aggression” are the rule, not the exception. So why has the Spiegel decided to selectively target Breedlove who is no more deceitful than anyone else? What’s really going on here?
Clearly, the Spiegel is doing Merkel’s work, that is, undermining the credibility of Washington’s chief commander in Europe in order to discourage further escalation of the conflict in Ukraine. But while Merkel wants to humiliate Breedlove to show that Germany will not sit on its hands while Washington plunges the region into the abyss; she has also shown considerable restraint in limiting her attack to the General while sparing Kerry and Obama any embarrassment. This is quite an accomplishment given that –as we said earlier–virtually everyone in the political establishment and the media have been lying nonstop about every aspect of the conflict. Merkel doesn’t want to discredit these others just yet, although the Spiegel piece infers that she has the power to do so if the “bad behavior” persists.
The Spiegel article is part of a one-two punch designed to force Washington to change its confrontational approach. The second jab appeared late Sunday afternoon when EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker announced that Europe needed to field its own army. Here’s the story from Reuters:
“The European Union needs its own army to face up to Russia and other threats as well as restore the bloc’s foreign policy standing around the world, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker told a German newspaper on Sunday…
“With its own army, Europe could react more credibly to the threat to peace in a member state or in a neighboring state.
“One wouldn’t have a European army to deploy it immediately. But a common European army would convey a clear message to Russia that we are serious about defending our European values.” (Juncker calls for EU army, says would deter Russia, Reuters)
Can you see what’s going on? On the one hand, the Spiegel delivers a hammer-blow to the credibility of NATO’s top officer and on the other, the President of the EU Commission blindsides US powerbrokers by announcing a plan to create an independent EU fighting force that will render NATO redundant. These are big developments that have undoubtedly left the Obama troupe reeling. This is a full-blown assault on NATO’s role as the primary guarantor of EU regional security. Maybe the European people are gullible enough to accept Junker’s absurd claim that an EU army will “send an important message to the world”, but you can be damn sure that no one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue believes that nonsense. The move is clearly designed to send a message to Washington that Europe is fed up with NATO and wants a change. That means it’s “shape up or ship out time” for Breedlove and his ilk.
Ironically, these developments align Merkel with Putin’s view of things as stated in his famous Munich speech in 2007 when he said:
“I am convinced that we have reached that decisive moment when we must seriously think about the architecture of global security. And we must proceed by searching for a reasonable balance between the interests of all participants in the international dialogue … The United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way … And of course this is extremely dangerous. It results in the fact that no one feels safe. I want to emphasize this — no one feels safe.” (Russian President Vladimir Putin, 43rd Munich Security Conference, 2007)
How can the US possibly cast itself as “steward of the global security system”, when its interventions have left a trail of decimated failed states from the southernmost border of Somalia to the northern tip of Ukraine, a chaotic swathe of smoldering ruin and agonizing human suffering that rivals the depredations of the Third Reich.
Europe’s security requirements cannot be met by a belligerent, warmongering US-controlled entity that acts solely in Washington’s interests. At present, NATO gets 75% of its funding from the US, which is why the alliance is less interested in peacemaking and security than it is in internationalizing its imperial war of aggression across the planet.
Prior to the crisis in Ukraine, European leaders didn’t see the danger of this idiotic arrangement (even though interventions in Serbia, Libya and Afghanistan should have brought them to their senses) But now that NATO’s recklessness could vaporize Europe in a nuclear firestorm, leaders like Merkel and Hollande are starting to change their tune…
Continue this article at Counter Punch
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