NATO Announces Largest Troop Deployments Against Russia Since Cold War
By Alex Lantier
November 09, 2016 "Information Clearing House" - "WSWS" - NATO will place hundreds of thousands of
troops on alert for military action against Russia in the coming months, top
NATO officials told the Times of London on Monday.
The US-led military alliance is planning to speed up
the mobilization of forces numbering in the tens of thousands and, ultimately,
hundreds of thousands and millions that are to be mobilized against Russia.
Beyond its existing 5,000-strong emergency response force, NATO is tripling its
“incumbent response force” to 40,000 and putting hundreds of thousands of
troops on higher alert levels.
The Times wrote, “Sir Adam West, Britain’s
outgoing permanent representative to NATO, said he thought that the goal was to
speed up the response time of up to 300,000 military personnel to about two
months. At present a force of this size could take up to 180 days to deploy.”
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said, “We are…
addressing what we call the follow-on forces. There are a large number of
people in the armed forces of NATO allies. We are looking into how more of them
can be ready on a shorter notice.” According to the Times, Stoltenberg
explained that NATO is looking broadly at methods for “improving the readiness
of many of the alliance's three million soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.”
The target of these deployments, the largest since the
dissolution of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy and the end of the
Cold War a quarter century ago, is Russia.
“We have seen a more assertive Russia implementing a
substantial military build-up of many years, tripling defence spending since
2000 in real terms; developing new military capabilities; exercising their
forces and using military force against neighbours,” Stoltenberg said. “We have
also seen Russia using propaganda in Europe among NATO allies and that is
exactly the reason why NATO is responding. We are responding with the biggest
reinforcement of our collective defence since the end of the Cold War.”
These statements show how NATO planning for a horrific
war against Russia has continued behind the backs of the people throughout the
US presidential election campaign. Military deployments and war preparations by
the Pentagon and the general staffs of the various European countries are set
to go ahead, moreover, whatever the outcome of the election in the United
States and those slated for 2017 in the European NATO countries.
Stoltenberg's vague attack on Russian “propaganda” in
Europe is an allusion to the instinctive opposition to war that exists in the
European and international working class and popular distrust of the
anti-Russian propaganda promoted by NATO officials like Stoltenberg and West.
Last year, a Pew poll found broad international
opposition to NATO participation in a conventional war against Russia in
Eastern Europe, even in a scenario that assumes Russia started the conflict.
Under these hypothetical conditions, 58 percent of Germans, 53 percent of
French people, and 51 percent of Italians opposed any military action against
Russia. Opposition to war in the poll would doubtless have been higher had
pollsters mentioned that NATO's decision to attack Russian forces in Eastern
Europe could lead to nuclear war.
This opposition is rooted in deep disaffection with
the imperialist Middle East wars of the post-Soviet period and the memory of
two world wars in Europe in the 20th century. The arguments Stoltenberg presented
against it are politically fraudulent.
The primary threat of military aggression and war in
Europe comes not from Russia, but from the NATO countries. Over the past 25
years, the imperialist powers of NATO have bombed and invaded countries in
Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Within Europe, they bombed Serbia and
Kosovo in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, pushed NATO’s borders hundreds of miles
to the East, and backed a violent, fascist-led putsch to topple a pro-Russian
government in Ukraine in 2014.
The aggressive character of NATO policy emerged once
again last Friday, when NBC News reported that US cyber warfare units had
hacked key Russian electricity, Internet and military networks. These are now
“vulnerable to attack by secret American cyber weapons should the US deem it
necessary,” NBC stated.
Russian officials denounced the activities highlighted
in the report and the Obama White House's silence on the matter. Russian
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, “If no official reaction
from the American administration follows, it would mean state cyber terrorism
exists in the US. If the threats of the attack, which were published by the US
media, are carried out, Moscow would be justified in charging Washington.”
The geo-strategically disastrous consequences of the
Stalinist bureaucracy's dissolution of the Soviet Union and restoration of
capitalism in Eastern Europe are ever more apparent. With NATO troops or proxy
forces stationed in a geographic belt extending from the Baltic republics to
Poland, Ukraine and Romania—either a short distance from or on Russia's
borders—NATO is now poised for a major war against Russia that could escalate
into a nuclear conflagration.
An examination of Stoltenberg’s remarks shows that
NATO’s plans are not defensive preparations to counter a sudden conventional
invasion of Europe by the Russian army. In such a scenario, Russian tank
columns would overrun the few thousand or tens of thousands of troops in NATO’s
various emergency response forces, depriving the broader ranks of NATO
“follow-up” forces the 60 to 180 days they need to mobilize.
Rather, the plan for mobilizing successive layers of
“follow-on forces” is intended to allow NATO to threaten Russia in a crisis
situation by gradually bringing to bear more and more of its collective
military strength, which, although split between 28 member states, outweighs
that of Russia. Russia's population of 145 million is far smaller than that of
the NATO countries, at 906 million.
The aggressive character of NATO’s agenda is
illustrated by a report issued last month by the CIA-linked Rand Corporation
think tank on the military situation in the Baltic republics of Lithuania,
Latvia and Estonia. The small military forces NATO has posted in the Baltic
republics, Rand wrote, are “inviting a devastating war, rather than deterring
it.” They calculated that Russian forces, if they actually invaded, could
overrun these countries in approximately 60 hours.
On this basis, the think tank called for launching a
vast NATO military build-up in the Baltic republics, virtually at the gates of
St. Petersburg. It wrote that it would take “a force of about seven brigades,
including three heavy armored brigades—adequately supported by air power,
land-based fires, and other enablers on the ground and ready to fight at the
onset of hostilities… to prevent the rapid overrun of the Baltic states.” This
would cost the NATO countries $2.7 billion each year.
As the NATO countries intensify their threats against
Russia, there are increasingly bitter conflicts among the NATO imperialist
powers themselves. Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi bluntly opposed new
sanctions on Russia as called for by Washington at last month's European Union
summit in Brussels, and there are deepening tensions between Germany and the
United States as officials in Berlin and Paris call for an independent EU
military.
Prospects of increased US-led military provocations
against Russia are sharpening tensions within Europe. In an article titled
“Whether Clinton or Trump wins, for Germany things will get uncomfortable,”
German news magazine Der Spiegel warned of the long-term
implications of an aggressive US-led policy against Russia, which it assumed
would continue regardless which of the two candidates secured the White House.
The magazine wrote, “The motto will be: If you want
(nuclear) US protection from Putin, you must either pay us more money or re-arm
yourself.”
Sources:
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