NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg was today addressing the Workers Youth League (AUF) summer camp in Norway. The AUF is Norway's largest political youth organization and is affiliated with the Norwegian Labor Party. The AUF summer camp is of course famous for being the scene of the horrific terrorist attack perpetrated by neo-Nazi Anders Breivik in 2011.

Stoltenberg said little of note. Nonetheless, it's worth pointing out how little NATO has learned from what has happened this year. There is a serious military conflict taking place on the European continent, a conflict clearly triggered by NATO, and particularly by its unwavering insistence to scoop up as many countries into its military system without any regard for the security concerns of others. It is moreover the second major conflict taking place on the European conflict within the last 25 years. Both of these conflicts are inextricably linked to two NATO commitments, first, to limitless expansion and, second, to ridding Europe of Russian presence and influence once and for all. The war in Ukraine was triggered by the first commitment; the bombing of Yugoslavia by the second.

Stoltenberg is willfully oblivious to all of this. At one point, he even has the insolence to declare:

"We are seeing acts of war, attacks on civilians and destruction not seen since World War II. We cannot be indifferent to this."

Not "seen since World War II"? Stoltenberg, like most official front-men for NATOLand, has evidently forgotten the 11-week bombing campaign that NATO waged against Yugoslavia, the first time anyone had bombed major European cities since Hitler. Of course, when NATO bombs bridges, trains, hospitals, marketplaces, refugee convoys, then it's not "attacks on civilians." It's targeting with pinpoint accuracy that is occasionally marred by "errors"--"errors" that NATO resolutely denies until, in the face of irrefutable and overwhelming evidence of its venality, it is forced to admit.

NATO is on the side of the angels, and this preposterous notion inform Stoltenberg's address:

"President Putin has attacked an entire innocent country and people, with military force, to achieve his political goals. What he is really doing is challenging the world order we believe in. Where all countries, large and small, can choose their own path. He does not accept the sovereignty of other countries."

It is easy--and not a little tedious--to list everything that is objectionable about that statement. Ukraine is hardly entirely "innocent": The regime in Kiev came to power through a violent coup against an elected government; it has waged an eight-year war against its own people, in which some 13,000 (maybe more) people have been killed; it has imposed a blockade against the civilian population of its own country; it has refused to implement a peace agreement that it had signed and that was adopted by the U.N. Security Council.

As for using military force to "achieve political goals," well, NATO has done an awful lot of that. NATO bombed the Serbs of Bosnia in 1995 in order to secure a peace agreement that it has been seeking to undermine ever since. NATO bombed Yugoslavia in 1999 to steal Kosovo from Serbia and to topple the democratically-elected government of President Slobodan Milošević. It bombed Libya in 1999 to get rid of Libyan leader Moamar Qaddafi, who had long been a thorn in the side of the West.

The rest are standard Western cliches. "World order we believe in"? Who's the "we"? It's not a world order many countries in the world believe in, as demonstrated by their reluctance to join in the Western sanctions against Russia. As for countries' right to choose "their own path," that only applies to countries that choose the path laid down by NATO. It didn't apply to Serbia in the 1990s, and does not apply to Serbia today. Serbian political leaders, including Serbian President Alexander Vučić, have repeatedly spoken out about the pressure they have been subjected to by the NATO powers in order to get them to agree to imposing sanctions against their longstanding friend and ally, Russia. Were Qaddafi alive today, doubtless, he too could adumbrate on the issue of Libya's ability to choose its own path.

It needs to be pointed out agains and again that nowhere in the U.N. Charter is it stated that every member-state has the right to join any military alliance it chooses without regard to the security concerns of neighboring member-states.

What's particularly irksome about Stoltenberg is not his cliches, but his dangerous delusions. He is convinced, as are probably most NATO country leaders, that the rules of the game that NATO sets are rules that everybody else is obligated to accept and to follow. NATO, according to Western leaders, can deliver any amount of lethal military hardware to Ukraine, provide military training to Ukraine, provide intelligence to Ukraine for purposes of targeting Russians and their allies, be actively involved in all of Ukraine's military targeting decisions, and yet somehow not be a party to the conflict. It is casuistry that would astonish even Medieval scholars.

Stoltenberg declares:

"In this conflict, NATO has two tasks. Support Ukraine. And prevent the conflict from spreading into a full-scale war between NATO and Russia."

A simple-minded observer might conclude that the two tasks are incompatible. The more you help Ukraine, the more likely does "a full-scale war between NATO and Russia" become. Not according to Stoltenberg:

"The second task of NATO is to prevent the war from spreading. We do that both by not being a party to the war – we are not entering Ukraine with troops. We also do it by showing clearly that an attack on a NATO country will trigger a response from the whole of NATO."

So, here is the NATO conceit. NATO is not a "party to the war" because NATO has no "troops" in Ukraine. First of all, we have to take Stoltenberg's word for it that there are no NATO "troops" in Ukraine. We know there are NATO military advisers and trainers in Ukraine. We don't know how many, but the number is likely to be fairly substantial. The United States involvement in Vietnam also started with advisers and trainers--they were still U.S. troops. The idea that the U.S. was not a party to the conflict in Vietnam until LBJ ordered full-scale military deployment would have been regarded as too absurd to say with a straight face back in the early 1960s.

Stoltenberg proclaims NATO's rules of the game in order to threaten Russia: "See, we are not a party to the conflict. So if you attack any one of us even as we are facilitating the delivery of military hardware to Ukraine, then it's unprovoked aggression against us, and that means war against every one of us." This is the bizarre logic according to which NATO operates. Just as it insists that Russia's launch of what it calls "Special Military Operations" in Ukraine was unprovoked aggression--ignoring of course Ukraine's non-implementation of Minsk, NATO's promise of membership to Ukraine, the eight-year-long war in the Donbass, NATO's turning of Ukraine into an armed aircraft carrier directed at Russia--so NATO will insist that a Russian attack on a NATO member-state actively engaged in arming Ukraine is unprovoked aggression.

Once a NATO member-state is a victim of unprovoked aggression, then all of NATO goes into action--"One for all, and all for one!" So, Russia had better watch out and not hit out at anyone in NATO. Those are the rules of the game that NATO has devised. But there is no reason anyone needs to follow them. To anyone with the slightest common sense it is obvious NATO is a party to the conflict, and as such a reasonable target if military circumstances warrant.

Above all, the vaunted Article 5:

"The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith."

This Article 5, Stoltenberg's lodestar, presupposes that NATO and all NATO member-states have followed Article 1:

"The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations."

This, by Stoltenberg's innumerable admissions, NATO countries have failed to do. They have gone out of their way to avoid settling their "international dispute" with Russia by "peaceful means." They have gone out of their way to aggravate a "dispute" that should never have happened.

NATO's violation of Article 1 precludes its invocation of Article 5. Stoltenberg's rules of the game are a figment of his imagination. No one but NATO accepts their reality.

George Szamuely

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_198141.htm?selectedLocale=en