"NATO now exists to manage the risks created by its existence."
-- Richard Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine
From the Russian perspective, NATO aggression has continued for the past 20 years. Secretary of State James Baker under the first President Bush explicitly promised the Russians that NATO would not expand eastward toward Russia. For the next two decades, at the behest of the US, NATO has expanded eastward to Russia's borders and put Ukrainian NATO membership in play. The unceasing madness of "US and NATO aggression in Ukraine" is argued forcefully by attorney Robert Roth in Counterpunch, who notes that US sponsored sanctions on Russia are already, arguably, acts of war.
NATO continues to maintain nuclear weapons bases around Russia's periphery while adding more anti-missile missile installations. Anti-missile missiles to intercept Russian missiles are generally understood to be part of the west's nuclear first strike capability.
Then there's months-old, expanding Operation Atlantic Resolve, an elaborate US-sponsored NATO show of force deploying thousands of troops to NATO countries that are also Russia's near-neighbors. Beginning in April 2014, Operation Atlantic Resolve started sending troops to Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland) that border Russia. Those troops remain, and Defense News reported that more US saber-rattling is coming:
"The US military's plans to send troops into Romania and Bulgaria as a deterrence to Russian aggression could expand to include Hungary, the Czech Republic and Russia's southern neighbor, Georgia". by the end of the summer, you could very well see an operation that stretches from the Baltics all the way down to the Black Sea".
In the Black Sea itself, NATO forces continue to project force through "training exercises" involving the Navies of at least seven nations: US, Canada, Turkey, Germany, Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria. NATO commander, Gen. Philip Breedlove complained in late February that Russia had deployed "air defense systems that reach nearly half of the Black Sea" -- as if it was surprising that Russia would respond to hostile military activity close to one of its oldest and largest naval bases, Sevastopol, in Crimea. Breedlove admits that NATO naval forces have approached Crimea, provoking Russian naval responses. Breedlove's warmongering reportedly upsets German officials, but they don't object publicly to American lies.
This pattern of provocation and response is familiar to those who know the Viet-Nam War, when similar US tactics provoked the so-called "Tonkin Gulf incident." That manipulated set of events, deceitfully described by the White House and dishonestly amplified by most American media, was used to gull a credulous and lazy Congress into passing the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, giving the president authority to wage that disastrous, pointless war. Watch for the sequel coming to a Black Sea theatre of war near you.
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