The US's Aggressive Expansion of NATO Created This Horror; The US Can and Should End It

By Dave Lindorff

The sad state of what used to be the peace movement in the US is on display today in the nation's capital and on highways leading to it.

As a bloody and dangerous war is raging in Ukraine between the armies of Russia and Ukraine, the latter backed by arms being supplied by the US and its NATO allies, instead of masses of protesters converging on Washington to demand that the US end the conflict in Ukraine by announcing that it would never again permit the expansion of NATO membership to Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova or any other former Warsaw Pact country or former Soviet state of the former Soviet Union, the only demonstration in the nation's capital is truckers protesting Covid vaccine and mask mandates .

For decades since the Korean War (the last time the US sought Security Council approval before going to war), the US has been committing the illegal war crime of attacking another country that does not present any imminent threat of attack to it as required under the UN Charter, yet not since the Biden administration took office, and only rarely under prior Democratic presidential administrations from Carter through Obama, has a US peace movement risen up to seriously protest US militarism.

Now we're seeing self-styled peace activists organizing protests against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, joining the US government in denouncing Russian President Vladimir Putin. But that's not a big deal. What these protesters should be having the courage and integrity to do is demand that the US take the lead in halting the war on Ukraine.

Washington could do this, not by sending more lethal arms to Ukraine as Congress is pressing President Biden to do, and as Biden has successfully pressed most of the supine NATO counties to do even Germany but by promising to reverse its now decades olf aggressive and threatening policy of admitting to NATO countries closer and closer to Russia's eastern border.

Ukraine is only the latest and most threatening of these cases. It was the US, after all, which helped foment and orchestrate the 2014 Maidan Coup in Kiev that ousted the elected leader of Ukraine because, while popularly elected, he was steering the country towards an economic pact with Russia instead of with the European Union.

Here's noted international law expert Francis Boyle's explanation of the real situation and of US responsibility for the current crisis, as laid out over the weekend in an interview with Dennis Bernstein, host and producer of "Flashpoints" on Pacific Radio in San Francisco:

"This war must be immediately terminated before it expands and sucks in the European NATO States and the United States. Towards that end President Biden must publicly announce that NATO Expansion is over for good and that Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova will not be joining NATO as member States"

For the rest of this story by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site. please to go: https://thiscantbehappening.net/the-uss-aggressive-expansion-of-nato-created-this-horror-the-us-can-and-should-end-it/