By
John Wojcik
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who
came to the Trump administration from the Tea Party wing of the Republicans,
has announced that the president is suspending U.S. participation in the
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and is beginning the process of total
U.S. withdrawal in six months.
Trump himself accused Russia on
Saturday of covertly developing and fielding a missile system prohibited by the
treaty, but neither he nor Pompeo presented any evidence to back up the claim.
The INF treaty Trump is cancelling is
particularly worrisome because, since it was signed by President Ronald Reagan
and Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in December
1987, the Soviet Union and now Russia and the United States have not been
allowed to possess any land-based cruise missiles that can strike within a
range of 310 to 3,410 miles. The deal was made to prevent such missiles from
being deployed in Europe.
There were no such Soviet missiles in
Europe at the time of the treaty signing, and there have been no such Russian
missiles in Europe since then. (At the time of the treaty signing, the old
Soviet Union, unlike the U.S., did not deploy nuclear weapons outside of its
own territory. The U.S., however, stationed such missiles in other countries,
including in what was then West Germany.)
The only outside weapons of any type
today in European countries, including the former socialist countries, are NATO
weapons, among which are tanks and planes from the U.S. NATO, in violation of
agreements made at the end of the Cold War, has moved weapons into all the
countries from which the Soviet Union withdrew its forces, including Poland,
the Czech Republic, and Hungary. U.S. weapons have even been deployed in places
like Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, countries that were actually part of the
Soviet Union itself.
Showing once again that NATO is fully
controlled by the United States, the organization said in a statement made
almost immediately after the Trump announcement killing the treaty, that “the
allies fully support this action.”
The dangerous scuttling of the treaty
begs the obvious question: Is Washington laying the groundwork for its own
deployment of such nuclear ground-based missiles either in Europe or someplace
else in the near future? Or is it planning development of other weapons that would
violate the treaty, either in Europe or elsewhere?
The media has largely fallen for the
line that there are people in the Pentagon who are “reasonable” and upon whom
we can rely for protection against the excesses of President Trump. The
scuttling of this historic treaty is just another piece of evidence that
nothing can be further from the truth. Trump continues the long-held U.S.
policy of feeding its war machine and thereby keeping the generals happy. He
has allocated them, with the agreement of Congress, the largest military budget
in history. It includes money to modernize and upgrade the nuclear arsenal.
Unfortunately, the long drumbeat about
how dangerous Russia is because of its interference in the 2016 elections has
contributed to making it more difficult to build opposition to things like
ending a nuclear arms deal with that country. The line pushed by some of the
militarists is that Russia is the main threat to America, so possibly it’s not
so bad that we re-start the arms race. It’s necessary for our security, they
say, and with the continuing “Russiagate” scandal around the last elections
many, including Democrats, have fallen into that trap.
Trump’s recent announcement that he
was pulling out of Syria, for example, was portrayed by many liberals as some
type of present for his pal Vladimir Putin. First of all, other than propaganda
points, Russia has nothing much to gain from the U.S. pulling out of Syria. It
has its own long-standing problems with ISIS and extremist right-wing
fundamentalist Islamists and can use all the help it can get fighting them.
Second, and perhaps more important, Trump never really intended to get out of
Syria anyway, as he has shown since the announcement.
Likewise, despite his railing against
NATO, including his threats to pull out unless other countries “pay up,” he has
shown with his moves to kill the INF treaty that NATO policy is Trump policy
when it comes to carrying out imperialist aims around the world.
We have only to look at Venezuela
where Trump has stepped up the long-standing U.S. attacks on that country with
his national security adviser John Bolton laying it bare when he said this week
how nice it would be to have U.S. oil companies managing the flow of oil out of
that country.
Following right behind him in full
support of overthrowing the elected government in Venezuela was the rest of
NATO. All of Trump’s complaints against it aside, NATO is the willing
accomplice to U.S. foreign policy. If the U.S. militarists ever got rid of
NATO, they’d have to replace it with something similar or even worse.
When it comes to carrying out
imperialist foreign policy, including killing a treaty that has prevented
nuclear war, the shots are called in Washington, not in Belgium or anywhere
else in Europe. (IPA Service)
Courtesy:
People’s World
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