NATO Must Be Dissolved

SEN. RICHARD BLACK: I’m very pleased to be here with Schiller Institute, and I want you to just know in advance that I come at this as a very patriotic American. I’ve risked my life hundreds of times in combat. So I’m very patriotic but I’ve very concerned about NATO. NATO, in my view poses a very grave threat to world peace. In fact, it is the centerpiece of the deep state. Going back, in 1949, NATO was formed as a defensive alliance against the Soviet Union, which was massively powered by nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union, in response formed the Warsaw Pact, six years later in 1955. Many years of Cold War
went on. Fortunately, there was no nuclear war, or conventional war. The Cold War ended in 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved and communism was discredited. The Warsaw Pact dissolved that same year. Now, by 1991, NATO served no practical purpose, and it should have been dissolved. It would have been a great thing for world peace had it been dissolved. The prospects for a permanent peace were very bright. The distance between Germany and Russia was over 3,000 miles, a huge buffer against any sort of an accidental missile launch, or a hostile invasion, one way or the other. So at that point, the prospects of a World War III were extremely remote and this was a very fine time. Backing up just a year before that, in 1990, President George H.W. Bush and the top brass from NATO guaranteed President Gorbachev of the Soviet Union that if he would not interfere with the reunification of Germany, that NATO would not move one inch to the east, towards Russia, and he accepted that agreement, and carried it out loyally. But, NATO lied, and they lied massively. Instead of observing their promise, NATO rapidly advanced, until today, they lie within 20 miles of the Russian border. So NATO has advanced the same distance, approximately, as from coast to coast in the United States, from New York City to San Francisco. Instead of dissolving NATO, the Alliance grew from 16 members, to 30 members, and they did this by falsely portraying Russia as the reincarnation of the Soviet Union — which it was not, at all.
Now, it’s important to realize that Russia’s population is half that of the United States, and its economy is only the size of Italy’s. A good measure of the genuine risk from Russia, is that Germany, which is the industrial powerhouse of Europe, assessed the threat of Russian invasion as so remote that they have reduced the number of tanks from 5,000 during the Cold War, down to 200 today, almost nothing.

Now, Donald Trump campaigned on withdrawing from NATO, because it was obsolete, and he made a pledge to normalize relations with both Russia, with Syria; however, the problem with this is that it would have destroyed the {raison d’être}, the very reason for the existence of NATO and the deep state. And it is that principal reason, in my opinion, that caused President Trump to face a continuing coup, that began before he was elected and that culminated in the massive election fraud that we have
just seen. The Russian hoax put President Trump’s back at the wall. He was forced to modify his anti-NATO rhetoric and sort of morph it into a demand that NATO simply purchase more weapons. They’ve done this, and of course, this has only further exacerbated the arms race between NATO and Russia. NATO and the military-industrial complex, the entire deep state, employing millions of influential bureaucrats, they depend upon public perceptions of nonexistent threats for their existence. There are millions of defense-related jobs that are involved in this. But the fact is, that except for minor border skirmishes with Mexico, the United States has never been invaded by a foreign nation since the War of 1812. Back then, we were a
small, weak nation, and today, we are now the monolith of the world. The U.S. defense budget is so large that it’s now larger than the 10 largest defense budgets of other nations. We have three times the budget of China; fifteen times the budget of Russia; and forty times the budget of Iran. The U.S. Navy has three times the naval tonnage of either Russia or China. Their navies are primitive: While we have 11 massive carrier task forces to project global power, both China and Russia have only one, modest aircraft carrier apiece. Marine troops, naval infantry, are a measure of a nation’s power to invade other countries from the sea. The U.S. has 15 times as many naval troops as Russia and 8 times as many as China. So anyone who imagines that perhaps we’re threatened by some sort of an invasion, need only look at the size of the U.S. Marine Corps, and the size of their marine forces and
realize that that is a fantasy. With the U.S. in the lead, NATO has taken recklessly provocative actions against Russia, to deliberately heighten the tensions, we repeatedly fly nuclear capable missions directed towards the border of Russia, and just before they reach the border of Russia, they peel off and go off in their directions. But just in the month of August, it forced Russia to scramble jets to intercept these bombers on 27 different occasions.

The provocations, both naval and by air, have become so militant and so risky, that in 2019, President Putin made the decision to unveil his previously secret hypersonic nuclear weapons program. He did this, not to bluster and impress the world, but he did this to ward off any possible offensive action towards Russia. He’s followed that up by announcing that he’s going to arm the Russian Navy and Russian submarine force with hypersonic missiles. With virtually no buffer between NATO and Russia, these missiles, which cannot be intercepted, are able to reach Washington, D.C., or New York City from Russia, within an hour, and for missiles that are fired by Russian submarines offshore, within several minutes they can literally
exterminate the entire population of Washington, D.C., or of New York City. This is an extraordinary danger to the American people. One thing we need to understand: {Russia does not want war.} They don’t want a nuclear war, certainly. And they cannot fight the United States and NATO conventionally. But the U.S. has dismantled all of the nuclear — almost all of the nuclear disarmament treaties. They were painfully negotiated over decades, and now we are developing small-yield nuclear weapons whose only purpose is to make nuclear war a more practical reality. So, NATO, which once defended Europe, is now fighting aggressive wars in the Middle East and they’re being recruited to confront China and to join in on that venture, which is very likely to occur. Each of these expansions of NATO raise the specter of a nuclear war. If World War III breaks out, it will kill vast numbers of American citizens, and NATO will be to blame. The death toll will exceed any war that has ever been fought by
many, many times! It would poison the Earth with radiation. It would cause a total breakdown in trade, transportation, and food production. It possibly would end civilization, altogether. Now, it’s important for Americans to understand the geography of the
world. The United States was blessed by having massive oceans on either coast: the Pacific, the Atlantic, that extend for many thousands of miles. So we are not threatened. No nation can invade the United States, and unless we threaten others, there is absolutely no realistic fear of war. Ordinary Americans gain nothing by the endless wars that we’re fighting, under the aegis of NATO and our allies. And it’s important to realize that when the balloon goes up, top government officials and the global oligarchs will shelter in prepared underground cities. But the rest of us will be incinerated by their folly. We will have NATO to thank for the demise of Western civilization.

Thank you very much