MORE than 90 per cent of respondents in a global survey strongly oppose NATO’s involvement in the Asia-Pacific region, describing the US-led Western military alliance’s activities as cause for great alarm.
According to a poll conducted by CGTN, 93 per cent of the respondents strongly agree that the actions of NATO in recent years have violated its stated defence position.
More than 92 per cent believe NATO has become a tool for the United States to maintain hegemony and pursue its own political interests.
‘NATO stirs up trouble everywhere and keeps interfering in the affairs of other regions, which will only end up with its own consequences,’ said a respondent, as cited by CGTN.
The survey was conducted after Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said his country was considering the establishment of a NATO liaison office.
The news sparked widespread concern in the global community, especially among countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
Japan hosted a delegation from the military alliance earlier this month to discuss ways to step up cooperation. News also emerged that the military bloc intends to open a liaison office in Tokyo next year. Both Tokyo and NATO have confirmed the plans.
The office would be NATO’s first in the Asia-Pacific region.
The plan prompted a reaction from North Korea, which warned of NATO’S growing ‘military collusion’ with Japan.
Pyongyang warned that Washington was gradually pushing NATO into Asia through partnerships with regional powers.
‘It is an open secret that the United States has been trying to create a military alliance like this in the Asia-Pacific region,’ said Kim Seol-hwa, an official with North Korea’s Japan Research Centre, the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported on Monday.
He also said that the ‘recent unprecedented military collusion between Japan and NATO is arousing great concern and alertness in the international community.’
China also warned against ‘NATO’s continued eastward foray into the Asia-Pacific and interference in regional affairs.’
It said the Western military alliance’s activities ‘will inevitably undermine regional peace and stability and stoke camp competition.’
Beijing has warned against the establishment of an ‘Asia-Pacific version of NATO’ and made clear its opposition to any foreign military involvement in the region.
- Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has said the offer of NATO membership to Ukraine was a ‘grave mistake’ and led to the West’s combined war against Russia.
‘I’m in the ironical position that I was alone when I opposed membership, and I’m nearly alone when I advocate NATO membership,’ Kissinger said in an interview recorded days before his 100th birthday on Saturday.
‘I think the offer to put Ukraine into NATO was a grave mistake and led to this war,’ explained the seasoned former diplomat, who served under the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
Yet he claimed that the scale of the conflict ‘is a Russian peculiarity,’ and the United States and its allies ‘were absolutely right to resist it.’
But after the US and its allies turned Ukraine into the ‘best-armed country in Europe,’ it clearly belongs to the Washington-led NATO military alliance, Kissinger claimed, adding that now he believes that peace in Europe cannot be achieved without Ukraine in NATO.
Meanwhile, Washington has changed its policies on fighter jets after Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky’s repeated requests to send F-16 fighters.
Kissinger also said that Ukraine was required to accept that Sevastopol, which is the largest city in Crimea and a major port on the Black Sea, is part of Russia and should not be separated from the nation.
‘For Russia, the loss of Sevastopol, which was never Ukrainian in history, would be such a comedown that the cohesion of the state would be in danger. And I think that’s not desirable for the world after Ukraine,’ he said.
Last week, Russia’s Ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, warned of possible attacks on the Crimean Peninsula by Ukrainian forces.
In a statement published on the Russian embassy’s Telegram channel, Antonov warned: ‘It is important that the United States be fully aware of the Russian response’ to attacks against Crimea.
Crimea separated from Ukraine and joined Russia through a referendum in 2014.
- An American academic and political analyst has said that the Ukraine conflicy is a ‘proxy war of the combined West against Russia’ and Washington’s insistence on NATO enlargement to Ukraine has made the country ‘a victim of unachievable US military aspirations.’
In an article, titled ‘The War in Ukraine Was Provoked – and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace,’ Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs wrote that the Ukraine war was provoked by the US and President Joe Biden played a personal role in it.
‘The Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24, 2022,’ he wrote in the article published last week.
‘In fact, the war was provoked by the US in ways that leading US diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations,’ he added.
Sachs, who is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, commented that ‘the relentless US push to expand NATO,’ was one of the ‘two main US provocations’ that precipitated the war.
‘The first was the US intention to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea region by NATO countries (Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia, in counterclockwise order),’ he stated.
‘The second was the US role in installing a Russophobic regime in Ukraine by the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014,’ he added.
The Columbia University professor explained that the ‘shooting war in Ukraine began with Yanukovych’s overthrow nine years ago, not in February 2022 as the US government, NATO, and the G7 leaders would have us believe.’
Sachs wrote that ‘Biden and his foreign policy team refuse to discuss these roots of the war,’ because it would expose that Biden played a ‘personal role in the war as a participant in the overthrow of Yanukovych.’
The academic added that before that Biden was ‘a staunch backer of the military-industrial complex and very early advocate of NATO enlargement.’
‘Who, exactly, are Biden’s sponsors?’
Commenting to the Press TV website on Friday, New York-based journalist and commentator Don Debar said: ‘It would also raise the fundamental question, which is this: Who, exactly, are Biden’s sponsors?’
‘Who are the people who shepherded him to the pinnacle of the US government, despite the fact that he has never had a national constituency of support?’ he asked.
‘Who placed him in the Senate in 1973 and helped him find his way to the various committees that allowed him to help bring us to this point of war with Russia, following the most aggressive foreign policy towards Russia and China and any other targets of US corporate imperialists? DeBar asked.
Russia began what it described as a ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine on February 24, 2022 as part of a national security measure against the persisting eastern advance of the US-led NATO military alliance.
Moscow also said the military operation was aimed at defending the pro-Russia population in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Luhansk and Donetsk against persecution by Kiev, and also to ‘de-Nazify’ Ukraine.
Former US Congressman Ron Paul has said that President Joe Biden’s Ukraine debacle will go down as ‘one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in US history.
‘The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement,’ Professor Sachs wrote.
‘The Biden administration’s insistence on NATO enlargement to Ukraine has made Ukraine a victim of misconceived and unachievable US military aspirations. It’s time for the provocations to stop, and for negotiations to restore peace to Ukraine,’ he concluded.
