Allowing Ukraine to join the US-led NATO alliance would pose an enormous threat to world peace and threaten a world war, yet the intellectual preparatory work for such a reckless move is already being done, former US State Department official Nicolai Petro, currently a professor of politics at the University of Rhode Island, told Sputnik.
“The danger that such a move would pose to global peace and stability, however, is absolutely no guarantee that it will not happen,” Petro said.
Last week, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he expected NATO to speed up his country’s accession to the bloc following the referenda on joining Russia of Donbas, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions.
Petro, who served as State Department special assistant for policy on the Soviet Union under President George H.W. Bush, pointed out that joining NATO has long been an aspiration of the US-backed, weak governments in Kyiv following the toppling of Ukraine’s democratically elected government in the February 2014 Maidan coup.
“NATO membership was made mandatory by amendment to the Ukrainian constitution by Zelenskyy’s predecessor [Petro Poroshenko, who presided over the first stage of the Russo-Ukrainian war.] From NATO’s perspective, it makes even less sense today than it did then,” he said.
Publicly, top US and NATO officials have avoided endorsing Zelenskyy’s demand.
US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on Friday that the best way for the West to support Ukraine was on the battlefield and suggested that the military alliance would take up Kyiv’s bid “at a different time.”
However, the governments of nine Eastern European members of NATO have already issued a joint call for the Alliance to accept Ukraine.
The document was signed by the presidents of the Czech Republic, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, and Slovakia.
Petro said a widespread effort was already being made to prepare the public of the Western nations to support Ukrainian accession to NATO even though it might trigger a disastrous global conflict.
“The preparatory intellectual work is already being done to ‘normalize’ world war. In a nutshell: since we are already at war, what’s the big deal in acknowledging it?” he said
In this context, immediate NATO membership could easily be justified as an “extraordinary circumstance,” Petro explained.
“In that way, you see, the violation of procedures would be justified as a humanitarian necessity, for which the foundation has also been laid by referencing past Russian atrocities. Given this track record, supporters of ‘NATO membership now’ will argue that membership will serve to protect Ukrainian civilians from future Russian atrocities,” he pointed out.
War hawks in the West were already rallying around the new talking points to justify increased confrontation, Petro warned.
“The script almost writes itself,” he said.
Andriy Yermak, the head of the presidential office in Ukraine, told Polish President Andrzej Duda that Kyiv counted on Warsaw’s help in joining NATO.
Zelenskyy ‘Running Out of Props’
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s latest desperate attempt to convince Western politicians that Kyiv can now join NATO is a sign that he is running out of props, analysts told Sputnik.
On Friday, Zelenskyy said that Ukraine was applying to join NATO in an expedited manner after the DPR, the LPR, the Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions decided to join Russia.
“He is running out of props… so he is grasping at whatever mirage might save him,” University of Pittsburgh Professor of International Affairs Michael Brenner said on Monday. “Thus, the idea of joining NATO.”
The fantasy that his Western masters would allow Ukraine to join NATO revealed the imaginary nature of the world Zelenskyy lived in, Brenner observed.
“Of course, it never will happen because it would mean all-out war with Russia. Even the lunatics in Washington are not that suicidal,” he said.
Zelenskyy is a TV producer and actor, Brenner added, who improbably finds himself the star player in a real-life drama of historical importance.
“He is at once scriptwriter, director, and central character. The worlds of fiction and actuality have merged in his mind – Stanislavsky method acting to the extreme,” Brenner told Sputnik. “At the same time, he knows that to keep the show on the road, he has to follow instructions from Washington, which is the uber director.”
So, he must do anything that keeps the war going – not for Ukraine but for an American strategic victory – in other words, to bleed the Russians and weaken them, he said.
The Americans felt no loyalty or special ties to Zelenskyy, whatever he believed to the contrary, Brenner stressed.
“As long as Zelenskyy serves this purpose, they will keep him as their champion – when he becomes a liability, they will drop him, like [1960s South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh] Diem in Vietnam,” he said.
Retired veteran Pentagon analyst Chuck Spinney commented that the NATO membership fantasy was an absurd aspiration even for Zelenskyy and that it revealed his fading grip on reality.
“It is beyond stupid. This raises the question of why do it now. Has someone given him the green light, or is Zelenskyy going off the rails?” Spinney told Sputnik. “My impression is that he is becoming more erratic. His quasi-Hitlerite stance of fighting to the last man to save territory may be an indicator of instability.”
Danger To Peace
Canadian political commentator and historian Matthew Ehret, vice president of the Rising Tide Foundation, cautioned that this pattern of increasingly bizarre public actions made Zelenskyy a greater danger to world peace, not less of one.
“A wounded animal is a dangerous animal, and both Zelenskyy and his handlers within the Anglo-American machine managing NATO are very desperate and wounded animals at this stage of the game,” he said.
Zelenskyy had been encouraged by Western intellectuals who still fantasized that, following the end of the Cold War, Western democracy as defined in Washington and London was the only plausible political and economic future for the human race, even though a vast majority of humanity did not live under it, and many of those who did were increasingly frustrated with their experience, Ehret observed.
“They have overplayed their hand and, in their arrogance, are still trying to hold on to an obsolete geopolitical script from the early 1990s that posited foolishly the doctrine that the end of history had arrived and a unipolar epoch was upon us,” he said.
These technocrats still refused to acknowledge that the world today was unlike anything their ivory tower models presumed possible, and their scripts for a New World Order no longer applied, Ehret noted.
“The recent referendum results in east Ukraine were just yet another reminder of this fact and the hectic rage is palpable on the part of Zelenskyy’s handlers within the corridors of NATO, who seem to be engaged in a flight forward trajectory towards what may become a thermonuclear war,” he concluded.
- By Sputnik News Agency
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