NOBODY in their right mind wants to be obliged to send their kid off to war in Eastern Europe if Romania and Moldova start bombing each other. Yet NATO membership requires just that. And courtesy of the best congress money can buy, now power to withdraw from NATO has been removed from the US president and enshrined in the well-greased palms of our legislators. More specifically, on December 16 congress approved a bill barring the president from unilaterally exiting NATO without legislative approval. This is a disaster. It’s aimed at Trump and one of the few decent things he might do if elected president, namely ditch that trouble-making albatross, NATO. Naturally president Joe Biden did not delay signing the National Defence Authorisation Act, which includes this new NATO provision; so we’re stuck with it.

You doubt this is bad news? Just look at NATO’s track record: bombing Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and currently the abattoir NATO has made of Ukraine — or rather the disaster caused by NATO’s promise to absorb Ukraine. In Afghanistan, NATO performed with its usual, incomparable mediocrity, so the U.S. withdrew, convinced its puppet regime could hold off the Taliban for months. After all, the US and NATO had bombed the country and the Taliban to smithereens — right? Well, it turned out our puppet couldn’t restrain the Taliban long enough for retreating US jets to lift off from the tarmac. And what was NATO doing in Afghanistan for 20 years anyway? Don’t ask any of our military geniuses like David Petraeus, who kept telling us victory was just around the corner, and who even argued in the Atlantic, August 8 2022, that ‘we could have won.’ Ha!

As for NATO’s 2011 military intervention in Libya, that was a debacle that transformed Africa’s most prosperous nation into a stone-age pit with open-air slave markets. The NATO 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia wasn’t much better, in that it should never have happened and arguably the only reason it did was so then president Bill ‘NATO Uber Alles’ Clinton could distract the public from the lurid details of a sex scandal and impeachment. Thus the noble enterprises in which NATO has engaged, spreading mayhem, misery and murder across the globe in the name of freedom and democracy. What has NATO learned from these fiascos, seriatim? Arguably nothing.

Take NATO’s plans for the South China Sea and for Finland, plans which slate Taiwan for the cemetery and leave Finland bristling with US bases from Helsinki in the south to Utsjoki in the north. You disagree that Taiwan’s headed for the grave? Well, numerous US bigwigs have bandied about the notion of bombing Taiwan’s computer chip industry, rather than letting it fall into China’s hands. That’s American homicidal love for Taiwan. Meanwhile, back in July, NATO infuriated Beijing by portraying China as a major challenge to… you got it, NATO! What is NATO doing in the China Sea, you ask? Whatever Washington tells it to do. Lately, that means stirring up trouble and painting Beijing in the garish colours of a supervillain. NATO did so by announcing, according to Al Jazeera July 12, that China ‘challenged the alliance’s interests, security and values with its “stated ambitions and coercive policies.”’

‘The PRC’s malicious hybrid and cyber operations and its confrontational rhetoric and disinformation target Allies and harm Alliance security’, NATO proclaimed. Welp, your accusations can’t get much more heatedly bellicose than that. Or maybe they can: NATO went on to decry the Moscow-Beijing strategic partnership, recriminating that those two superpowers undercut the sacred rules-based international order. That’s the order Washington cooks up on the fly to serve its interests of the moment. Those are the rules the Empire hands down that everyone, except Washington, must follow. And yes, Russia and China DO undercut this so-called rules-based order — because they follow, instead, international law. Especially as it’s enunciated in United Nations documents.

Then there is Finland, whose recent entrance into NATO president Biden no doubt regards as quite a coup. But it’ll likely turn out the way his other coup, sanctions — ‘the ruble will be rubble’ — did. Which is to say it could backfire bigly. Finland enjoyed decades of peace with Russia, and the two nations had no problems. Now disputes will proliferate, all because the Finns believed the NATO propaganda lie that Moscow intends to conquer many neighbouring countries. It does not. It intends to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and murdering its Russian population. It will likely succeed at both.

But now, as the Kremlin has warned, things have changed. Previously when Moscow regarded Helsinki, it saw a peaceful neighbour. Now it sees an enemy. You think not? Then explain Russian president Vladimir Putin’s recent order recreating the Leningrad Military District on Finland’s borders. That district began to be demilitarized in November 1990 and was completely disbanded in 2010. Now it’s back. And it covers the entire Russian-Finish border. Suffice it to say if Finland eventually goes up in flames, it will be NATO, with its military bases coating that nation, that lit the match.

More accurately the United States, not NATO. For, as AP reported on December 14, Finland will sign a defense pact with the US, which will permit ‘US soldiers access to 15 military areas and facilities covering the entire Nordic nation all the way from a key southern naval base and inland airbases to a vast remote army training area in Lapland, in the Arctic north.’ These American bases in Finland include some directly on the Russian border. Fortunately, the US probably lacks sufficient troops and equipment to pack its new Finnish bases with boots on the ground, as military expert Will Schryver has tweeted. But still, no wonder Putin reactivated the Leningrad Military District. His adversary, Biden, who allegedly gave the order to blow up the Nordstream pipelines, doubtless smirks with success and doing everything possible to goad Russia into World War III.

You think that’s too unkind? Then explain Biden’s outburst in early December, when he threatened congressional Republicans, sceptical of more aid to Ukraine, with sending troops to fight Russia. ‘If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there’, Biden claimed, falsely, from all the evidence so far. Then Joe ‘Bring on Armageddon’ Biden added, ‘We’ll have… American troops fighting Russian troops.’ Yes, thanks to an organization called NATO and a jingoistic war president named Biden.

CounterPunch.org, December 29. Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Lizard People.