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This is on top of NATO beating back the non-existent Warsaw Pact for the past 30 years, in addition to bringing such good times to Afghanistan and Libya.

By David Swanson

I’m hearing a lot of talk about U.S. and NATO failures, so I want to call attention to the successes. Feel free to cheer wildly for each one.

  • Germany has canceled a Russian pipeline and will be destroying the Earth with more U.S. fossil fuels, and oil prices are up!
  • Poland is buying billions of dollars worth of U.S. tanks.
  • Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe and other members of NATO are all going to be buying a lot more U.S. weapons or having the U.S. buy them as gifts.
  • Slovakia has new U.S. bases.
  • Various governments from the Baltics and Scandinavia on down are declaring Russia evil.
  • Talk of a European military separate from NATO seems to have evaporated.
NATO's successes are many.
  • In Germany you can lose your job as head of the Navy for suggesting treating Russia respectfully.
  • In the United States countless fans of movies about the evils of McCarthyism have announced that Republicans are treasonous Putin lovers.
  • U.S. weapons companies’ stocks are soaring.
  • So-called news media ratings are up as well, and it turns out that it also costs them less to hire people who can read Putin’s mind than it would have to hire journalists.
  • Plus there’s no longer any need to cover any of Biden’s broken promises on student debt or education or housing or wages or the environment or retirement or voting or anything else.
  • Plus Biden — like Trump when he finally bombed enough people — is finally “presidential.”

This whole thing seems to be as big a success for 99% of the people in the United States as a story about Wall Street booming or a corporate trade agreement being signed.

And this is on top of NATO beating back the non-existent Warsaw Pact for the past 30 years, in addition to bringing such good times to Afghanistan and Libya.

Of course if I take my tongue out of my cheek for a minute, I can recognize in all seriousness that this madness is going to end with life on Earth eliminated, either by war or by environmental collapse heavily contributed to by war.

The panic created by calling Putin “Hitler” is just not matched by pointing out the risk of nuclear or climate apocalypse. A movie about an asteroid seems only to have gotten people to worry about asteroids.

The fact is that we need not only to halt each current militarized crisis including the one in and around Ukraine, but to take each rare opportunity when war is in corporate news to demand to shift global resources to addressing non-optional crises if we are going to survive. Those include crises in ecosystems, the nuclear weapons problem, disease pandemics, and the growing plutocratic disempowerment and devaluation of most human beings.

Here’s a video of a Zoom call held Tuesday night with tons of great speakers, on which I said the words above.

On the call, peace groups said they would organize actions for peace in Ukraine during the first seven days of March.

Want to understand more about the crisis in Ukraine and the threat of war? Check out NoWarInUkraine.org.

David Swanson is Executive Director of World Beyond War and staff with RootsAction.

Militarism and Foreign Policy