{"id":205820,"date":"2015-12-03T19:03:26","date_gmt":"2015-12-03T19:03:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/nato-picks-a-new-fight-with-russia\/"},"modified":"2015-12-03T19:03:26","modified_gmt":"2015-12-03T19:03:26","slug":"nato-picks-a-new-fight-with-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/nato-picks-a-new-fight-with-russia\/","title":{"rendered":"NATO Picks a New Fight with Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"<div readability=\"167.58185170552\">\n<p><strong>Exclusive:<\/strong> The Obama administration and much of Official Washington have dangerously lost touch with reality, ginning up a costly new Cold War with Russia even as expensive wars continue in Afghanistan and Iraq\/Syria. The latest\u00a0provocation against Russia is to invite Montenegro into NATO, writes Jonathan Marshall.<\/p>\n<p><span id=\"more-16498\"\/>By Jonathan Marshall<\/p>\n<p>If insanity means trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, President Barack Obama\u2019s foreign policy is best understood in a psychiatrist\u2019s office. Secretary of State John Kerry\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/12\/03\/world\/europe\/kerry-nato-syria-russia.html\"><u>announcement<\/u><\/a> that NATO plans to expand east by inviting Montenegro to join is guaranteed to destroy hopeful prospects of renewed cooperation between Russia and Western powers over Syria.<\/p>\n<p>The move follows NATO\u2019s recent defense of Turkey\u2019s calculated and provocative decision to bring down a Russian bomber just seconds after it may have entered Turkish air space. More important, planned expansion follows years of bad faith on the part of NATO toward Russia, led by Washington.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_11486\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" readability=\"37\"><a href=\"http:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/nato-map.gif?80e558\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11486\" src=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/lazy-load\/images\/1x1.trans.gif?80e558\" data-lazy-src=\"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/nato-map-300x214.gif\" alt=\"A map showing stages of NATO's expansion. Dark blue showing original members; lighter blue the &quot;round one&quot; members; aqua the &quot;round two&quot; members; yellow represents neutral states; and brown and red (including Ukraine), otherwise aligned. On the map, Montenegro is one of the tiny brown spots on the eastern Adriatic.\" width=\"300\" height=\"214\"\/><noscript><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11486\" src=\"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/nato-map-300x214.gif\" alt=\"A map showing stages of NATO's expansion. Dark blue showing original members; lighter blue the &quot;round one&quot; members; aqua the &quot;round two&quot; members; yellow represents neutral states; and brown and red (including Ukraine), otherwise aligned. On the map, Montenegro is one of the tiny brown spots on the eastern Adriatic.\" width=\"300\" height=\"214\"\/><\/noscript><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">A map showing stages of NATO\u2019s expansion. Dark blue showing original members; lighter blue the \u201cround one\u201d members; aqua the \u201cround two\u201d members; yellow represents neutral states; and brown and red (including Ukraine), otherwise aligned. On the map, Montenegro is one of the tiny brown spots on the eastern Adriatic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>NATO\u2019s eastward expansion following the purported end of the Cold War lies at the heart of Russia\u2019s chilly reaction to Washington\u2019s attempts to build a uni-polar world. Many <a href=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/2015\/01\/03\/rebuilding-the-obama-putin-trust\/\"><u>authorities agree<\/u><\/a> that in 1989, Secretary of State James Baker and West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher explicitly promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not \u201ctake advantage\u201d of upheaval in Eastern Europe by expanding toward Russia.<\/p>\n<p>But it didn\u2019t take long for the Western allies to break that promise and flex their muscles against a radically weakened Russia that had been stripped of most of its empire after the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1999, against Russian opposition, NATO absorbed the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. In 2004, it added Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia&#8230;.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/2015\/12\/03\/nato-picks-a-new-fight-with-russia\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Exclusive: The Obama administration and much of Official Washington have dangerously lost touch with reality, ginning up a costly new Cold War with Russia even as expensive wars continue in Afghanistan and Iraq\/Syria. The latest\u00a0provocation against Russia is to invite Montenegro into NATO, writes Jonathan Marshall. By Jonathan Marshall If insanity means trying the same [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-205820","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205820\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}