WarSclerotic

NATO Build up on Russia Border Will Only Heighten Tensions

This build up has no precedent in the old cold war when NATO was parked in Western Germany

via NATO Build up on Russia Border Will Only Heighten Tensions.

This article originally appeared in The Nation

NATO defense ministers, meeting in Brussels this week, rushed headlong into a new and potentially more dangerous cold war with Russia by taking the unprecedented decision to station men and matériel directly on Russia’s western border.

NATO’s decision, which has no precedent in the history of the last cold war, will only serve to heighten tensions with Russia and may well be the catalyst for ever more violence in the breakaway regions of eastern Ukraine.

Meanwhile, transatlantic efforts to undermine last February’s Minsk II cease-fire accords continue without surcease. On Monday, June 22, the European Union extended sanctions against Russia in the financial, energy, technological, and defense sectors until January 2016. The decision was made at the EU’s foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg. Russia quickly retaliated, banning food imports from the EU, the United States, Canada, Norway, and Australia for the next 12 months.

The controversy surrounding the tit-for-tat sanctions was followed in short order by US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s weeklong trip to Europe. A senior defense department official claimed that Carter would spend his time urging NATO allies to “dispose of the Cold War playbook.”

Yet ditching the “playbook” obviously didn’t entail jettisoning Cold War–style rhetoric, since Carter went on to denounce Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “malign influence” in Eastern Europe.

Senator John McCain, as usual, went even further. Delivering comments redolent of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famously hawkish Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s “rollback” rhetoric last weekend in Kiev, McCain said it was in the interests of the West to “reverse” Russian aggression. According to McCain, only the deluded “still cling to the Minsk cease-fire.” He declared that he and the Ukrainians he met with “know this cease-fire is a fiction.”

Later in the week Secretary Carter participated in the NATO defense ministers’ meeting in Brussels. And the summit’s—please forgive the bureaucratese—“deliverables” indicate that the alliance has taken Carter’s directive to heart, with plans to triple the number of troops in its Response Force to 40,000 troops. Troops, armored vehicles and up to 250 tanks will be stationed across Europe’s eastern frontier, with plans to station them in Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania.

Taking this perhaps fateful step is, in fact, going far beyond the “Cold War playbook” and has no parallel in Cold War history.

These maneuvers precede what will be NATO’s largest joint exercise of the post–Cold War era, Trident Juncture 2015, which is planned to take place September 28 to November 6.

More worrying still is the fact that the NATO meeting took place amidst a rash of nuclear posturing from both sides. On June 16, President Putin made headlines throughout the West when he announced that Russia would add 40 additional intercontinental ballistic missiles to its nuclear deterrent. His announcement was, in turn, denounced in short order by Secretaries Kerry and Carter as well as by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

Such was the import of Putin’s comments that the House Armed Services Committee held a hearing on Thursday on nuclear deterrence. The ostensible focus of the hearing was the increasingly aged state of the US nuclear arsenal, but the hearing also served, not surprisingly, as occasion for hard-line Republicans to sound the alarm over Russia’s nuclear “provocations.”

Questions over just how to shore up the US nuclear deterrent in the face of a resurgent Russia have also been a priority of Washington’s think tanks. The Center for Strategic and International Studies just released a report, Project Atom, which urges the Pentagon to add, among other things, a carrier-based nuclear deterrent to the arsenal. The defense journalist Tyler Rogoway explains that the “strategy emanates from the idea that a deterrent is more effective when it’s forward deployed to positions in and around an ally’s geographical area.”

Yet, according to Council on Foreign Relations expert Adam Mount, for all the hand-wringing over Russia’s nuclear arsenal, Putin’s recent announcement was “entirely in line with previous expectations and did not add major new capabilities to his nuclear arsenal.” Russia, according to Mount, continues to be in full compliance “with the New START treaty, which limits strategic launchers like ICBMs.”

Nevertheless, all the Sturm und Drang over the sanctions, NATO troop buildups, and nuclear saber rattling masks the uncomfortable fact that it is our clients in Kiev who are acting as the primary—though, of course, not only—obstacles to implementing Minsk II.

In Brussels, NATO signally failed to address Kiev’s ongoing economic and financial blockade of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, its firing of GRAD rockets into crowded residential blocks in eastern Ukrainian cities, and its refusal to negotiate with the rebel leaders as stipulated by the Minsk accords. Meanwhile, President Obama is said to continue to insist that it is the Russian-separatist side alone that is refusing to implement the accords.

And so the events of this week have extinguished any glimmer of hope that may have been sparked by John Kerry’s diplomatic parley with the Russians in Sochi this past May. All the while, the administration, aided and abetted by a compliant Congress and a complacent media, stands idly by as the war parties on both sides of the Atlantic march on, unencumbered and virtually unopposed.

For more about an organization dedicated to opposing this rush toward a new Cold War please visit EastWestAccord.com

Israel Approves Security Fence on Jordan Border

Security Cabinet backs Netanyahu’s proposal to build 30 km barrier from Eilat to planned Timna airport, as Jordan ties continue to flag.

By Arutz Sheva Staff

First Publish: 6/29/2015, 2:47 PM

via Israel Approves Security Fence on Jordan Border – Defense/Security – News – Arutz Sheva.

The Security Cabinet on Sunday adopted Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s proposal to build a 30-kilometer (over 18-mile) long security barrier on the eastern border with Jordan in the very south of Israel.

The fence, which is to stretch from the southern port city of Eilat to the site designated for the Timna airport, comes after Israel completed work on the border fence with Sinai and improved the security barrier with Syria on the Golan Heights.

In addition the Security Cabinet approved the allocation of resources for building the fence.

Tensions have been high between Israel and Jordan, after the latter has threatened to revoke the 1994 peace treaty on several occasions recently to pressure Israel to allow the Jordanian Waqf to continue denying Jews their rights to pray at the Temple Mount.

Perhaps responding to those tensions, the Israeli government clarified in a statement that it has been in contact with the Jordanian government about the security fence, noting it won’t infringe on Jordan’s national interests.

At the start of a meeting of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Monday, Netanyahu referred to the Cabinet decision.

“Yesterday in the Security Cabinet, we made a very important decision to continue a section of fence along our southern border, this time from Eilat, 30 kilometers north to past the Timna airport that is under construction,” explained the prime minister. “This is important. It is part of our national security.”

“It joins the fence that we built along the length of our border with Sinai, which blocked the entry of illegal migrants into Israel and – of course – the various terrorist movements. This step also joins the fence that we built on our border on the Golan Heights.”

Speaking about possible complications with Jordan, Netanyahu said, “I would like to make it clear that this fence will be entirely within the territory of the State of Israel. It will not, in any way, infringe on the sovereignty of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and its national interests.”

Peaceful neighbors?

Tensions have been openly sour between Israel and Jordan of late; Jordanian Ambassador to Israel Walid Obeidat was recalled to Jordan last November until February in an act of protest over talk in Israel of allowing Jews to pray on the Mount, which is the holiest site in Judaism but remains under the discriminatory de facto control of the Waqf.

Last November the Jordanian parliament held a special prayer session for the two Arab terrorists who committed a brutal attack on a Jerusalem synagogue, murdering four Jews at prayer and beheading two of them, as well as murdering a police officer.

Jordan’s Prime Minister Abdullah Nsur also sent a letter of condolence to the families of the two murderous terrorists. Aside from its threats regarding the Temple Mount, Jordan also has been leading the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) “diplomatic war” against Israel at the UN.

Jordan itself is made up of a majority of Palestinian Arabs, and nearly all Arab residents of Judea and Samaria hold Jordanian citizenship, leading many to suggest creating a “Palestine” in Jordan.

That suggestion has been given further backing by none other than PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, who said earlier this month that Jordanian and Palestinian Arabs are “one people living in two states.”