NATO expansion, US missiles aimed at Russia

Twelve eastern and central European countries have been incorporated into the NATO imperialist military alliance since 1991. These are the three Baltic states directly bordering Russia — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — as well as Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

With Moscow brutally annexing Crimea in 2014 and maintaining military pressure on the Ukraine/Russia border, a July 2016 NATO summit provocatively violated a 1997 NATO agreement with Russia “on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security.”

Washington and other NATO members pledged that the alliance would “carry out its collective defence and other missions” by means other than “additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces” near Russia’s borders. To rationalize getting around this pact, the July 2016 summit announced that NATO will permanently “rotate” up to 4,000 US, German, UK, and Canadian troops through eastern Poland and the Baltic states.

In June 2002 the Bush administration withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Moscow. The White House implemented plans for ground-based ABM systems in eastern Europe, Alaska, and California, as well as sea- and land-based systems in Asia.

The Obama administration deployed a ground-based antiballistic missile system in Romania in 2016, with another set for Poland in 2018. An ABM system targeting North Korea, China, and Russia, will be operational in South Korea in 2017.

None of these ABM systems come anywhere close to giving Washington the capacity to cripple long-range Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles from Russia or China in their boost or later stages, and thus none give the US rulers nuclear first-strike capacity. What’s more, there’s no reason to believe that’s a reachable goal at any foreseeable time — for political reasons, above all.

— from The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record