Are you a victim of NATO Brinkmanship?

Brinkmanship is NATO's calling card

When Barack Obama was president he and Vladimir Putin had some lively talks and you can be sure brinkmanship was discussed as it is the American disease.

If you talk to an American president he will say brinkmanship is the Russian disease. If you talk to Russian President Vladimir Putin it is the American disease. On this matter Putin is right. Brinkmanship is as American as baseball, apple pie and shall we say, war.

America has been at war 222 years of its 239 year history, a very long time to be in the red and one might conclude they have no respect for life, limb or property.

America has been at war 222 years of 239 year history

Brinkmanship is apple pie and baseball all rolled in to one for John Foster Dulles, US Secretary of State (1953-1959). Dulles was a corporate lawyer and the quintessential cold warrior. Any country that didn’t cater to his corporate clients every wish was targeted for regime change, or assassination of leadership. He and his brother Allen Dulles, first director of the CIA, saw the world as their killing field and exploited it with reckless abandon. The two brothers were a tag-team exercising ruthless foreign policy.

Dulles coined the term and it became the cornerstone of US foreign policy. Brinkmanship is a form of bullying where other countries are bullied and threatened to the point of open warfare. It leaves countries as cultures of fear and living on the cusp of war.

The US used brinkmanship to force Russia’s intervention in Ukrainian and now it is using brinkmanship to threaten war against China. Brinkmanship can also be seen as gun boat diplomacy.

NATO"s present global belligerence has no moral or intellectual justification, it is naked imperialism at a time in history when consequences are global and unconscionable. It is nothing more than racist ethnocentrism directed at China and Russia, neither want war and are defending their right to exist and self-determination.

Governments of the West have abdicated their sovereign powers to unelected neoconservative ideologues who are the driving force behind the endless war and chaos.

Barack Obama was supposed to be the president of hope and real change, but was a Bush II clone, and his vice president, Biden, now president, a clone of a clone as the warfare state becomes more and more audacious and menacing.

Are we content to live in cultures of fear, loathing, and perpetual war? Does NATO’s brinkmanship get to define the estate of humankind?

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The Modern Politician

by Archibald Lampman

What manner of soul is his to whom high truth
Is but the plaything of a feverish hour,
A dangling ladder to the ghost of power!
Gone are the grandeurs of the world's iron youth,
When kings were mighty, being made by swords.
Now comes the transit age, the age of brass,
When clowns into the vacant empires pass,
Blinding the multitude with specious words.
To them faith, kinship, truth and verity,
Man's sacred rights and every holiest thing,
Are but the counters at a desperate play,
Flippant and reckless what the end may be,
So that they glitter, each his little day,
The little mimic of a vanished king.

(This poem was written in 1896)