Photo: atlanticcouncil.org
By Scott Taylor
Last week’s NATO Summit in Vilnius, Lithuania was billed as the ‘most significant’ such summit since the end of the Cold War. It was certainly the largest such gathering with the NATO alliance membership standing at 31, with Sweden’s admission still pending.
It is worth remembering that during the Cold War there were just 16 NATO members aligned against the Warsaw Pact.
That communist alliance included the 15 Republics of the Soviet Union along with the seven satellite states of Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania.
In the 32 years since the Warsaw pact was dissolved and the Soviet Union broke apart, NATO has added seven former Warsaw Pact nations plus the three former Soviet Baltic Republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
For those closely following the math, East Germany re-unified with NATO member West Germany, and the unified Republic of Czechoslovakia has since become the two separate NATO members of Czechia and Slovakia.
All of this clearly illustrates that the playing field has significantly shifted in the past three decades to the point that Russia stands alone against an alliance of 31, soon to be 32, NATO countries.
Perhaps even more revealing has been the poor performance of the once vaunted Russian military machine through the first 500 plus days of their invasion of Ukraine. No one ever expected Ukraine to withstand Putin’s initial onslaught, yet the combination of NATO supplied weapons, NATO supplied training and NATO supplied real-time intelligence has allowed Ukraine’s military to battle Russian forces to a standstill.
As Russian generals publicly berate their superiors at the Kremlin for failing to support the frontline troops, Ukraine is steadily making battlefield gains to reclaim captured territory in Eastern and Southern Ukraine.
At the NATO Summit, U.S. President Joe Biden confidently quipped to reporters that Putin has ‘lost the war’ in Ukraine.
This comes close on the heels of the same Biden administration explaining their rationale for supplying Ukraine with cluster munitions.
These controversial munitions are banned by the rules-based international order because of the threat they pose to innocent civilians. By their very nature cluster bombs break apart above the ground to scatter lethal bomblets over an area the size of a football field.
The problem is that not all of these bomblets detonate on impact. While the U.S. spokesperson claims there is just a 2.5 per cent failure rate, battlefield evidence suggests that number is far higher.
It is also not speculative to conclude that such unexploded ordnance poses a risk to innocent civilians for decades to come.
One need only visit those countries wherein the U.S. military has employed such munitions to see the legions of limbless survivors.
It was for that reason that Canada expanded the global landmine ban which we first spearheaded to also include cluster bombs.
For the record, the U.S. did not sign onto the landmine treaty and they certainly did not agree to ban cluster bombs.
To their credit, both Canada and the UK strongly voiced their opposition to this decision by the U.S. to provide Ukraine with cluster munitions.
In one of the most idiotic statements I’ve heard to date, NATO Secretary General Jen Stoltenberg justified the U.S. decision thus “The difference is that Russia is using cluster munitions to attack Ukraine, while Ukraine will be using cluster munitions to protect itself against an aggressor.”
This echoes that famous quote by a U.S. major during the Vietnam war when he told a reporter “it was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.”
Another argument used to justify providing Ukraine with a banned weapon is that Russia has been using cluster bombs in the war. Again, whenever the Russians have done so, and it has been admittedly sparingly, the western pundits have been quick to cry “War crime!”
Alarmingly, the Russian Defence Ministry has vowed to increase their use of cluster munitions should Ukraine employ them.
This is a dangerous escalation with harmful implications for innocent Ukrainian civilians on both sides of the battle lines for decades to come.
Let us not forget that this current conflict is taking place entirely on Ukrainian soil.
The destruction caused by all of the munitions supplied to the Armed Forces of Ukraine have virtually all been expended on Ukrainian infrastructure. If Biden is correct and Putin has already lost the war, then why supply Ukraine with controversial banned weapons?
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was present at the NATO Summit requesting accelerated membership into the alliance.
Given that such an admission of Ukraine would put NATO at war with Russian immediately, that was never going to happen.
Instead NATO placated Zelenskyy with the promise of additional weaponry to win a war in which Biden has already proclaimed him the victor.
It is too bad that the NATO leaders did not use this summit to discuss some sort of modern Marshall Plan to finance the eventual reconstruction of Ukraine. That would have been productive.
