Whom the gods would destroy, Friedrich Nietzsche famously said, they first make mad. What would Nietzsche make of the current, truly mad US and NATO obsession with charging into the Black Sea? It is a useful thought to ponder.
The Black Sea was far outside NATO’s traditional theater of operations for most of the Alliance’s history. However, Brussels and Washington have been piling up their military assets and visibility in the region like bees at a honey pot – or like a rogue herd of elephants charging off the edge of a cliff.
Yet NATO’s “In Your Face” presence in the Black Sea protects no one. On the contrary, it puts America’s allies in the region at grave risk by escalating tensions and increasing the danger that full scale war could break out by deliberately manufactured incident (Just think the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964) and or through a random error or clash that escalates out of control.
The US/NATO forward presence in the Black Sea is strategic madness. And it replicates parallel incendiary US exercises in fake macho stupidity against Beijing in the South China Sea: A region from which the Chinese people suffered invasion and societal collapse on a genocidal scale following defeats by Britain and France in the First Opium War (1839-42) and by Imperial Japan in its terrible invasion of summer 1937.
Washington seems equally intent on opening up a third front against Iran with its parallel forward policy in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean.
Three simultaneous wars against three major nations, two of which are the largest, most populous in the world and formidably nuclear armed? US grand strategy –insofar as there is one – seems to have national suicide as its only goal.
This is especially bizarre in the Black Sea: Washington’s strongest and most important ally in the region, Turkey is now on the brink of being expelled from NATO because of the Turkish government’s determination to buy Russia’s excellent S-400 air defense system, the best of its kind in the world.
Worse yet, if the United States pushes ahead with defying the 1936 Montreux Convention and packing the Black Sea with its warships, combat aircraft and other military assets, it risks having them cut off if an enraged Turkey closes the Bosporus Strait past Istanbul to them. There is no way the United States could maintain its own, and other NATO forces meant to “protect” Ukraine and Georgia in the Black Sea if Russia and Turkey, supported by a friendly China and Iran decided to cut them off or move against them.
The United States would then have the choice between surrendering, losing a catastrophic conventional war on a scale never before experienced or going nuclear.
President Donald Trump repeatedly proclaims his desire for peace and appears to be sincere at a conscious level. Yet he has appointed and allowed himself to be surrounded by wild extremists and adventurers. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Adviser John Bolton and Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) General Curtis Scaparotti have all talked tough about maintaining and expanding US military power in the Black Sea.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, a man so feckless and irresponsible he could not even protect the teenagers of his own political party in his native Norway from being massacred by a single, hate-crazed extremist, continues to eagerly pour gasoline on this incendiary region, drunk in his delusion that he a leader of courage and competence.
Probably 99 percent of Americans care less about the history and strategic importance of the Black Sea than about the Dark Side of the Moon. Yet no doubt, as usual they will let themselves be herded by the slick, superficial demagogues of their mass media into passively going along with these mad and delusional policies.
The bottom line is all too clear: The US ever-expanding presence in the Black Sea cannot be sustained. The US itself is driving Turkey out of NATO which will force Ankara to join or associate with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization for its own protection and survival. Then Washington will no longer be able to get away with breaking the 1936 Montreux Convention at will to flood the Black Sea with its warships.
The United States will then face the choice of either swallowing its pride, acknowledging its bluffs have failed and backing down and out of the region or facing the virtual certainty of national catastrophe.
It is all too obvious what the choice will be.
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