A Quote by Michael Hudson
It's amazing that Europe says, "What are we going to do with these refugees?" It's as if it doesn't realize that being part of NATO and bombing these countries forces them to choose to live by fleeing, or to stay and get bombed.
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Refugees are threatening, not just to Americans, but also in many countries the world over. And it's partially because, unlike immigrants, refugees do not choose where they're going to go or why they're fleeing, and they are unwanted populations. They bring with them the stigma of disaster.
NATO has a special relationship with countries far away from Europe: Australia, Japan, South Korea. They have joint projects and programmes which are being implemented without these countries becoming members of NATO.
Syrian refugees fleeing to Europe do not go through anything like the rigorous process experienced by those who are coming to the States, and the volume of Syrians fleeing to Europe is orders of magnitude larger than it is to the United States.
Every chance at destabilizing [Bashar] Assad... the bombing campaign causes a flood of refugees into Jordan, there's already half a million in Jordan. I think a bombing campaign - I think it's hard to argue that a U.S. bombing campaign is going to cause less refugees. And I think it causes more refugees and more of a humanitarian disaster. I think it causes, or allows, the risk of Israel being attacked with a gas attack to go up, if we attack Assad. So there's all kinds of bad things.
In 2003, at the time I made my "Old Europe" comment, the center of gravity in NATO and Europe had long since shifted to the East. With the former Warsaw Pact countries joining NATO, the alliance has a different mix today. Some people were sensitive about my comment because they thought it was a pejorative way of highlighting demographic realities. Apparently they felt it pointed a white light at a weakness in Europe - an aging population. Europe has come some distance since World War II in becoming Europe.
US opposition to Russia and China has entailed sanctions against Russia, and Russia in turn has made counter-sanctions against Europe. So Europe is essentially sacrificing its opportunities for trade and investment in order to remain part of NATO. It is also agreeing to bomb Syria and the Near East, creating a wave of refugees that it doesn't know what to do with.
President Bush Sr. and Secretary Baker, way back when, told Gorbachev, "We are not going to advance NATO into Eastern Europe. We're not going to - we're not going to advance NATO into East Germany, if you allow the unification of Germany." Where is that pledge? Where is the logic behind a military alliance, devised in the time of communism, before the Berlin Wall fell, now being in the Ukraine, in Poland, in Estonia, in Latvia and Lithuania? I don't understand.
There are few things more bizarre than watching people advocate that another country be bombed even while acknowledging that it will achieve no good outcomes other than safeguarding the 'credibility' of those doing the bombing. Relatedly, it's hard to imagine a more potent sign of a weak, declining empire than having one's national 'credibility' depend upon periodically bombing other countries.
Cubans who arrive and can prove that they are refugees who are truly fleeing political persecution will continue to qualify as refugees. The only thing that I've asked for is to do away with automatic benefits granted to someone, basically, Cubans who come from Cuba, if it cannot be verified that they are refugees fleeing political persecution, so they will be treated the same way as any other immigrant who arrives in the United States, which is that legal immigrants in the United States don't have the right to any federal benefits for five years.
So seven new countries, three of them formerly part of the Soviet Union, and the others part of the Warsaw Pact, will become full members of NATO next year.
The refugees are not only going to be a demand on the country's resources, but also the refugees raise the possibility that the countries that they're going to are themselves not as stable as the citizens would like, I think. We're all just one catastrophe away from ending up as a refugee, and we don't want to be reminded of that.
Can the wider West establish a global 'cyber NATO?' It would be difficult, but so, too, was the founding of NATO itself, which was called into being only after successive communist coups in Eastern Europe.
If you look at the movement of refugees, in Vladimir Lenin's phrase, "the people who voted with their feet," the movement of refugees until comparatively modern times was overwhelmingly from West to East, not from East to West. Refugees of all kinds were constantly fleeing from Christendom to the Islamic lands. Jews of course and Muslims of course, but even some Christians and the movement of refugees went overwhelmingly that way.
Cubans must prove that they're political refugees. And if they can prove that they're really fleeing persecution, well, they would qualify as refugees.
Nato is supposed to be here to protect the alliance... If Poland and other central European countries constitute the real flank of Nato, then it seems natural to me, a logical conclusion, that bases should be placed in those countries.
I think NATO is obsolete. NATO was done at a time you had the Soviet Union, which was obviously larger - much larger than Russia is today. I'm not saying Russia is not a threat. But we have other threats. We have the threat of terrorism. And NATO doesn't discuss terrorism. NATO's not meant for terrorism. NATO doesn't have the right countries in it for terrorism.
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