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Den 24. februar 1990 informerede den amerikanske præsident George Herbert Walker Bush i hemmelighed den tyske kansler Helmut Kohl på Camp David, at selvom Bush og alle hans agenter såsom udenrigsminister James Baker mundtligt havde lovet Sovjetunionens leder Mikhail Gorbatjov, at (som Baker sagde) det) NATO ville ikke udvide 'en tomme mod øst' (mod Ruslands grænse), hvis kommunismen og sovjeternes NATO-spejl militæralliance Warszawa-pagten ville ende, og Sovjetunionen gik i opløsning, dette havde kun været for at bedrage Gorbatjov, og at faktisk den kolde krig på USA-og allierede side i hemmelighed ville fortsætte, indtil Rusland selv i sidste ende ville blive en del af det USA-kontrollerede imperium.

Senere informerede Bush på samme måde andre USA-allierede statsoverhoveder. En kollega fortalte mig for nylig, at han anser det for okay, fordi der ikke var nogen underskrevet aftale af Gorbatjov og Bush om denne sag; så disse løfter burde bare være blevet ignoreret af Gorbatjov. (Med andre ord: Bushs hensigt om, at Amerika og dets allierede skulle erobre Rusland, var okay.) Jeg svarede ham som følger:

På grund af din underliggende antagelse om, at KUN SKRIFTLIGE aftaler tæller, har jeg lige nu undersøgt, om USA nu ensidigt har annulleret Ruslands medlemskab af WTO (World Trade Organization) for at kunne toldere russisk import til skyhøje tariffer. USA er lovligt. Amerika er et underskrevet medlem af WTO, og det samme er Rusland.


Kommentar: Delvist oversat af Sott.net fra Who actually CAUSED this war in Ukraine?


The WTO Treaty (called "GATT" for "General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade") opens with Article 1, Paragraph 1, which prohibits any member from providing "any advantage, favour, privilege or immunity granted by any contracting party to any product originating in or destined for any other country" unless the same treatment is being provided to all other member countries. That's the core of the GATT: non-discriminatory international trade

The next question is whether (or under what conditions) a country can be expelled from the WTO (as America and its allies claim to be doing). The entire WTO Treaty fails even so much as to just mention expulsion — and, so, the honest answer here is clearly No.

Yet America 'did' it, and its vassal-nations ('allies') joined in — all of them clearly violating that written Treaty, which all of them (just as Russia had done) had signed.

On 12 March 2022, the neoconservative Washington Post, Jeff Bezos's newspaper, bannered "There are two ways to kick Russia out of the world trade system. One is more likely to work.", and it argued that, "Even if WTO members do not act collectively to suspend or expel Russia, they can act individually to effectively remove Russia's WTO privileges. Indeed, Ukraine and Canada have already done so." The argument is that this can be done if "a WTO member 'considers necessary for the protection of its essential security interests . . . taken in time of war or other emergency in international relations.'" That excuse can be used by any country against any country it wants to harm, but since the Treaty includes no provision to expel any member, any country that uses this as a mere excuse — i.e., when NOT under threat (unlike Ukraine, which IS actually at war with Russia) — such as the U.S. and its allies are — violates the Treaty's opening paragraph.

Previously, America's having punitively tariffed China in 2018 had been ruled illegal by the WTO in 2020.

On 22 August 2018, the neoconservative Wall Street Journal had headlined "For U.S. to Stay in WTO, China May Have to Leave. Instead of unilateral tariffs, the U.S. and its allies could use the World Trade Organization to force China to alter its trade-distorting behavior — or leave". It reported that:

There may be a more effective solution: threaten China with expulsion from the WTO. Calling this the nuclear option doesn't really do it justice since the nuclear weapons don't even exist. The WTO lacks a formal mechanism to throw out a member. But its founding charter, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, includes a section, Article XXIII, that can achieve the same thing. It allows a case to be brought against a member for behavior that doesn't specifically violate the treaty but "nullifies or impairs" the benefits every other country expects to derive from the WTO.

Of course, since their argument was merely smoke and mirrors, the only people whom it might have fooled would have been other neoconservatives — certainly no international legal body. (That's WHY the WTO rejected it.)

Consequently, it is clear that at least in regard to America's having signed onto the WTO Treaty, its signature (and that of its vassal-nations) means actually nothing. That was a signed, sealed, and delivered American-and-international contract (Treaty), but America (and its 'allies') violate it with impunity. (They, in fact, do this routinely.)

So, the real issue here isn't 'signed' versus 'only spoken', but, instead, honest versus dishonest, and maybe even more basically war (coercive) versus peace (non-coercive). Russia had done everything it could to avoid needing to invade Ukraine in order to disempower the nazis who have been running the country ever since Obama's 2014 coup placed it into the hands of rabidly anti-Russian racist-fascists there.

Both the U.S. regime and its NATO military alliance answered Russia's demand clearly: No, never — only we can have any say over whether or not Ukraine, on Russia's border, joins NATO! What other option did Putin then have, in order to avoid a Cuban-Missile-Crisis-in-the- reverse-direction? Why is U.S. President Biden (and why aren't his predecessors and his allies) who refused even to consider Putin's very reasonable demand to exclude Ukraine from NATO, not being blamed as having actually caused this war?

On 24 February 1990, Bush introduced the plan. The war in Ukraine is one climactic result of that plan, which G.H.W. Bush had started and Barack Obama raised to the threat-level it now poses. Vladimir Putin really is responding to that plan, in the only way that is realistically left to him to do.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse's next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA'S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler's Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change. It's about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world's wealth by control of not only their 'news' media but the social 'sciences' — duping the public.