Appeal for France to Exit from the Integrated Command of NATO

Just a few days before NATO was to convene in great pomp in Madrid, Jacques Cheminade put out a statement once again calling on France to leave its integrated command. Jens Stoltenberg had just reiterated clearly, during a visit to Paris, that the leaders planned to come up with a new strategic concept against Russia and China, which would imply “the aggressive extension of NATO’s jurisdiction to the entire world”.

The Alliance, Cheminade continues, “had already lost its raison d’être with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, but this is much more of a senseless extension from the Atlantic to the Pacific shores”. In these conditions, it is an illusion to think that NATO “could be modified from within…. The only reasonable option is to get off this runaway train.” Such a decision would be supported by a majority of French citizens, he adds, as evidenced in the most recent elections and the gains for both Jean-Luc Melenchon’s electoral alliance and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement national (cf. SAS 25, 26/22).

Concerning the conflict in Ukraine, and NATO’s de facto status of co-belligerent, Cheminade notes that beyond refusing war, the conditions for peace have to be created. For that, first and foremost, we must stop “treating the Ukrainian people as cannon fodder. To this end, we must impose insofar as possible a diplomatic approach that recognizes the neutrality of Ukraine, in line with the Austrian model, and the guarantee of its borders, the attachment of Crimea to Russia being an established fact and the status of the Donbass remaining a matter open for negotiation.”

In addition, the solution must take into account the Russian demands for “the establishment of a system of stability and security in Europe, formally excluding the presence of offensive nuclear weapons of NATO in countries other than Germany, and excluding its permanent installations in countries other than Poland and Romania”.

“But this is still not enough”, Cheminade continues. “To get to the heart of the matter, the present self-destructive international financial order must be brought to an end and replaced by a system of mutual win-win economic development through immediate negotiations, along the lines defined by the participants in the international conferences of the Schiller Institute.”