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Congress approves bill barring any president from unilaterally withdrawing from NATO (thehill.com)

submitted 11 months ago by tsonfeir@lemm.ee to c/worldnews@lemmy.ml

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Congress has approved legislation that would prevent any president from withdrawing the United States from NATO without approval from the Senate or an Act of Congress. The measure, spearheaded by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), was included in the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which passed out of the House on Thursday and is expected to be signed by President Biden.

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[-] tsonfeir@lemm.ee 8 points 11 months ago

So who do you like?

[-] Krause@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

the warsaw pact

https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=D-g4Nq4221k

[-] Hyperreality@kbin.social -1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Oh, I remember you. With the apparently non-ironic Communist East Germany avatar. You never did respond to my previous comment. I'll copy paste the relevant bits again to refresh your memory:

I wrote:

The East German government opposed Apartheid. We now know that behind the scenes IMES, run by the East German deputy foreign minister and Stasi employees, sold dozens of shipments of weapons to Apartheid South Africa. Source: Van Vuuren, H. (2018). Apartheid guns and money: A Tale of Profit. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

You called this a fairy tale. But then never responded when I posted this:

Van Vuuren’s ... and his researchers ... combed through over 2 million pages of documents, many of them reluctantly declassified and released by state agencies pursuant to applications brought under access to information legislation. They amassed 40,000 documents from 25 public archives and various collections ... Their detailed investigations of the sustained, multi-pronged complicity of governments (including all five permanent members of the UN Security Council), banks, defence corporations, intelligence officials and private individuals in sanctions-busting activities are distilled in stark infographics peppered throughout the book.

Ie. also the USSR and Communist China.

And this:

Until the fall of the Wall, Western pharmaceutical companies conducted drug trials in East German hospitals. More than 50,000 patients served as subjects, often without their knowledge, and many died. The human experiments haven't been fully investigated to this day despite fresh evidence of wrongdoing.

To not bore you, I'll add this too:

Kommerzielle Koordinierung (English: Commercial Coordination), or "KoKo" for short, was a secret commercial enterprise in East Germany, run by Stasi officer Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski. ... Its main goal was to bring foreign currency to the German Democratic Republic ... Its operations were controlled by Erich Honecker, Erich Mielke, and Günter Mittag. KoKo was involved in illegal arms deals with Iran, Third World regimes, and even the CIA; "selling" East German political prisoners to West Germany ... importing luxury items for the top nomenklatura of the Socialist Unity Party.

And another bonus:

Iraq exported oil to East Germany, which exported military vehicles and weapons to Iraq. In 1982, East Germany exported weapons both to Iran and Iraq, which were at war with each other.

TLDR

the DDR (and other communist countries) covertly sold weapons to Apartheid South Africa, Iran, the CIA, and third world regimes.
profited off a war which cost something like 2 million lives, many of them civilians
the communist regime sold political prisoners for profit and profited off often deadly human experimentation
the profits were partly used to fund the luxury lifestyle of the nomenklatura, the communist elite.

[+] davel@lemmy.ml -10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I like the end of the Global North’s neocolonialism.

[-] tsonfeir@lemm.ee 10 points 11 months ago

But what do you favor as a system?

[-] sonori@beehaw.org 4 points 11 months ago

China and Russia’s colonialism and imperialism apparently, since those are the only two countries trying to expand their own new colonial empires anywhere they can.

Russia has troops in half a dozen African countries, expreses military control over several of its neighbors, and is currently invading its neighbor to add it back into its empire.

China is continuing to annex its neighbors waters, building out military bases around the Pasific and Indian oceans, and gaining control over large parts of Africa’s infrastructure.

NATO remains primarily committed to mutual defense and in their own words, “preventing changes to the status quo by force or coercion.”. Yes, the current system is flawed and ineffectual with poor power distribution, but this libertarian ideal, that the world would be better off without defensive alliances and that military force and invasion should be the primary deciding factor of foreign influence is just as silly as all libertarian policy.

We had a system where military power was the primary deciding factor of foreign relations, that was what lead to Europe brutally colonizing most of the world in the first place. We should not seek to return to that era.