Guns are bad -- except when we use them to provoke Russia

NATO and the European Union signed a historic joint declaration on security cooperation during a NATO pow-wow last week in Warsaw. For those who missed the memo, NATO’s grand vision for European security involves sending thousands of troops to Russia’s border. What could possibly go wrong?

Luckily there was at least one cool head at the summit.

Proponents of peace and basic human dignity cheered when President Obama stepped up to the podium last week and stated that “there is sorrow, there is anger, there is confusion about next steps. But there’s unity in recognizing that this is not how we want our communities to operate.”

He was referring of course to the tragedy which had just unfolded in Dallas. The fact that Obama was speaking from Warsaw, and made these comments shortly before praising NATO’s newly ratified “defensive” eastward expansion and mind-numbing mission creep, is an irony that appears to have escaped our valiant press corps.

Yes, as Americans gunned each other down with their military-grade weapons in Dallas, Obama was in Poland finalizing plans for the aggressive militarization of Baltic states ― a policy that will inevitably lead to constructive dialogue with Moscow. Because if the horrendous violence over the last week has taught us anything, it’s that weapons resolve all misunderstandings and differences ― especially when tensions are high.

Obama sharply criticized senseless American violence as he sat center stage at a summit for an organization that has dispensed unfathomably amounts of death and destruction across multiple continents over the last twenty years ― and has shown little interest in using peaceful, civil means to resolve conflicts.

As Melvin Goodman, a professor of government at John Hopkins University, recently noted:

We need to stop the killing abroad in order to concentrate on ending the killing at home ... [T]here is a troubling parallelism in the fact that the United States leads the international community in the sale of weapons abroad as well as in the sale of military-style assault weapons at home.

And what was keeping Obama from returning to the United States to grieve with his fellow Americans? Oh, he was just ensuring that “our community” was heading in the correct, nuclear holocaust direction. A popular blogger summed up what Obama accomplished in Warsaw:

The NATO Summit Declaration that was agreed in Warsaw targets Russia. Behind the vague wording it is a clear plan to start blocking the country along its entire eastern border. As expected, the West is creating the infrastructure to block Russia in the Baltic and Black Seas, correctly choosing two vulnerable places, two exclaves – Kaliningrad and Crimea. Both are indefensible without going to war.

But since bloggers are not to be trusted, let’s instead consult with former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, who is idolized by the west as a champion of democracy:

NATO has begun preparations for escalating from the Cold War into a hot one. All the rhetoric in Warsaw just yells of a desire almost to declare war on Russia. They only talk about defense, but actually they are preparing for offensive operations.

Gorbachev isn’t fibbing. At the NATO summit, Obama announced the deployment of 1,000 more US troops to Poland, as part of Operation Russian Aggression, because shipping soldiers many thousands of miles in order to counter Russian military drills within Russian territory is of course a purely defensive measure. Obama described the defensive strategy of encircling Russia with military bases overflowing with hostile forces as the “most important moment” for the alliance since the end of the cold war.

Of course, the prevailing narrative that drives such an insane foreign policy ― Russia presents an exceptional, existential threat to world peace, despite two decades of unapologetic wars and bombing campaigns by the U.S. and its NATO rat pack ― keeps the money flowing to Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

Americans and Europeans have once again been duped into pouring money into the military industrial complex in order to protect the western world from bogeymen, while simultaneously being told that massive austerity is necessary in order to be fiscally responsible. Haven’t we seen this before? We’re smack in the middle of an atrocious Hollywood remake, on par with the new Ghostbusters.

Most level-headed Americans would agree that guns don’t really help with resolving our nation’s endless list of seemingly insoluble social problems. But weapons work great when you want to ensure security for Europe and common understanding with Russia. So goes the logic of Barack Obama, our anti-gun international arms dealer-in-chief.