NATO Learns Nothing and Forgets Nothing

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg seems unable to free himself of his dangerous delusions

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg recently addressed the Workers Youth League (AUF) summer camp in Utøya, Norway. The AUF is Norway’s largest political youth organization and is affiliated with the Norwegian Labor Party. The AUF summer camp is of course famous for being the scene of the horrific terrorist attack perpetrated by neo-Nazi Anders Breivik in 2011.

Stoltenberg said little of note. Nonetheless, his speech was a remarkable demonstration of how little NATO has learned from the dramatic events of this year. A serious military conflict is taking place on the European continent, a conflict that NATO had played a substantial role in triggering through its unwavering insistence on scooping up as many countries in Europe, Central Asia and beyond into its military system, without any regard for the security concerns of others.

The war in Ukraine is moreover the second major conflict to break out on the European continent within the last 25 years. Both of these conflicts are inextricably linked to two NATO commitments: first, to limitless expansion and, second, to the elimination of Russia’s presence and influence from Europe once and for all. The war in Ukraine was triggered by the first commitment; the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia by the second.

Bombing of Yugoslavia down the memory hole

Stoltenberg is of course cheerfully oblivious to any of this. At one point during his speech, he even had the insolence to say of the fighting in Ukraine:

We are seeing acts of war, attacks on civilians and destruction not seen since World War II. We cannot be indifferent to this.

Not “seen since World War II”? Stoltenberg, like most official front-men for NATOLand, has evidently forgotten the 11-week bombing campaign that NATO waged against Yugoslavia, the first bombing attacks on major European cities since Hitler. Some of NATO’s atrocities include: a daytime attack on a passenger train crossing the railway bridge over the Južna Morava river at Grdelica gorge, killing 14; the attack on the column of displaced civilians over a 12-mile stretch of road between Djakoviča and Decani in western Kosovo, killing 73; the attack on the Belgrade headquarters of Radio Television of Serbia, killing 16; the attack on a residential area in the southern town of Surdulica in southeastern Serbia, killing 16; the destruction of a passenger bus on Lužane bridge in Kosovo, killing at least 23; the daytime cluster bombing of the market in Niš, killing 15; the bombing of the Kosovo Albanian village of Koriša, killing 87; the attack on the Dragiša Mišović hospital in Belgrade, killing three; the attack on the bridge in Varvarin in south-central Serbia, killing three; the bombing of a sanatorium and a nearby old people’s home in Surdilica, killing 17; the attack on an apartment building in Novi Pazar in southwest Serbia, killing 10. 

The list can easily be extended. The point is that NATO continues to live in its own delusional world in which a 30-country-strong military alliance, armed with nuclear weapons, is purely “defensive” and wouldn’t in a million years dream of hurting a fly.

Countries “can choose their own path”

President Putin, Stoltenberg claimed,

has attacked an entire innocent country and people, with military force, to achieve his political goals. What he is really doing is challenging the world order we believe in. Where all countries, large and small, can choose their own path. He does not accept the sovereignty of other countries.

It is easy—and not a little tedious—to list everything that is objectionable about that statement. Ukraine is hardly entirely “innocent”: The current government in Kiev came to power in 2014 through a violent coup against a legally-elected government; it has waged an eight-year war against its own people, in which some 13,000 (maybe more) people have been killed; it has imposed a blockade against the civilian population of its own country; it has refused to implement a peace agreement that it had signed and that was subsequently adopted by the U.N. Security Council in Resolution 2202 (2015).

As for using military force to “achieve political goals,” well, NATO has done an awful lot of that. NATO bombed the Serbs of Bosnia in 1995 in order to secure the creation of an artificial state in the Balkans that would effectively be under NATO’s control. Because NATO failed to achieve its desired goal, namely, the creation of a unitary state, it has been seeking to undermine the agreement that ended the war ever since. The Dayton Accords of 1995 crafted an unwieldy state of Bosnia and Herzegovina made up of two loosely-connected entities—the Muslim-Croat federation and the Republika Srpska. However, the Dayton agreement made no mention of the creation of joint Bosnian state institutions such a national army, still less of any prospective NATO membership. Yet the NATO powers have more than 25 years continued to pretend that any reluctance on the part of the state’s citizens (mostly the Serbs) to follow through on the creation of a national army and of course on applying for NATO membership or realizing their “Euro-Atlantic ambitions,” to use the preferred jargon is a violation of Dayton Accords. “We will not tolerate Republika Srpska’s secessionist policies, which endanger Bosnia and Herzegovina’s future and the stability in the region,” the democracy-loving G-7 foreign ministers thundered in a joint statement issued on May 14.

NATO also used military force to secure political goals when it bombed Yugoslavia in 1999. NATO sought to topple the government of President Slobodan Milošević and to seize the province of Kosovo from Serbia. This province, like Bosnia and Herzegovina, has remained under effective NATO occupation and serves as home to a giant, brand-new U.S. military base in Europe, Camp Bondsteel.

NATO also used military force in 2011 when it launched an “unprovoked” bombing attack on Libya in order to get rid of independent-minded Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi—long a thorn in the side of the West. There was some ludicrous talk at the time emanating from NATO and NATO governments that only a prolonged bombing campaign could save the residents of Benghazi from “genocide.” A subsequent U.K. House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee report, “Libya: Examination of Intervention and Collapse and the U.K.’s Future Policy Options,” ridiculed the assertions NATO made in order to justify its attack:

Despite his rhetoric, the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence. The Gaddafi regime had retaken towns from the rebels without attacking civilians in early February 2011….More widely, Muammar Gaddafi’s 40-year record of appalling human rights abuses did not include large-scale attacks on Libyan civilians.

Stoltenberg, protected by an obsequious NATO press corps, can rest easy that he will never be confronted with such unpleasant facts. The rest of Stoltenberg’s claims were standard Western cliches. “World order we believe in”? Who’s the “we”? The “we” obviously don’t include most of the countries of the world, the ones who have pointedly refused to join in the Western sanctions campaign against Russia.

As for countries’ right to choose “their own path,” that in NATO parlance only applies to countries that choose the path laid down by NATO. Serbia certainly didn’t enjoy that right in the 1990s. The most truthful explanation for NATO’s extraordinary hostility toward Yugoslavia during that decade, a hostility that culminated in a brutal bombing campaign, came straight from the horse’s mouth. John Norris, former communications director to Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state during the Clinton administration, wrote in his book, Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo (2005):

It was Yugoslavia’s resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform—not the plight of Kosovar Albanians—that best explains NATO’s war. Milošević had been a burr in the side of the transatlantic community for so long that the United States felt that he would only respond to military pressure. Slobodan Milošević’s repeated transgressions ran directly counter to the vision of a Europe “whole and free,” and challenged the very value of NATO’s continued existence….It was precisely because Milošević had been so adroit at outmaneuvering the West that NATO came to view the ever-escalating use of force as its only option….NATO went to war in Kosovo because its political and diplomatic leaders had [sic] enough of Milošević and saw his actions disrupting plans to bring a wider stable of nations into the transatlantic community

There it is: nothing to do with Kosovo, and everything to do with resistance to NATO/E.U. takeover of every piece of real estate in Europe. The Serbia of today, incidentally, has no more of a right to choose its own path than the Serbia of the 1990s had. Serbian political leaders, including Serbian President Alexander Vučić, have repeatedly spoken out about the pressure they have been subjected to by the NATO powers in order to get them to agree to imposing sanctions against their longstanding friend and ally, Russia. Doubtless, had Qaddafi not been murdered during NATO’s 2011 bombing campaign, he too could today adumbrate in some detail on the issue of Libya’s right to choose its own path.

In any case, an unconditional right to join NATO—the right to choose one’s own path—has never been considered the fundamental determinant of national sovereignty. There is no article in the U.N. Charter that says that every U.N. member-state has the right to join any military alliance it wants without regard to the security concerns of other U.N. member-states. It is certainly not a right that the United States recognizes, as evidenced by its recent furious response to the news that the Solomon Islands (nowhere near physically to the United States) had signed a security agreement with China, which might lead to China’s building a military base on the islands.

NATO’s dangerous delusions

What’s particularly irksome about Stoltenberg is not his clichés, but his dangerous delusions, not to mention his deceitfulness. Consider again his statement about “attacks on civilians and destruction not seen since World War II.” According to Stoltenberg,

At the NATO summit in Madrid just over a month ago, all NATO countries agreed that we will support them [Ukraine] as long as necessary. We have a moral responsibility to support them. They are an independent country, with over 40 million people, who are unjustifiably subject to a brutal war of aggression. We are seeing acts of war, attacks on civilians and destruction not seen since World War II. We cannot be indifferent to this.

This statement makes it sound as if NATO got involved in Ukraine—rushed to help Ukraine—in response to Russia’s actions. NATO, Stoltenberg will have you believe, was minding its own business when Russia launched its attack, and NATO, in accordance with its “values” and humanitarian intent, had no choice but to get involved and help Ukraine defend itself from an “unprovoked”—the favored word of NATO propagandists—attack.

Not only is this untrue, but Stoltenberg himself has innumerable times admitted that this is untrue. NATO, Stoltenberg has insisted time and again, has been arming and training the armed forces of Ukraine since at least 2014.

On June 27, at a NATO pre-summit press conference in Madrid, Stoltenberg disclosed that

NATO and Allies have provided substantial support to Ukraine since Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. Including with military and financial aid. And training for tens of thousands of Ukrainian forces.

The following day, on June 28, during a Dialogue on Climate and Security at a NATO Public Forum, Stoltenberg boasted:

NATO Allies have supported Ukraine since 2014. We didn’t wake up in February 2022….The Ukrainian Armed Forces are much better equipped, much better trained, much larger, much better commanded in 2022 than in 2014. Not least because of the support, the training, the equipment they have received for many years from the NATO allied countries. It’s first and foremost the bravery, the courage of Ukrainians that have enabled to stand up against the brutal Russian invasion. But the support they have achieved from 2014 and onwards has of course, also been key.

“NATO Allies and NATO have been there since 2014—trained, equipped and supported the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Stoltenberg told the European Parliament on July 13.

The NATO-Ukraine scheme

In other words, Stoltenberg has without prodding confirmed what the Russians have been claiming for years. NATO was turning Ukraine into an armed, hostile military base on Russia’s border, at a time when not only Ukraine was supposed to be implementing the 2015 Minsk agreement, but key NATO powers Germany and France were supposed to be ensuring that Ukraine was indeed implementing that agreement. The Minsk agreements, signed by the Kiev government and the representatives of the people of the Donbass, provided for the gradual reintegration of the Donbass into Ukraine. As part of the step-by-step process of reintegration, the Ukraine constitution would be changed in order to grant certain areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk a “special status.”

None of that ever took place, as the Russians repeatedly pointed out. Indeed, former Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko, who signed the Minsk agreements on behalf of Ukraine, recently admitted that he never had the slightest intention of fulfilling the terms of the Minsk agreements. His goal in signing the agreement had been to buy time to enable Ukraine to build a “powerful military.” “What is the result of the Minsk agreement?” he asked. “We win eight years to create an army. We win eight years to restore economy.”

NATO, as Stoltenberg admits, happily played right along with the Ukraine government’s scheme of pretending to be interested in implementing Minsk while in reality preparing for war. Also playing along with this theater were the NATO powers—Germany, France and the United States in particular—who were piously pretending to be anxious to implement Minsk while sternly condemning Russia (which was not a party to Minsk—like France and Germany, it was a guarantor) for its supposed failure to implement Minsk. Throughout those eight years, the same NATO powers continued to arm Ukraine, while tacitly and not so tacitly encouraging it to prepare to resolve the problem of the Donbass by force (in clear violation of Minsk). And, as NATO well knew, there was no way Russia would stand by passively in the event of an armed attack by the Kiev government against the ethic Russians of the Donbass. In other words, for eight years NATO prepared Ukraine for war against Russia, which it knew was coming.

Not only was NATO encouraging Ukraine to resolve its Donbass problem by force, NATO was seeking to get Ukraine into the alliance. NATO pursued this goal single-mindedly. The issue of whether whether Ukraine would become a de jure or a de facto NATO member was secondary. What mattered was the blow that Ukraine’s induction into NATO would inflict on Russia’s Great Power pretensions. NATO had clearly taken on board the thinking of former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski who, in his classic The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997) had explained the importance of Ukraine to any hope Russia might have to remain a Great Power:

Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state, more likely to be drawn into debilitating conflicts with aroused Central Asians, who would then be resentful of the loss of their recent independence and would be supported by their fellow Islamic states to the south. China would also be likely to oppose any restoration of Russian domination over Central Asia, given its increasing interest in the newly independent states there. However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as its access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.

That’s precisely why Ukraine was so important to NATO, and why NATO pledged that Ukraine (and Georgia) would become members at the 2008 Bucharest summit, and why NATO has repeated the pledge ever since, including even at the Madrid summit in June. The problem was that neither Ukraine nor Georgia remotely qualified for NATO membership—and NATO well knew it. The issue wasn’t corruption or lack of democracy—NATO has had plenty of experience over the years of overlooking such peccadilloes. The problem was that in order to qualify for NATO membership, an aspiring country had to have settled any and all outstanding conflicts on its territory—and exclusively by peaceful means. According to NATO’s own study on enlargement, published in 1995,

States which have ethnic disputes or external territorial disputes, including irredentist claims, or internal jurisdictional disputes must settle those disputes by peaceful means in accordance with OSCE principles. Resolution of such disputes would be a factor in determining whether to invite a state to join the Alliance.

According to NATO’s Membership Action Plan, any NATO aspirants had to commit

to settle their international disputes by peaceful means [and] to settle ethnic disputes or external territorial disputes including irredentist claims or internal jurisdictional disputes by peaceful means in accordance with OSCE principles and to pursue good neighbourly relations.

These were NATO’s own rules, and they obviously precluded Georgia from membership at the time NATO made its fateful declaration in Bucharest that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO.” Georgia was involved in two serious conflicts on its territory: in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Within four months of NATO’s Bucharest declaration, war broke out in Georgia as its president, Mikheil Saakashvili, buoyed by NATO’s pledge, sought to resolve his separatist problems with the two breakaway regions once and for all.

Ukraine had the same problem. From 2014 on, and the start of Kiev’s war against the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, Ukraine couldn’t possibly be said to have met NATO’s requirement that aspiring member-states must peacefully settle all territorial and ethnic disputes before their membership can be considered. Nonetheless, NATO continued to repeat, year in and year out, that Ukraine and Georgia will be members of NATO even though neither state was anywhere close to meeting NATO’s own proclaimed requirements.

NATO’s rules of the game

Stoltenberg is convinced, as are probably most NATO country leaders, that the rules of the game that NATO sets are rules that everybody else is obligated to accept and to follow. NATO, according to Western leaders, can deliver any amount of lethal military hardware to Ukraine, provide military training to Ukraine, provide intelligence to Ukraine for purposes of targeting Russians and their allies, be actively involved in all aspects of Ukraine’s military targeting decisions, and yet somehow not be a party to the conflict. NATO’s casuistry is as laughable as it is foolish.

In his summer camp address, Stoltenberg declared, “In this conflict, NATO has two tasks. Support Ukraine. And prevent the conflict from spreading into a full-scale war between NATO and Russia.” A simple-minded observer might conclude that the two tasks are mutually incompatible. The more you help Ukraine, the more likely does “a full-scale war between NATO and Russia” become. The more NATO identifies Ukraine’s cause as its own, the more likely it is that Russia will target NATO as a combatant. Not in the bizarro world that Stoltenberg inhabits:

The second task of NATO is to prevent the war from spreading. We do that both by not being a party to the war—we are not entering Ukraine with troops. We also do it by showing clearly that an attack on a NATO country will trigger a response from the whole of NATO.

So, here then is the NATO conceit: NATO is not a “party to the war” because NATO has no “troops” in Ukraine. Yes, it’s true that NATO countries have provided Ukraine with extraordinary quantities of weaponry worth billions of dollars: shoulder-fired MANPAD systems, Harpoon anti-ship missiles, anti-aircraft missiles, Stinger missiles, tanks, armored personnel carriers, attack helicopters, howitzers, multiple-launch rocket systems, High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, drones and anti-tank missiles, to name but a few. Yes, it’s also true that NATO countries, particularly the United States, have provided tactical intelligence to Ukraine enabling it to target and kill Russians. Not to worry though, Stoltenberg reassures us, because there are no NATO “troops” on the ground in Ukraine. So, NATO is essentially a bystander—not a combatant at all.

Stoltenberg’s sophistry

Stoltenberg has been engaging in this deceptive sophistry for months now, and thereby seriously misleading the public as to the serious risk NATO is running of provoking an armed confrontation with a nuclear superpower. Stoltenberg’s reasoning is delusional on many levels. First of all, we have to take his word for it that there are no NATO “troops” in Ukraine. We know that there are NATO military advisers and trainers in Ukraine. We don’t know how many, but the number is likely to be fairly substantial. The United States involvement in Vietnam also started with advisers and trainers—U.S. military personnel, in other words. The idea that the U.S. was not a party to the conflict in Vietnam until LBJ ordered full-scale military deployment would have been regarded as too absurd to say with a straight face back in the early 1960s.

Stoltenberg evidently expects everyone in the world—and particularly the Russians—to accept the rules of the game as he has defined them: Because there are supposedly no NATO “troops” on the ground in Ukraine, NATO is not a combatant in Ukraine. This rule, in Stoltenberg’s thinking, leads to a second rule: Since NATO is not a combatant in Ukraine, then any attack by Russia on a NATO power that is— peacefully and defensively of course—engaged in the delivery of military hardware to Ukraine, would be regarded by NATO as an act of unprovoked aggression against a member-state. And, of course, according to NATO’s self-proclaimed rules, an act of unprovoked aggression against one is an act of unprovoked aggression against all. One for all, and all for one!

This is the frightening and delusional logic that drives NATO toward the edge of the cliff. In helping Ukraine fight Russia, NATO argues, it is only helping Ukraine defend itself. This of course is wholly untrue. As we have seen, Stoltenberg has numerous times admitted that NATO has been actively involved in the financing, arming and training of Ukraine’s forces. At NATO’s Madrid summit, he touted NATO’s delivery of extraordinary quantities of arms to Ukraine as demonstration of the alliance’s long-standing commitment to the country:

All of this is making a difference on the battlefield every day. And since the invasion in February, Allies have stepped up even more. With billions of euros’ worth of military, financial, and humanitarian assistance.

In other words, what NATO has been doing since February of this year has been a continuation of what it had been doing since 2014. NATO did not join the fray in response in February; NATO has been there for at least eight years, pouring in weaponry, ignoring repeated Russian warnings about “red lines” and provoking the inevitable Russian retaliation against the ever-expanding hostile armed camp on its border.

NATO was anything but a disinterested observer that responded in shock in February with a desperate desire to do something to help a plucky little country. Yet NATO needs to maintain this absurd fiction in order to be able to maintain in public the line that Russia’s attack was “unprovoked.” As NATO will have it, Russia’s launch of what it called “special military operations” in Ukraine was an act of unprovoked aggression—ignoring of course the non-implementation of Minsk by Ukraine and NATO powers France and Germany; NATO’s repeated promises of membership to Ukraine; Ukraine’s brutal eight-year-long war against its own citizens in the Donbass; and NATO’s transformation of Ukraine into, effectively, an armed aircraft carrier directed at Russia. In much the same way, NATO will insist that a Russian attack on a NATO member-state actively engaged in arming Ukraine is also an act of unprovoked aggression.

As we know, according to the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, once a NATO member-state is the victim of an act of unprovoked aggression, then all of NATO goes into action— “One for all, and all for one!” goes the battle-cry. So Russia, Stoltenberg warns menacingly, had better watch out and not strike out at anyone in NATO. Otherwise, Russia will have a full-scale war with all 30 NATO member-states on its hands.

Misreading the NATO charter

NATO and NATO country leaders may satisfy themselves with the thought that they can arm and fund Ukraine to their heart’s content and that Russia would be too afraid to attack any piece of NATO real estate lest such a reckless act brings the full wrath of NATO down on its head. However, there is no reason to think that Russia or China or anyone in the world accepts and would be willing to follow the rules that NATO has invented for itself. To anyone with the slightest common sense it is obvious NATO is a party to the conflict, has been so for a long time, and as such is a legitimate target for attack if military circumstances warrant.

Above all, NATO’s vaunted Article 5 is not the cast-iron guarantee ensuring that all NATO member-states would rush to war on behalf of one of its members against a would-be attacker that NATO propagandists think it is. Here is what Article 5 says:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith.

In other words, NATO member-states, having agreed that an attack has taken place against a member-state, will then doubtless agree that this attack constitutes an attack against all, and will then decide…what exactly? Well, they will decide what, if anything, they can or will do about it. There is no obligation on anyone to do more than he is willing or able to do. Since NATO is mostly made up of deadbeats and militarily inconsequential powers, the only issue that matters is what the one militarily non-inconsequential power—the United States—will decide to do.

More significantly, adherence to Article 5, Stoltenberg’s lodestar, presupposes that NATO and all NATO member-states have adhered to the North Atlantic Treaty’s Article 1:

The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.

This, by Stoltenberg’s innumerable admissions, NATO countries have failed to do. They have gone out of their way to avoid settling their “international dispute” with Russia by “peaceful means.” They have gone out of their way to aggravate an “international dispute” that should never have happened. This “international dispute” moreover took place on territory that was not part of NATO’s real estate.

NATO’s flagrant violation of Article 1 precludes its invocation of Article 5. A Russian attack on NATO territory, while almost certainly unwise, would not be an act of unprovoked aggression. It would be nothing if not provoked. Stoltenberg’s rules of the game are a figment of his imagination. While he would doubtless cry indefatigably “One for all, and all for one,” there would be no legal basis on his part to demand that NATO countries put themselves in the line of fire just because some member-states have been recklessly seeking to draw Russian into launching an attack on them.

Leaving aside Article 5 and the imaginary safety-net that it’s supposed to provide, it’s particularly pathetic—though entirely in keeping with past NATO practice—that neither Stoltenberg nor the leader of any key NATO power, seems very much to care about the object of their solicitude, namely Ukraine itself. It’s been obvious for some time that the more NATO “assists” Ukraine, the less of Ukraine there will be at the end of the fighting. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently explained that, in light of the U.S. delivery to Kiev of long-range weaponry such as the HIMARS, Russia will have to expand its goals and go further into Ukraine in order to ensure the security of the residents of the Donbass, not to mention those of Russia:

This process continues, consistently and persistently. It will continue as long as the West…desperate to aggravate the situation as much as possible, continues to flood Ukraine with more and more long-range weapons. Take the HIMARS. [Ukraine] boasts that they have already received 300-kilometre ammunition. This means our geographic objectives will move even further from the current line. We cannot allow the part of Ukraine that Vladimir Zelensky, or whoever replaces him, will control to have weapons that pose a direct threat to our territory or to the republics that have declared their independence and want to determine their own future.

Since the demise of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, NATO has launched at least three, maybe four, wars. Without constant expansion and the creation of new enemies along the way through this constant expansion, NATO would have no justification for its continued existence. NATO seems unable to get off this path, no matter how fraught with danger it clearly is—as the wars in Yugoslavia and Ukraine have demonstrated. As Stoltenberg’s delusional remarks illustrate, things could get a lot more alarming—and soon.