“Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose at the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership,” Blinken told reporters in Brussels Thursday.
NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, celebrates 75 years of existence this month. It came into being after World World II when the U.S., Canada and Western Europe combined their security against a hostile Soviet Union at the time.
Last July, NATO allies agreed Ukraine should join the group which currently consists of 32 members. It’s ongoing conflict with Russia complicates things, however, namely World War III.
So that makes it seem like context was lacking from Blinken’s statements.
“You can't admit somebody to NATO if it's already involved in a war," Gordon Chang, a longtime expert on China, told the "Washington Watch" program this week.
"As much as I believe in supporting the war against Russia, nonetheless, you can't do that while Ukraine is actually fighting," Chang further said. "That would mean that NATO would actually be fighting."
The issue is a timeline for admission, Chang said, which was unclear in Blinken's brief address to reporters.
Will NATO members embrace Article 5?
Standing next to his Ukrainian counterpart at a NATO press conference, Blinken left no room for doubt about Ukraine’s future with NATO.
But Article 5 of the treaty states that if a NATO member is the victim of an armed attack, all other members will consider it an attack on them, too, and will come to their aid.
National security expert Bob Maginnis suggests an exception will have to be made regarding the current Ukrainian war with Russia.
"There are a lot of stipulations in there," he tells AFN. "I cannot imagine that NATO nations, with a few exceptions, would embrace that particular viewpoint: that Article 5 goes into effect as soon as they become a member, and [that] we want them to be a member right away."
Any concerns over Article 5 and another war in Europe aren't being helped by France, a NATO member. AFN reported in a February story that France's president, Emmanuel Macron (pictured below), was urging NATO members to consider putting NATO troops in Ukraine.
Macron's closed-door plea, which he made at a NATO meeting in Paris, was only made public by Slovakia's prime minister who called it madness.
More recently, Russia has said it has learned France plans to put more than 1,000 French troops in Ukraine.
In a rare and blunt phone call this week, Moscow's defense minister warned his French counterpart to drop that idea.
Biden's 'reckless' policy
Maginnis is convinced Russia would see the addition of Ukraine to the NATO rolls as a threat.
"What the Russians want is to fill the security vacuum that's been created," he tells AFN, "and that's why I think it's not going to be long before they take over Moldova; certainly they'll take over to Georgia."
He adds that the world is getting closer to the precipice and that he has strong doubts the Biden administration is up to the challenge.
"I'm concerned [about] the Biden people – they're just reckless. And that is very, very disconcerting," Maginnis shares. "This is not child's play any longer. If we're not careful, we're going to stumble into a war with Russia."
Chang, too, sees a list of failures from the Biden administration ever since Biden took office.
“The U.S. failed with the catastrophic withdrawal of Afghanistan, and that led Vladimir Putin to think that he could invade Ukraine," Chang said. "Remember, Putin went after and took Crimea during Obama's administration. There was four years of peace while (Donald) Trump was president, and then after Trump left office, you have Putin going against Ukraine again, this time for the rest of it that he didn't get in 2014."
China playing major role all over planet
Chang, whose expertise is China and its communist party, says a war with Russia would likely mean war with China, too.
China is helping fund Russia’s war against Ukraine with various investments, Chang said.
Most notable is China’s thirst for Russian oil. The PRC’s imports of Russian crude are at record levels, after an expected 1.7 million barrels a day in March, a figure that tripled from the previous month, according to BusinessInsider.com.
Decreased demand for Russian oil by India is also at play here.
China is also supporting Russia with “lethal aid,” Chang said, while China backs insurgencies in North Africa and continues to show support for Iran.
“So, with elevated commodity purchases last year, China purchased 90 percent of Iran's crude oil exports, but also, we see diplomatic and propaganda support for the effort against Israel. Plus, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi militia all have large quantities of Chinese weapons. So, this is China going to war,” Chang said.
Iran’s war-making capabilities depend on China.
“Last year, China's purchases were 60 percent above that in 2017, and 2017 is relevant because that was the last year before the Trump administration reimposed sanctions on the purchase of Iranian oil. You can see that Iran could not have afforded to attack Israel were it not for China's backing of the Iranian regime,” Chang said.
“Also, in 2021 there was that $400 billion 25-year announcement of a strategic partnership between Iran and China,” he added.
Are chess pieces moving for WW III?
If NATO membership is viewed by Russia as an aggressive move, as Maginnis predicts, that would be just one of many elements Chang says are in place to create “irresistible momentum” for global conflict.
He believes that’s where this is headed.
“We have got to realize that our policies have just utterly failed. We issue these warnings, as I mentioned, and we don't follow up," he warned. "That's what led to World War II in Europe, where Britain and France, from 1936 on, issued all of these warnings to Hitler. Then you get to August 1939, and Britain and France say, ‘We're going to go to war if you invade Poland.’
“We know from the archives that nobody in Berlin believed London and Paris. Well, we are the British and French of this decade because we've issued three decades of warnings to China and failed to back them up,” Chang said.
