Valeriy Krylko
[Source: atlanticcouncil.org]
Fellows at the Atlantic Council advocate bombing and confronting Russia, while eschewing any opportunities for peace.
The Atlantic Council is an American think tank, founded in 1961, which lies at the heart of what 27-year CIA veteran Ray McGovern and whistleblower termed the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank Complex (MICIMATTC).
Its close ties to the CIA were evident when its former executive vice-president, Damon Wilson, was appointed CEO of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA offshoot that promotes propaganda and supports dissidents in countries whose governments have been targeted by the U.S. for regime change.
Former CIA Director James Woolsey is listed as a lifetime director of the Atlantic Council, while former CIA Directors Leon Panetta, Robert Gates and David Petraeus are also listed on its Board, along with such war criminals as Henry Kissinger, and Condeleezza Rice.
Over the past decade, the Atlantic Council has published countless reports on Russia’s kleptocracy and disinformation under President Vladimir Putin, and has hosted anti-Russian dissidents and Belarusian opposition figures such as Svetlana Tikhanovskaya who called for more aggressive imperial intervention by the U.S. in Belarusian politics.
One of its fellows, Michael Weiss, spreads his anti-Russia invective as an editor at the popular online media outlet, The Daily Beast. He helps run a neo-McCarthyite website, PropOrNot that promotes the worst kind of fear mongering imaginable while attacking independent media outlets, including the Ron Paul Institute, for allegedly advancing Russian propaganda.
In 2015, the Atlantic Council helped prepare a proposal for arming the Ukrainian military with offensive weaponry like Javelin anti-tank missiles—the same year that it presented its Distinguished Leadership Award to Marillyn Adams Hewson, then the CEO of Lockheed Martin, which produces Javelin missiles and many other strategic weapon platforms.
Since the commencement of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, the Atlantic Council has doubled down on its long-standing Russophobia, calling for bombing Russia and starting World War III.
In February, Matthew Kroenig, the Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, argued for consideration of the U.S. preemptive use of “’tactical’ nuclear weapons.[1] This would not only kill thousands of people directly but likely cause what scientists characterize as a “nuclear winter” by injecting so much smoke and debris into the air that it will block sunlight and cause a precioitious drop in global tempratures, affecting food production across the globe.
Marketing Arm of the Military Security Complex
Within a few years of the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949, voluntary organizations emerged in member countries of the North Atlantic Alliance (NATO) to promote what was called public understanding and support institutions that would enhance collective security. In 1954, the Atlantic Treaty Association was created and an international network of citizen associations was formally linked.
In 1961, former Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and Christian Herter, along with Will Clayton, William Foster and Theodore Achilles, recommended the creation of a new entity, the Atlantic Council of the United States, which would bring together U.S. citizens who supported the Atlantic Alliance.
Initially, it was designed to establish cooperation between the United States and Western European countries against the Soviet Union, but with the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, the organization rapidly expanded its activities far beyond the Atlantic. In particular, the subject of its close attention was Russia, other countries that emerged on the territory of the former Soviet Union, as well as Eastern European states.
The Atlantic Council currently positions itself as a forum for political, business and intellectual international leaders. The Council’s structure includes regional centers as well as a number of functional programs related to international security and the global economy.
The official mission of the Atlantic Council is to help build constructive leadership and engagement in international affairs, based on the central role of the Atlantic community in solving global problems. The assumption of course being that the Atlantic community is superior to all others.[2]
Paul Craig Roberts, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Ronald Reagan, calls the Atlantic Council the “marketing arm of the military-security complex.”
In February 2009, James L. Jones, then-chairman of the Atlantic Council, stepped down in order to serve as President Obama’s new National Security Advisor and was succeeded by Sen. Chuck Hagel. Four years later, Hagel stepped down to serve as U.S. Secretary of Defense.
Funding
Numerous media reports, as well as the Atlantic Council’s own reports, show that the organization’s largest contributor is government grants from the U.S. State Department.[3]
The State Department and the U.S. Department of Defense are active sponsors of the organization. For 2021, the Atlantic Council received between $500,000 and $1 million from the U.S. Department of State alone.
Also among the sponsors is the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), which has provided between $100,000 and $249,000 to the think tank.
In addition, the Atlantic Council is sponsored by numerous foundations, organizations and commercial companies. For example, the NED and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) are among them.
Further main donors include Facebook, the French Ministry of Armed Forces, the Foreign Ministries of Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Estonia, Norway, Lithuania and the Czech Republic, the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, the largest defense concerns, e.g., Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon, the U.S. Navy and Air Force, NATO, as well as many American business giants such as FedEx, Apple, Amazon, etc.
Dubious Relationships
The Grayzone project reported in 2019 that the Atlantic Council had initiated a lucrative relationship with a corruption-tainted Ukrainian gas company, the Burisma Group, worth as much as $250,000 a year. This is the same company that appointed Joe Biden’s son, Hunter to its board, even though he had no industry experience, along with former CIA #3 man Cofer Black.
Burisma’s relationship with the Atlantic Council is indicative of the acceptance of tainted money that skews the mission of the organization and drives the Atlantic Council to adopt hawkish positions, especially toward Russia, in line with the interests of MICIMATTC.
Tellingly, one of the Atlantic Council’s fellows during Donald Trump’s presidency was Michael Carpenter, a top aide to Joe Biden, a super-hawk on Ukraine championing the provision of Javelin missiles when he was Vice President under Barack Obama.
In July 2018, Carpenter helped welcome Andriy Parubiy, the speaker of the Rada (the Ukrainian parliament), to a series of meetings on Capitol Hill.
Parubiy is the founder of the Social National Party, which The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson described as “openly neo-fascist.” As The Grayzone Project reported, Parubiy appeared in a Nazi-style uniform, packing a pistol beneath a Wolfsangel symbol on the cover of his Mein Kampf-style memoir, “View from the Right.”
Targeting the Kremlin
The ability to influence public opinion has become a critical asset in any state’s arsenal. The war in Ukraine is a clear example of this. In order to increase global support for their country, Ukraine’s political leaders target appeals for help to specific audiences and receive it from the Atlantic Council, among others.
All materials in one way or another concerning Russia are presented one-sidedly and seek to form a negative image of Russia, which prevents the realization of more peaceful relations between the U.S. and Russia.
One of the reports from the Atlantic Council—“The Kremlin’s Trojan Horses”—is characteristic in its bias and levying of accusations directed against Russia that are not verifiable. The report claims that Russia, for example, has been incessantly interfering in both U.S. and European politics and should be held accountable for its actions.[4] But it does not offer definitive proof and ignores evidence that has emerged, which points to the politicized dimensions of the allegations.
Other reports declare Russia, along with China, to be the main enemy of the U.S., which engages in cyber and other forms of hybrid warfare, necessitating the creation of a transatlantic counter-hybrid strategy to combat.[5]
It can be assumed that the NATO-led Atlantic Council is already actively working to create new information weapons to manipulate the human mind and change human behavior. The exploitation of human consciousness has become a mass industry.
And it is expected that new tools of artificial intelligence will soon provide specialists in the field of information-psychological operations radically expanded opportunities to manipulate the human mind and change human behavior. It is highly likely that information-warfare operations are also being tested against the entire global community.
So in 2021, August Cole of the Atlantic Council and Hervé Le Guyader produced a sci-fi essay—though in the first part of the publication, it describes high-ranking NATO officers meeting in Tallinn in 2028 and having a conversation with very concrete, practical recommendations.[6]
For example:
1: Warfare has changed radically away from kinetics, and the same should be true for NATO. Traditional military-only kinetic operations will always exist, but the overall threat picture is much larger, as demonstrated every day. If NATO sticks to its current five areas of operations, its capabilities will not suffice to repel attacks, and that is a straight path to obsolescence.
2: Trust, especially between allies, is a deliberate vulnerability. Like any international organization, NATO relies on trust between its partners. Trust is based on respect for some explicit and tangible agreements, but also on “invisible contracts,” an exchange of values, which is not easy when so many Allied nations have been fighting each other for centuries.
Given these developments and the existing open statements about the need to conduct a new type of non-kinetic warfare aimed at the minds of people, the question arises not only about the need to counter such aggressive attempts, but also about their admissibility, since we are not even talking about conditional enemies, but a threat to most countries and peoples of the world, including citizens of NATO countries, as these technologies of manipulation and influence, first of all, are tested on them.
The Atlantic Council recommends countering Russian efforts to resolve the conflict in Ukraine peacefully: Russia’s defeat would, allegedly, give Western countries an opportunity to restructure the post-World War II global security system. It proposes abolishing veto rights of permanent members of the UN Security Council organization while increasing the role of NATO and the EU in Eurasia.[7]
The organization’s expert Anders Åslund stated that NATO should bomb Russia—a call for World War III essentially.
It is noteworthy that Åslund expressed the opinion that Ukrainian officials are not interested in fighting corruption, because they control the economy and profit from it: “Because they are interested in corruption, they live off it. The Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko probably gets a lot of money for not fighting corruption. If he fought corruption, he would earn nothing but his small salary.”[8] Then he suddenly changed his position and retracted his statements about Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko.[9]
In an official report released by the Atlantic Council, experts called for increased supplies of offensive weapons to Ukraine, which should ensure that Ukrainian fighters capture the republics of Donbass along with their capitals of Donetsk and Luhansk. [10]
Another Council fellow, Max Brooks, suggested that assets of Russian citizens frozen in the West could be used to buy aircraft for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
As we can see, the Atlantic Council, a NATO think tank, is inciting Western countries to open confrontation with Russia by threatening the outbreak of nuclear war.
The Council also calls on the U.S. and its partners to deepen and expand their military and financial support for Ukraine. Experts emphasize that the Biden administration considers the conflict in Ukraine to be the decisive battle of the post-Cold War era.
It is worth noting that, only since January 2021, the U.S. has allocated more than $32.8 billion in security assistance to Ukraine, while, according to experts, the above funds could have been spent on American citizens and the stabilization of the U.S. and world economy.
[Source: state.gov]
In order to weaken Russia’s influence, the Atlantic Council calls on post-Soviet countries to stop supporting the Russian identity and suggests that Western leaders foment discord within political blocs created by Russia.
Thus, the Atlantic Council is used by U.S. government circles in order to set different countries against each other at the expense of U.S. citizens. That is why it is extremely important today to address the issue of providing and communicating objective information to the world community about the ongoing events, including the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. This is necessary, among other things, in order to avoid all kinds of speculation and further loss of life.
Notes:
- In John Bellamy Foster, John Ross, and Deborah Veneziale, Washington’s New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023), 42. ↑
- https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/about/ ↑
- https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Atlantic-Council-Annual-Report-2021-2022.pdf ↑
- https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/the-kremlins-trojan-horses-3-0/ ↑
- https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/a-strategic-concept-for-countering-russian-and-chinese-hybrid-threats/ ↑
- https://www.innovationhub-act.org/sites/default/files/2021-04/ENG%20version%20v6.pdf ↑
- https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/ukrainian-victory-can-deal-a-decisive-blow-to-russian-imperialism/ ↑
- https://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2018/02/2/7170362/ ↑
- https://ukrainian.voanews.com/a/aslund-pro-lutsenka/4841240.html ↑
- https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/russia-crisis-military-assessment-how-ukraine-can-take-the-fight-to-russia/ ↑
Valeriy Krylko is a freelance journalist, and translator of news articles in online media (English-Russian). These articles are published in European and Russian-language media. He is closely affiliated with independent outlets covering the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, and can be reached at: vkrylko098@gmail.com
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