SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
nato
Trump Cuts, NATO Withdrawals Weakening Landmine Treaty and Endangering Lives
"The Trump administration's deep cuts to foreign aid are now disrupting mine clearance operations," one campaigner said ahead of International Day of Mine Action.
Apr 01, 2025
International Day for Mine Action on April 4 is typically an occasion to take stock of humanity's progress toward eradicating the scourge of landmines; however, with the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump dramatically slashing foreign aid and several European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization members withdrawing from the landmark Mine Ban Treaty, campaigners say there's little worth celebrating this Friday.
Mary Wareham, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Crisis, Conflict, and Arms program, said Tuesday that International Day of Mine Action "is a moment to highlight the work of the thousands of deminers around the world who clear and destroy landmines and explosive remnants of war."
"They risk their lives to help communities recover from armed conflict and its intergenerational impacts," Wareham—a joint recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for her work with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL)—continued. "But due to devastating developments driven largely by two countries that have not banned antipersonnel landmines, the United States and Russia, this Mine Action Day does not feel like much of a celebration."
"For over three decades, the U.S. has been the world's largest contributor to humanitarian demining, mine risk education, and rehabilitation programs for landmine survivors," Wareham noted. "But the Trump administration's deep cuts to foreign aid are now disrupting mine clearance operations. Thousands of deminers have been fired or put on administrative leave pending the completion of so-called reviews. It's unclear if this crucial support will continue. The price of Trump administration cuts will be evident as casualties increase."
Responding to the Trump cuts, Anne Héry, advocacy director at the Maryland-based group Humanity & Inclusion—a founding ICBL member—said:
Any delay in clearance prolongs the danger of contamination by explosive ordnance for affected populations. Clearance operations save lives, especially children, who are often victims of explosive devices. They also enable communities to use land for agriculture, construction, and other economic activities. This funding cut will further displace vulnerable populations who cannot return home due to contamination. It will also result in limited access to schools, healthcare facilities, and water sources in contaminated areas.
The Trump administration's seeming disdain for Ukrainian—and by extension much of Europe's—security concerns, combined with Russia's ongoing invasion and occupation of much of Ukraine, has some E.U. and NATO members looking for other ways to defend against potential Russian aggression.
Earlier this month, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania said they would withdraw from the 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production, and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction, also known as the Ottawa Treaty and the Mine Ban Treaty.
In a joint statement, the four countries' defense ministers explained that "military threats to NATO member states bordering Russia and Belarus have significantly increased" and that "with this decision we are sending a clear message [that] our countries are prepared and can use every necessary measure to defend our security needs."
As Wareham also noted: "Russian forces have used antipersonnel landmines extensively in Ukraine since 2022, causing civilian casualties and contaminating agricultural land. Ukraine has also used antipersonnel mines and has received them from the U.S., in violation of the Mine Ban Treaty."
In another blow to the Mine Ban Treaty, Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo announced Tuesday that Finland is preparing to quit the pact, a move he said "will give us the possibility to prepare for the changes in the security environment in a more versatile way."
#Estonia #Latvia #Lithuania #Finland #Poland – DO NOT EXIT the Mine Ban Treaty! Your choices shape the future. "Young people are watching, and we’re counting on you" to uphold the ban on landmines! #MineFreeWorld #ProtectMineBan
[image or embed]
— International Campaign to Ban Landmines (@minefreeworld.bsky.social) April 1, 2025 at 7:04 AM
Wareham said that "the proposed treaty withdrawals raise the question of what other humanitarian disarmament treaties are at risk: chemical weapons? cluster munitions? The military utility of any weapon must be weighed against the expected humanitarian damage."
"To avoid further eroding humanitarian norms, Poland and the Baltic states should reject proposals to leave the Mine Ban Treaty," she added. "They should instead reaffirm their collective commitment to humanitarian norms aimed at safeguarding humanity in war."
Keep ReadingShow Less
NATO Chief Rebuffs Trump's Attempt to Use Alliance to Help US Take Greenland
"Trump is causing a completely unforced recession, the markets tanking, and your 401(k)s plummeting, and he's focused on invading Greenland," said one observer.
Mar 13, 2025
North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary General Mark Rutte met with President Donald Trump on Thursday at the White House in Washington, D.C., where he brushed off the Republican leader's suggestion that the transatlantic alliance might get involved in his quixotic bid to annex the autonomous territory of another NATO member.
Revisiting his wish to somehow acquire Greenland from Denmark—an outcome opposed by Greenland, Denmark, and a majority of Americans—Trump told reporters during a joint press conference with Rutte and other NATO and U.S. officials including Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that he's bullish on the prospects of annexation.
"I think it'll happen," the president said. "And I'm just thinking, I didn't give it much thought before, but I'm sitting with a man that could be very instrumental. You know, Mark, we need that for international security, not just security, international."
At one point during the meeting, Trump turned to Hegseth and remarked, "You know, we have a couple of bases on Greenland already, and we have quite a few soldiers, and maybe you'll see more and more soldiers go there, and I don't know, what do you think about that, Pete?"
"Don't answer that, Pete," Trump said, eliciting laughter.
Maintaining the congenial vibe of the meeting, Rutte said with a laugh that "when it comes to Greenland yes or not joining the U.S., I would leave that outside, for me, this discussion, because I don't want to drag NATO into that."
The former longtime Dutch prime minister then said that Trump is "totally right" about countering Chinese and Russian regional influence, and that NATO cooperation on that matter is "very important."
While many observers focused on Rutte's diplomatic rejection of Trump's desire to acquire Greenland, Rasmus Jarlov, a member of Denmark's Parliament representing the Conservative People's Party, said on social media that "we do not appreciate the secretary general of NATO joking with Trump about Greenland like this."
"It would mean war between two NATO countries," Jarlov warned. "Greenland has just voted against immediate independence from Denmark and does not want to be American, ever."
The center-right Demokraatit Party pulled off a surprise victory Tuesday in Greenland's parliamentary election, with Jens-Frederik Nielsen, the territory's likely next prime minister, vehemently rejecting U.S. annexation.
"I hope it sends a clear message to [Trump] that we are not for sale," he said of the election results in an interview with Sky News. "We don't want to be Americans. No, we don't want to be Danes. We want to be Greenlanders, and we want our own independence in the future. And we want to build our own country by ourselves."
Trump's comments came on the same day that
NBC Newscited U.S. officials who said the president has ordered the Pentagon to prepare plans to "take back" the Panama Canal—including through the use of military force if deemed necessary.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Is This the Beginning or the End of a New Cold War?
We hope that Trump and European leaders can recognize the crossroads at which they are standing, and the chance history is giving them to choose the path of peace.
Mar 11, 2025
When European Union leaders met in Brussels on February 6 to discuss the war in Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron called this time “a turning point in history.” Western leaders agree that this is an historic moment when decisive action is needed, but what kind of action depends on their interpretation of the nature of this moment.
Is this the beginning of a new Cold War between the U.S., NATO, and Russia or the end of one? Will Russia and the West remain implacable enemies for the foreseeable future, with a new iron curtain between them through what was once the heart of Ukraine? Or can the United States and Russia resolve the disputes and hostility that led to this war in the first place, so as to leave Ukraine with a stable and lasting peace?
Some European leaders see this moment as the beginning of a long struggle with Russia, akin to the beginning of the Cold War in 1946, when Winston Churchill warned that “an iron curtain has descended” across Europe.
So are the new European militarists reading the historical moment correctly? Or are they jumping on the bandwagon of a disastrous Cold War that could, as Biden and Trump have warned, lead to World War III?
On March 2, echoing Churchill, European Council President Ursula von der Leyen declared that Europe must turn Ukraine into a “steel porcupine.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he wants up to 200,000 European troops on the eventual cease-fire line between Russia and Ukraine to “guarantee” any peace agreement, and insists that the United States must provide a “backstop,” meaning a commitment to send U.S. forces to fight in Ukraine if war breaks out again.
Russia has repeatedly said it won’t agree to NATO forces being based in Ukraine under any guise. “We explained today that the appearance of armed forces from the same NATO countries, but under a false flag, under the flag of the European Union or under national flags, does not change anything in this regard,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on February 18. “Of course this is unacceptable to us.”
But the U.K. is persisting in a campaign to recruit a “coalition of the willing,” the same term the U.S. and U.K. coined for the list of countries they persuaded to support the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. In that case, only Australia, Denmark, and Poland took small parts in the invasion; Costa Rica publicly insisted on being removed from the list; and the term was widely lampooned as the “coalition of the billing” because the U.S. recruited so many countries to join it by promising them lucrative foreign aid deals.
Far from the start of a new Cold War, U.S. President Donald Trump and other leaders see this moment as more akin to the end of the original Cold War, when then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met in Reykjavik in Iceland in 1986 and began to bridge the divisions caused by 40 years of Cold War hostility.
Like Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin today, Reagan and Gorbachev were unlikely peacemakers. Gorbachev had risen through the ranks of the Soviet Communist Party to become its general secretary and Soviet premier in March 1985, in the midst of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and he didn’t begin to withdraw Soviet forces from Afghanistan until 1988. Reagan oversaw an unprecedented Cold War arms buildup, a U.S.-backed genocide in Guatemala, and covert and proxy wars throughout Central America. And yet Gorbachev and Reagan are now widely remembered as peacemakers.
While Democrats deride Trump as a Putin stooge, in his first term in office Trump was actually responsible for escalating the Cold War with Russia. After the Pentagon had milked its absurd, self-fulfilling “War on Terror” for trillions of dollars, it was Trump and his psychopathic Defense Secretary, General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, who declared the shift back to strategic competition with Russia and China as the Pentagon’s new gravy train in their 2018 National Defense Strategy. It was also Trump who lifted President Barack Obama’s restrictions on sending offensive weapons to Ukraine.
Trump’s head-spinning about-turn in U.S. policy has left its European allies with whiplash and reversed the roles they each have played for generations. France and Germany have traditionally been the diplomats and peacemakers in the Western alliance, while the U.S. and U.K. have been infected with a chronic case of war fever that has proven resistant to a long string of military defeats and catastrophic impacts on every country that has fallen prey to their warmongering.
In 2003, France’s Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin led the opposition to the invasion of Iraq in the United Nations Security Council. France, Germany, and Russia issued a joint statement to say that they would “not let a proposed resolution pass that would authorize the use of force. Russia and France, as permanent members of the Security Council, will assume all their responsibilities on this point.”
At a press conference in Paris with German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, French President Jacques Chirac said, “Everything must be done to avoid war… As far as we’re concerned, war always means failure.”
As recently as 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, it was once again the U.S. and U.K. that rejected and blocked peace negotiations in favor of a long war, while France, Germany, and Italy continued to call for new negotiations, even as they gradually fell in line with the U.S. long war policy.
Former German Chancellor Schröder took part in the peace negotiations in Turkey in March and April 2022, and flew to Moscow at Ukraine’s request to meet with Putin. In an interview with Berliner Zeitung in 2023, Schröder confirmed that the peace talks only failed “because everything was decided in Washington.”
With then-U.S. President Joe Biden still blocking new negotiations in 2023, one of the interviewers asked Schröder, “Do you think you can resume your peace plan?”
Schröder replied, “Yes, and the only ones who can initiate this are France and Germany… Macron and Scholz are the only ones who can talk to Putin. Chirac and I did the same in the Iraq War. Why can’t support for Ukraine be combined with an offer of talks to Russia? The arms deliveries are not a solution for eternity. But no one wants to talk. Everyone sits in trenches. How many more people have to die?”
Since 2022, President Macron and a Thatcherite team of iron ladies—European Council President von der Leyen; former German Foreign Minister Analena Baerbock; and Estonia’s former Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, now the E.U.’s foreign policy chief—have promoted a new militarization of Europe, egged on from behind the scenes by European and U.S. arms manufacturers.
Has the passage of time, the passing of the World War II generation, and the distortion of history washed away the historical memory of two world wars from a continent that was destroyed by war only 80 years ago? Where is the next generation of French and German diplomats in the tradition of de Villepin and Schröder today? How can sending German tanks to fight in Ukraine, and now in Russia itself, fail to remind Russians of previous German invasions and solidify support for the war? And won’t the call for Europe to confront Russia by moving from a “welfare state to a warfare state” only feed the rise of the European hard right?
So are the new European militarists reading the historical moment correctly? Or are they jumping on the bandwagon of a disastrous Cold War that could, as Biden and Trump have warned, lead to World War III?
When Trump’s foreign policy team met with their Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia on February 18, ending the war in Ukraine was the second part of the three-part plan they agreed on. The first was to restore full diplomatic relations between the United States and Russia, and the third was to work on a series of other problems in U.S.-Russian relations.
The order of these three stages is interesting, because, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted, it means that the negotiations over Ukraine will be the first test of restored relations between the U.S. and Russia.
If the negotiations for peace in Ukraine are successful, they can lead to further negotiations over restoring arms-control treaties, nuclear disarmament, and cooperation on other global problems that have been impossible to resolve in a world stuck in a zombie-like Cold War that powerful interests would not allow to die.
It was a welcome change to hear Secretary Rubio say that the post-Cold War unipolar world was an anomaly and that now we have to adjust to the reality of a multipolar world. But if Trump and his hawkish advisers are just trying to restore U.S. relations with Russia as part of a “reverse Kissinger” scheme to isolate China, as some analysts have suggested, that would perpetuate America’s debilitating geopolitical crisis instead of solving it.
The United States and our friends in Europe have a new chance to make a clean break from the three-way geopolitical power struggle between the United States, Russia, and China that has hamstrung the world since the 1970s, and to find new roles and priorities for our countries in the emerging multipolar world of the 21st Century.
We hope that Trump and European leaders can recognize the crossroads at which they are standing, and the chance history is giving them to choose the path of peace. France and Germany in particular should remember the wisdom of Dominique de Villepin, Jacques Chirac, and Gerhard Schröder in the face of U.S. and British plans for aggression against Iraq in 2003.
This could be the beginning of the end of the permanent state of war and Cold War that has held the world in its grip for more than a century. Ending it would allow us to finally prioritize the progress and cooperation we so desperately need to solve the other critical problems the whole world is facing in the 21st Century. As General Mark Milley said back in November 2022 when he called for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, we must “seize the moment.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular