Recent NATO provocations against Russia in the North Sea and Norwegian Sea serve as a stark reminder that, even as U.S.-Russian relations are improving in some respects, the British-steered military policy of the NATO countries, including the U.S., is still vectored toward a total confrontation with the largest nuclear power on the planet.
On Aug. 24, as the nuclear aircraft carrier group the USS Gerald Ford and the Royal Norwegian Navy ran patrols off the coast of Norway, NATO forces were mobilized to hunt for a Russian submarine which was supposedly tracking the carrier. The U.K.’s Royal Air Force scrambled spy planes to join NATO in what some sources called a “highly unusual surge” of activity. American, Norwegian, and French planes also participated in the search, with NATO allies deploying at least 27 specialist submarine-hunting sorties that ran along the border of Russia’s air defense zone.
In an interview aired on Sept. 5 with Glenn Diesen, Col. Douglas Macgregor commented on the pattern of such provocations: “We’ve also got a lot of vessels carrying Tomahawk missiles … moving towards Novaya Zemlya, which is very unusual. It’s up on the Arctic. Then you also had a B2A bomber fly a route to Norway and back to the United States in the middle of all of this. And somebody said, well, this is because of the upcoming ‘Zapad 2025’ exercise that the Russians schedule years in advance.… I don’t think that’s really true. I think what we’re seeing right now is an attempt to bully by practicing strikes on Russian facilities using bombers and missile carriers, practicing for the purpose of attacking Russian submarines.”
