NATO: 75 and Still Threatening
Bring out the bon bons, the bubbles, and the praise filled memoranda for that old alliance. At the three-quarter century mark of its existence, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is showing itself to be a greater nuisance than ever, gossiping, meddling, and dreaming of greater acts of mischief under the umbrella of manufactured insecurity. It is also being coquettish to certain countries (Ukraine, figures prominently in the wooing stakes) making promises it can never make good.
Its defenders, as is to be expected, see something very different before the mirror. They call the alliance a call for freedom, its enduring importance a reassuring presence. The more appropriate response would be convenience, the assurance of an alliance with collective obligations that would, given the circumstances, compel all parties to wage war against the aggressor. In terms of alliances, this is one programmed for conflict.
NATO is a crusted visage of a problem long dead. In the Cold War theatre, it featured in the third act of every play involving the United States and the USSR, a performance that always took place under the threat of a nuclear cloud. Any confrontation in Europe’s centre could have resulted in the pulverization of an entire continent. For its part, Moscow had the Warsaw Pact countries.
At the end of the Cold War, NATO had effectively ceased to be relevant as a deterrent force on the European continent. A new cut of clothing was sought for the members. Rather than passing into retirement, it became, in essence, a broader auxiliary force of US power. In the absence of a countering Soviet Union, the organisation adopted a gonzo approach to international security.
In 1999, the alliance became a killing machine for evangelical humanitarianism, ostensibly seeking to protect one ethnic group against the predations of another in Kosovo. In 2011, it involved itself in military operations against a country posing no threat to any members of the alliance. NATO, along with a steady air attacks and missile barrages, enforced the no-fly zone over Libya as the country was ushered to imminent, post-Qaddafi collapse. When the International Security Force (ISAF) completed its ill-fated mission in Afghanistan in 2015, NATO was again on the scene.
NATO’s Strategic Concept document released at the end of June 2022 took much sustenance from the Ukraine conflict while warning about China’s ambitions, a fairly crude admission that it wished to move beyond its territorial limits. “The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security and values.” Why such an alliance should worry about such eastward ambitions illustrates the wayward dysfunction of the association.
On April 27, 2022 the then UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and ultimately doomed prime minister pushed the view that NATO needed to be globalised. Her Mansion House speech at the Lord Mayor’s Easter Banquet was one of those cat-out-of-the-bag disclosures that abandons pretence revealing, in its place, a disturbing reality.
After making it clear that NATO’s “open door policy” was “sacrosanct”, Truss also saw security in global terms, another way of promoting a broader commitment to international mischief. She rejected “the false choice between Euro-Atlantic security and Indo-Pacific security. In the modern world we need both.” A “global NATO” was needed. “By that I don’t mean extending the membership to those from other regions. I mean that NATO must have a global outlook, ready to tackle global threats.”
Praise for the alliance tends to resemble an actuarial assessment about risk and security. Consider this from former US ambassador to NATO, Douglas Lute. NATO, in his mind, is “the single most important geostrategic advantage over any potential adversary or competitor”. With pride, he notes that “Russia and China have nothing comparable. The 32 allies in NATO train together, operate together, live together under a standing unified command structure, making them far more capable militarily than any ad-hoc arrangement.”
There is nothing to suggest in these remarks that NATO was one of the single most provocative security arrangements that helped precipitate a war that torments and convulses eastern Europe. Many a Washington mandarin has been of such a view: moving closer to Russia’s borders was not merely an act of diplomatic condescension but open military provocation.
One should, with tireless consistency, refer to the State Department’s doyen of Soviet studies, George F. Kennan, on this very point. In 1997, he issued the appropriate warning about the decision to expand NATO towards the Russian border: “Such a decision may be expected to inflame nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”
This speared provocation is repeated in the 2024 NATO Declaration made in Washington this month. It is effaced of history and context, Ukraine being a tabula rasa in the international system with no role other than that of glorified victimhood, a charity case abused in the international system. “We stand in unity and solidarity in the face of a brutal war of aggression on the European continent and a critical time for our security,” states the declaration.
Kyiv is promised aid under the NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine program, though such provision is, in the manner of an all-promising eunuch, crowned by a caveat: “NSATU will not, under international law, make NATO a party to the conflict.” The prospects for future conflict are guaranteed by the promise, however empty, that, “Ukraine’s future is in NATO.”
The declaration goes on to speak on the “interoperable” and “integrated” nature of Kyiv’s operations with the alliance. “As Ukraine continues this vital work, we will continue to support it on its irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership.”
NATO’s warring streak was further affirmed at the Washington summit by injudicious remarks about trying to make it “Trump proof” – a testament to the sleepless nights the strategists must be having at the prospect of a presidency that may change the order of things. He is bound to have gotten wind of that fact. Aggravated, the Republican contender may well withdraw the US imperium from the alliance’s clutches. In Washington’s absence, the NATO family might retreat into fractious insignificance. The ensuing anarchy, rather than stimulating war, may well do the opposite.
Remarks on Stop the War Coalition webinar July 16, 2024
After someone shot Donald Trump, Joe Biden said, indignantly, “we resolve our differences at the ballot,” which is classic propaganda, taking something obviously true (namely: it’s evil to shoot people) and using it to make seem true something obviously false (namely: you can use a ballot in a U.S. election to choose policies you support and have them enacted). When Trump and Biden debated, they debated who would destroy Gaza faster and who would make Europe move more money into war. No election ballot in the U.S. will resolve any war. And of course, when Biden says he is running the world, at least 96% of the world doesn’t get any say in that on any ballot.
Here’s another bit of Biden propaganda. See if you can spot any problem with it: “We support NATO in order to work together with the world.” Spot anything?
If you spotted the fact that there are ways to work with the world other than mass-murder, or the fact that NATO is only part of the world and is heartily despised by most of the world in polling, or the fact that NATO decisions are mostly made by the U.S. government and not by all of its members or all of its members and partners, or the fact that the United Nations — deeply flawed as it is — exists and that the most serious longstanding violation of its charter is the existence of NATO as a gang that drags nations into participation in wars, then you win the prize. The prize is getting to go explain things to other people.
Here’s another bit of Democraganda: “We stand with NATO, not with Trump.” Notice anything wrong with that? Personally, I have no trouble denouncing both NATO and Trump. If Trump opposed NATO I wouldn’t support NATO. I didn’t oppose campaign violence eight years ago because Trump was telling rallies to drag protesters out and beat them, and I don’t support election violence now that Trump opposes it. But does Trump oppose NATO? The fact is that Biden’s great accomplishment of getting Europe to take more money out of schools and hospitals and dump it into weapons was done more by Trump than by Biden. Nobody likes to notice this, but Trump’s “Buy more weapons or I’ll tell Russia to attack you,” worked better on the heroic leaders of the free world than did Biden’s “Buy more weapons or I’ll mumble incoherently.”
The U.S. Congress passed legislation to prevent Trump from leaving NATO. But the point wasn’t to prevent Trump leaving NATO. The point was to teach us that leaving NATO is something only a fascistic buffoon who has people at his rallies beaten would do, and to reinforce the lesson, already internalized by millions, that Trump is a servant of the Dark Lord, Vladimir, er I’m sorry, He Who Shall Not Be Named. In reality, of course, Trump and Biden are servants of weapons dealers, and very good ones. As a servant of Russia, Trump was not very good. He sent weapons to Ukraine that Obama wouldn’t, evicted Russian diplomats, sanctioned Russian officials, put missiles practically on Russia’s border, lobbied European nations to drop Russian energy deals, left the Iran agreement, tore up the INF Treaty, rejected Russia’s offers on banning weapons in space and banning cyberwar, expanded NATO eastward, added a NATO partner in Colombia, proposed adding Brazil, splurged on more nukes, bombed Russians in Syria, oversaw the largest war rehearsals in Europe in half a century (now outdone), condemned all proposals for a non-NATO European military, and insisted that Europe stick with NATO.
While NATO is thought of as an alliance of existing militaries, it also expends much of its energy on the NATO Support and Procurement Agency, which lines up weapons deals between manufacturers and governments. The NATO Support and Procurement Agency is headquartered in Luxembourg with “operational centers’’ in France, Hungary, and Italy. It has a greater number of staff and handles greater amounts of money than does NATO itself. According to NATO’s 2023 annual report, NATO’s international staff consisted of 1,352 civilians, but the NATO Support and Procurement Agency employed “more than 1,400 international civilian personnel’’ and in 2023, “the value of the Agency’s business activity exceeded EUR 5 billion,” which is greater than NATO’s total budget. NATO also raises money from its partners to spend on weapons. In January 2024, the prime minister of Japan committed $37 million to NATO for the purpose of buying weapons for Ukraine. NATO’s main purpose now is increasing weapons spending, while trying not to increase non-U.S. weapons manufacturing too much.
Here’s something else Biden says: “We support NATO, not surrender to Putin.” Of course the thought that you could oppose NATO -AND- oppose surrendering to anybody occasionally enters a few heads, and the thought that you could do something else with Putin, such as speak with him, enters many more. At his only press conference this year, last week, Biden was obliged to say “I see no point in speaking with Putin.” Well, people who want life on Earth to survive see a point in it. We’re closer to nuclear war than we’ve ever been, and we know better than we’ve ever known that there is no such thing as a limited nuclear war. That NATO is the world’s leading nuclear war planner gets lost in NATO’s unofficial name. I’ve been at fault perhaps in simply calling it NATO. In the U.S. media its name is usually “the defensive alliance NATO.” As with calling the most openly provoked war in living memory “the Unprovoked War on Ukraine,” you can be sure of one thing right away: NATO is not a defensive alliance. In fact, not a single NATO war has ever even pretended to be defending a NATO member against a foreign invasion. Only once has NATO even claimed to be calling all of its members into a war, the U.S. war of revenge, punishing the people of Afghanistan who had mostly never heard of the crimes of September 11th for the crimes of September 11th. Every other NATO war has lacked even the U.S.-coerced consensus of NATO members, as well as even any pretense of defensiveness.
Here’s another word that, if used properly, can mean nothing whatsoever, what Orwell might have called pure wind. The word is “irreversible.” Sadly, as far as I know, dementia is irreversible, climate collapse is irreversible, unless we learn otherwise. But announcing that the process of Ukraine joining NATO is irreversible isn’t even false. It’s meaningless. It’s a means of neither making Ukraine a NATO member nor refusing to make Ukraine a NATO member, and yet vocalizing certain sounds that resemble human speech.
Sometimes the propagandists start believing their own lies, but for the most part political speech and even political action is a show, put on by the rulers for the ruled. There were times during the early decades of the Cold War when Soviet or U.S. militarists timed incidents to boost the other side’s efforts at increasing military spending. Such symbiotic relations need not be discussed or even thought, but when the day before NATO holds a conference, Russia sends missiles into Kyiv and Belarus threatens to nuke somebody and China has troops do war drills in Europe, the weapons dealers and their corrupt government lackies who thrive on conflict and hatred benefit, and everybody else doesn’t. When government officials obey NATO rather than the people of their nations in shaping their budgets, the world is worse off. When the U.S. blows up your pipeline or puts nukes in your country and your champions of democracy bend over and shout “Thank you, Sir! May I have another?” hope for humanity dies a little bit. Friends don’t let friends use their names to provide NATO’s pseudo-legitimacy for wars.
When people from around the world, working together, without NATO, recently met in Washington DC for a counter-summit and rally, we met as citizens of the world united in opposition to the normalization of mass killing. You can see everything we did at nonatoyespeace.org.
Next June we’ll do the same, but more of it. And we’ll bring indictments with us, because NATO will be conveniently gathering in The Hague. I look forward to seeing you there!
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David Swanson
David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is executive director of World BEYOND War and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson’s books include War Is A Lie and When the World Outlawed War. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk World Radio. He is a Nobel Peace Prize Nominee.
By Vijay Prashad
At the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in Washington, the focus was on Ukraine. In the Washington Declaration, the NATO leaders wrote, “Ukraine’s future is in NATO.” Ukraine formally applied to join NATO in September 2022, but soon found that despite widespread NATO support, several member states (such as Hungary) were uneasy with escalating a conflict with Russia. As early as NATO’s 2008 Bucharest Summit, the members welcomed “Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.” However, the NATO council hesitated because of the border dispute with Russia; if Ukraine had been hastily brought into NATO and if the border dispute escalated (as it did), then NATO would be dragged into a direct war against Russia.
Over the last decade, NATO has expanded its military presence along Russia’s borders. At the NATO summit in Wales (September 2014), NATO implemented its Readiness Action Plan (RAP). This RAP was designed to increase NATO’s military forces in Eastern Europe “from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south.” Two years later, in Warsaw, NATO decided to develop an enhanced Forward Presence (eFP) in the Baltic Sea area with “battlegroups stationed in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland.” The distance between Moscow and the border regions of Estonia and Latvia is a mere 780 kilometers, which is well within the range of a short-range ballistic missile (1,000 kilometers). In response to the NATO build-up, Belarus and Russia conducted Zapad 2017, the largest military exercise by these countries since 1991. Reasonable people at that time would have thought that de-escalation should have become the priority on all sides. But it was not.
Provocations from the NATO member states continued. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the NATO countries settled on a course of fully backing Ukraine and preventing any negotiations toward a peaceful settlement of the dispute. The United States and its NATO allies sent arms and equipment to Ukraine, with U.S. high military officials making provocative statements about their war aims (to “weaken Russia,” for instance). Ukrainian discussions with Russian officials in Belarus and Turkey were set aside by NATO, and Ukraine’s own war aim (merely for Russian forces to withdraw) was ignored. Instead, NATO countries spent billions of dollars on weapons and watched on the sidelines as Ukrainian soldiers died in a futile war. On the sidelines of the NATO summit in Washington, Royal Netherlands Navy Admiral Rob Bauer, who is the chair of NATO’s Military Committee, told Foreign Policy, “The Ukrainians need more to win than just what we have set up.” In other words, the NATO states provide Ukraine with just enough weapons to continue the conflict, but not to change the situation on the ground (either by a victory or a defeat). The NATO states, it seems, want to use Ukraine to bleed Russia.
Blame China
NATO’s Washington Declaration contains a section that is puzzling. It says that China “has become a decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine.” The term “decisive enabler” has attracted significant attention within China, where the government immediately condemned NATO’s characterization of the war in Ukraine. China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said that NATO’s statement “is ill-motivated and makes no sense.” Shortly after Russian troops entered Ukraine, China’s Wang Wenbin of the Foreign Ministry said that “all countries’ sovereignty and territorial integrity should be respected and upheld.” This is precisely the opposite of cheerleading for the war, and since then China has put forward peace proposals to end the war. Accusations that China has supplied Russia with “lethal aid“ have not been substantiated by the NATO countries, and have been denied by China.
Lin Jian asked two key questions at the July 11, 2024, press conference in Beijing: “Who exactly is fueling the flames? Who exactly is ‘enabling’ the conflict?”. The answer is clear since it is NATO that rejects any peace negotiations, NATO countries that are arming Ukraine to prolong the war, and NATO leaders who want to expand NATO eastwards and deny Russia’s plea for a new security architecture (all of this is demonstrated by German parliamentarian Sevim Dağdelen in her new book on NATO’s 75-year history). When Hungary’s Viktor Orban—whose country holds the six-month presidency of the European Union—went to both Russia and Ukraine to talk about a peace process, it was the European states that condemned this mission. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, responded with a harsh rebuke of Orban, writing that “Appeasement will not stop Putin.” Alongside such comments come further promises by the Europeans and the North Americans to provide Ukraine with funds and weapons for the war. Strikingly, the new NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte even allowed Ukraine to use an F-16 jet from the Netherlands given to Ukraine when Rutte was the prime minister of that country to strike Russian soil. That would mean that weapons from a NATO country would be used directly to attack Russia, which would allow Russia to strike back at a NATO state.
NATO’s statement that characterizes China as a “decisive enabler” permitted the Atlantic alliance to defend its “out of area” operation in the South China Sea as part of its defense of its European partners. That is what permitted NATO to say, as outgoing Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in a press conference, that NATO must “continue to strengthen our partnerships, especially in the Indo-Pacific.” These Indo-Pacific Partners are Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea. Interestingly, the largest trading partner of three of these countries is not the United States, but China (Japan is the outlier). Even the analysts of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank have concluded that “a delinking of global production processes and consumption from China is not in sight.” Despite this, these countries have recklessly increased the pressure against China (including New Zealand, which is now eager to join Pillar II of the AUKUS Treaty among Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom). NATO has said that it remains open to “constructive engagement” with China, but there is no sign of such a development.
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
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Vijay Prashad
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. Tings Chak is the art director and a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and lead author of the study “Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China.” She is also a member of Dongsheng, an international collective of researchers interested in Chinese politics and society.
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