NATO AT 75: A TIME FOR CELEBRATION?

Foreword

When an institution reaches its 75th anniversary, its supporters offer up a rose-colored litany of its accomplishments, virtues, and remarkable longevity. The NATO summit in Washington was no exception with plenty of speeches celebrating the alliance's past achievements and extolling its role as the cornerstone of trans-Atlantic relations.

On January 17, 1961, in his farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the establishment of a "military-industrial complex."

Defending Europe against Soviet aggression is why NATO was created in 1949. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, however, NATO had lost its way.

Last June 17, NATO disclosed the 2024 defense expenditure of its member countries for a total  of 1,474.399 billion  US $. US defense expenditure rose from 641.253 billion US $ in 2015 to 967.707 billion US $ in 2024.

On Jan 24, 2024, in his first major speech as UK Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps said that Britain should prepare for war with China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea in the next five years. He thus described a shift from a post-war to a pre-war world.

The narrative, advanced by several scholars, former diplomats and selected journalists, asserts that NATO’s eastward expansion created the context for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This narrative has been de-emphasized in the Western mainstream news.

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's Arms Industry Database noted that sales of arms and military services by the sector's largest 100 companies confirms that Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics (all US companies) represents more than 50% of the world turnover.

NATO 75th anniversary celebration

President Joe Biden told the civilian and military leaders from 32 countries assembled in Washington that NATO has a new mission in stopping Russian dictator Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

“Today NATO is more powerful than ever. Our commitment is broad and deep,” he said. “Our nations will continue to keep faith in what we pledged in years to come.” How long the United States will honor that pledge, though, is unclear. Donald Trump, former president and Republican presidential nominee to challenge Biden’s reelection, has long threatened to abandon NATO.

The three-day spectacle has featured some major developments, with the alliance’s declaration that Ukraine’s accession to NATO is “irreversible” chief among them. But the problem is Trump might unwind much of what was agreed to in Washington should he recapture the Oval Office in November.

President Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address

As President of the United States for two terms, Eisenhower had slowed the push for increased defense spending despite pressure to build more military equipment and had warned against the establishment of a military-industrial complex.

On January 17, 1961, Eisenhower did maintain: “In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together”.

2024 NATO Defense  Expenditure

Last June 17, NATO disclosed the defense expenditure of its member countries for a total  of 1,474.399 billion dollars (greater than total spending by the rest of the world) while in 2014 NATO defense spending was of 943.218 billion dollars.

The figures are enormous, an all-time high, especially when compared for 2024 to China (second highest national spending after the USA) with 236 billion dollars and Russia (third maximum national expenditure) with 140 billion dollars.

Among European countries, the largest budgets are those of the United Kingdom (97.680), Germany (82.107), France (64.271), Poland (34.975) and Italy (34.462).

Currently eight European countries have over 100 thousand soldiers: Turkey (481,000), Poland (216,000), France (205,000), Germany (186,000), Italy (171,000), United Kingdom (138,000), Spain (117,000),  and  Greece (111,000).

US Arms Industry

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics (all US companies) represents more than 50% of the world turnover. Wherever there are arms competitions in any parts of the world, more US weapons will be purchased. The arms industry directly serves the military. And the US military is not only for the maintenance of defense, but also for the purpose of expansion in the world.

Meanwhile, such industries in the US have absolute advantages.

The military industry is the core of the existing manufacturing industry in the US. Most of the manufacturing industry revolves around the survival and development of military industry and its supplies. This part of the industry is estimated to account for more than 60% of the total US manufacturing industry.

Wars and defense industry, and the strength of the US are interdependent. To weaken the US defense industry would be to weaken the backbone of the US economy and undermine US strength.

Defense industry is meant to make money off of war. It provides a constant source of power for the US to maintain its dominance to the world and make huge profits from the process.

NATO

Defending Europe against Soviet aggression is why the military alliance was created in 1949. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, however, NATO had lost its way.

As soon as the original Cold War ended, special interests in the US launched the New Cold War. The present war in Ukraine is one consequence. Whether there will be a future NATO war in Asia, triggered by confrontation over Taiwan island, is today an open question.

The transatlantic oligarchy was not content with the end of the Cold War. Instead, after the end of the bi-polar world, Washington sought global hegemony. The US-led NATO war machine was to serve as the enforcement arm of US-led Western hegemony.

The veteran US diplomat George Kennan, architect of the west’s policy of Soviet containment, described NATO's eastward expansion in 1997 as “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era”.

In 2016, US president Donald Trump called NATO “obsolete” and complained it cost the US too much money. Most damning of all, French president Emmanuel Macron described the alliance as “brain-dead” in 2019.

Is NATO preparing for World War III?

Prioritising remilitarisation over economic growth is dangerously short-sighted. If the UK and US tried to take on the four countries (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea)  on Shapps’s blacklist there would be eight enemy troops to every British or American soldier. [1]

Taken together, these four countries boast a total of 8,2 million troops, counting both active army personnel and reserves.  Is this reversible in the five-year time horizon Shapps was giving for World War III? Not a chance.

The alliance’s backup plan appears to involve preparing the Western world for total global war and potential nuclear annihilation. Watching on, it is hard not to be reminded of the black comedy of Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr Strangelove”.

In the past few years, it has become popular to posture over conflict with Beijing. Politicians and talking heads want to rearm to meet the threat of a rising China without saying how this conflict would look like and how would be won. No mention on when the militarisation will take place, how much it will cost or how it will work. It is always signalled that this remilitarisation will happen at a vague point in the future. Perhaps it is time for proponents to fill in the blanks.

NATO and Ukraine

Instead of working on a peaceful settlement and seeking ways to restore the European security architecture, NATO countries are waging a proxy war on Russia by financing the Kiev regime and supplying it with arms and military hardware.

The narrative, advanced by several scholars, former diplomats and selected journalists, asserts that NATO’s eastward expansion created the context for Russia's invasion. This narrative has been de-emphasized in the Western mainstream news. Such framing is contrary to the historical and documentary record, and links to a marginalization of non-military solutions to solve the conflict.

Western media

The news media must balance a diverse set of arguments made on all sides of a conflict and consider their factual veracity. Moreover, it is the news media's task to critically reflect on the official justifications of war to limit a “government’s war-making powers”.

The mainstream news media has downplayed Russia’s security concerns and NATO’s militarization of the region.

NATO, which had been established as a defensive military alliance during the Cold War, expanded eastward, entering in what Russia still regarded as its sphere of influence.

The press de-emphasized frames that depicted Russia as a country with a national interest struggling against NATO expansion. This finding encapsulates the Western consensus.

Many of the items mentioning NATO expansion legitimized this policy or only cursorily included critical statements.

Background

In 1990, during negotiations about German reunification, the administration of then-US President Bush made a “categorical assurance” to the then-President of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev: ”If Gorbachev agreed (through a gentlemen agreement) that a reunified Germany was part of NATO, then NATO would not enlarge further east to incorporate former Warsaw Pact countries in the alliance”.

The rationale was to allow for “a non-aligned buffer zone” between the Russian border and that of the NATO states. In 1994, the then-US President Bill Clinton administration made NATO enlargement an official policy. Does this mean that a categorial assurance was broken by the West? Russian leaders have, indeed, suggested that Russian actions in the war with Georgia in 2008 and the conflict with Ukraine in 2014 happened partly as a response to such a broken assurance.

That Washington made a categorical promise to Moscow was confirmed by Jack F. Matlock, former US Ambassador to Russia in Moscow. Furthermore, declassified US government documents, published in 2017 by the National Security Archive, shed light on how these assurances unfolded.

In June 1997, Clinton received a letter written by 50 former bipartisan senators, cabinet secretaries and ambassadors calling US efforts to extend NATO “a policy error of historic importance”

Around the time of the 2008 NATO summit, William Burns, then-US ambassador in Moscow, wrote the following memo to the then-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests”.

According to the foreign policy analyst Carpenter: “Warnings by many US policymakers were ignored and Washington’s treatment of Russia was a policy blunder of epic proportions. We are now paying the price for the US foreign policy establishment’s myopia and arrogance.”

A new Security Architecture

Diplomacy is urgently needed. It is impossible to predict the outcome of the Ukraine war. Ukraine is already partitioned and has surely lost the Donbas region and Crimea. How much more territory Russia will gain is an open question. It may be that in the end Russia will hold historic Novorossiya from Odessa to Kharkov.

What is clear is that Europe needs a new security architecture after this tragic war. Such new security architecture must be inclusive on the basis of equal security. A starting point for a diplomatic process to achieve this is the “Charter of Paris” signed by member states of the Conference on Security and Co-Operation in Europe (CSCE) in November 1990.

Russia put forward diplomatic proposals to Washington and to NATO in December 2021. Both were rejected out of hand. War followed.

It is urgent to start a diplomatic process to terminate the present Ukraine War. Then negotiations for a peace settlement of the Ukraine war can take place. A sustainable peace settlement must be inclusive and must involve constructive new security architecture for Europe.

Considerations

Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Reform Party did maintain on 21 June 2024: “We have provoked this war. The West’s errors in Ukraine have been catastrophic. I won’t apologise for telling the truth. Until we admit what we got wrong, we will never have a lasting peace”.

Pope Francis in 2022 said bluntly that it was "NATO's barking at Russia's doorstep" that angered Russia and eventually led to the flames of war.

NATO claims to be a defensive organization, but in fact it has repeatedly violated international law and wantonly waged war against sovereign states, undermining global and regional peace, with the death and displacement of a large number of innocent civilians.

In its pursuit of “absolute security”, NATO engaged in five consecutive waves of eastward expansion after the end of the Cold War, which did not make Europe safer, but rather sowed the seed of conflict between Russia and Ukraine, reigniting conflict on the European continent.

NATO has been involved in almost all wars and conflicts. US has waged wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and many other countries in order to grab profits and achieve its own aims. The US is an expansionist country and NATO is the very tool in the hands of the US.

Conclusion

Putin didn’t have to go to war. But he was pushed to the wall. Had the situation been reversed, if Russia or China had tried to encircle the US with military bases and practices launching missiles right on the US border, as NATO did in Estonia in 2020 and 2021 (and conducting in Ukraine three military exercises in June, July and September 2021), Washington would have gone to war, too, and most other countries also would have done the same, assuming they had sufficient military power.

NATO first Secretary General, Baron Hastings Ismay, described its purpose bluntly: “NATO mission is to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine allowed US to impose its control on the European states, forcing them to prioritise NATO as key to their defence and forcing them to increase military spending. Germany was brought to heel and the emphasis on NATO allowed Britain to resume its role as the American watch dog in Europe.

Current US President Joe Biden admitted, in a 18 June 1997 talk at the Atlantic Council (NATO’s de facto think-tank), that eastward NATO expansion into the Baltic states would cause a “vigorous and hostile reaction” by Russia.

The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania did indeed become part of NATO in 2004 (Estonia and Latvia directly border Russia).

Biden’s 1997 comments were a clear admission that Washington knew its policy of pushing NATO right up onto Russia’s borders could force Russia to respond with force. Was Biden at that time wiser and smarter than these days when he calls Zelensky Putin and Kamala Harris Trump?

The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.