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What is the reason for NATO's existence?
The Alliance is the greatest threat to peace and security in Europe
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To mark the two-day NATO summit in Vilnius, which ends today, I wrote for UnHerd a myth-busting piece about the true nature NATO. The latter presents itself as a purely “defensive alliance… working for peace, security and freedom”. The reality, however, is quite different. Aside from the fact that its most powerful member and de facto leader, the US, has bombed more countries than any other nation, NATO itself has a rather violent track record. In 1999, NATO began its 78-day illegal bombing campaign of Yugoslavia, the first act of aggression against a sovereign state committed in Europe since the Second World War. Many civilian targets were hit, including 48 hospitals, 70 schools, 18 kindergartens and 35 churches. Overall, hundreds of civilians were killed, including 81 children. Since then, NATO has been involved in several other conflicts, most notably Afghanistan (following an illegal US-led invasion and bombing campaign) and Libya. None had anything to do with defending its members from external aggression; in all these cases, NATO was quite clearly the aggressor. It’s also far from clear how exactly NATO is providing “security” to Europe. On the contrary, there is ample evidence that NATO played a crucial role in unravelling Europe’s security architecture and creating the conditions for the war in Ukraine, the largest conflict in Europe since the Second World, by aggressively expanding eastward, systematically ignoring Russia’s warnings over the years. Read the rest of the article here.
And now, for paying subscribers only, here’s a selection of some of the best articles I’ve read lately. If you enjoy my writing, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid. Plus, you’ll also get access to my newsletter with the top reads of the week and other exclusive stuff.
SubscribedThe first article is a piece that came out in the New York Times yesterday and which — quite incredibly — essentially makes the same case that I make. It’s tellingly titled “NATO Isn’t What It Says It Is”. Its authors, Grey Anderson and Thomas Meaney, are respectively the editor and one of the contributors to an upcoming book which I will definitely be getting my hands on: Natopolitanism: The Atlantic Alliance since the Cold War. They write that “NATO, from its origins, was never primarily concerned with aggregating military power. … Rather, it set out to bind Western Europe to a far vaster project of a US-led world order, in which American protection served as a lever to obtain concessions on other issues, like trade and monetary policy. In that mission, it has proved remarkably successful”. Indeed. Even more crucially, they argue that, “by forbidding duplication of existing capabilities and prodding allies to accept niche roles, NATO has stymied the emergence of any semiautonomous European force
capable of independent action. As for defense procurement, common standards for interoperability, coupled with the sheer size of the US military-industrial sector and bureaucratic impediments in Brussels, favor American firms at the expense of their European competitors. The alliance, paradoxically, appears to have weakened allies’ ability to defend themselves”. But this is really not a paradox at all:
In fact, NATO is working exactly as it was designed by postwar US planners, drawing Europe into a dependency on American power that reduces its room for maneuver. Far from a costly charity program, NATO secures American influence in Europe on the cheap.
On the same topic, here’s another corker from Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges: “They Lied About Afghanistan & Iraq; Now They’re Lying About Ukraine”. He writes:
The playbook the pimps of war use to lure us into one military fiasco after another, including Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine, does not change. Freedom and democracy are threatened. Evil must be vanquished. Human rights must be protected. The fate of Europe and NATO, along with a “rules based international order” is at stake. Victory is assured. The results are also the same. The justifications and narratives are exposed as lies. The cheery prognosis is false. Those on whose behalf we are supposedly fighting are as venal as those we are fighting against. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was a war crime, although one that was provoked by NATO expansion and by the United States backing of the 2014 “Maidan” coup which ousted
the democratically-elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
Speaking of America’s role in bringing about the Russia-Ukraine war — and why the latter was anything but “unprovoked” — there was a surprising article in Newsweek the other day explaining how “the CIA was central to the war even before it started” and has been operating in Ukraine for several years. Interestingly, the article also nonchalantly talks about Ukraine being behind the Nord Stream bombing as if it were the most obvious thing in the world — and yet there is still no reaction whatsoever from European countries:
The CIA is also keen to distance itself from anything that suggests a direct attack on Russia and any role in actual combat — something Kyiv has repeatedly done, from the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline and the Kerch Strait bridge to drone and special operations attacks across the border. These attacks seem contrary to pledges by Zelensky that Ukraine would not take actions that might expand the scope of the war.
Coming back to Hedge’s piece, he goes on to explain:
The war will only be solved through negotiations that allow ethnic Russians in Ukraine to have autonomy and Moscow’s protection, as well as Ukrainian neutrality, which means the country cannot join NATO. The longer these negotiations are delayed the more Ukrainians will suffer and die. Their cities and infrastructure will continue to be pounded into rubble. But this proxy war in Ukraine is designed to serve US interests. It enriches the weapons manufacturers, weakens the Russian military and isolates Russia from Europe. What happens to Ukraine is irrelevant.
Harsh but true words — which are confirmed by the US’s insane and criminal decision to provide cluster bombs to Ukraine. Here are a few articles on the subject:
Here Ben Burgis explains why, rather obviously, “it’s nuts to send cluster bombs to Ukraine”.
It’s easy to conduct the debate about sending these weapons in glittering generalities—“Ukraine has a right to defend itself,” “we should give them whatever they need,” and so on. The grim reality is that Ukrainian children will be blowing themselves up with US-made explosives for decades to come. … We’re often told that “the Ukrainians” are the ones fighting and dying and that their judgment must be deferred to in all cases. Who are we to question “the Ukrainians” as they fight for their country? But to talk this way is to treat a nation of 44 million people as a hive mind. The truth is that most ordinary people in any country have little say over foreign policy. Most civilians are just trying to live their lives. And they’re the ones whose children are going to be blown up by these munitions.
Branko Marketic makes a similar point here: “Littering Ukraine With Cluster Bombs Is Not Solidarity” — “an obvious point I can’t believe has to be made”, as he commented on Twitter. He writes:
Cluster munitions are one of those inventions so diabolical, it makes you have second thoughts about whether the development of human intelligence was really a good idea: a shell that splits midair into hundreds and even thousands of smaller explosives that fan out across an area as large as several football fields to explode upon landing — and whose high dud rate ensures that if they don’t kill or disfigure anyone when they’re first fired, they’ll do so years later when someone happens to be unlucky enough to stumble across them.
They’re still killing and wounding in Laos, where millions of unexploded cluster bombs are left over from the US war in Vietnam, and where 75 percent of the victims are kids. In Kosovo, where they were also used by NATO forces, victims were nearly five times more likely to be under fourteen years old. Forty percent of cluster munition casualties were likewise children in Syria, which accounted for 80 percent of the more than four-thousand casualties from the ordnance recorded from 2010–19.
Remaining on the Ukraine issue, there’s been a lot of talk about NATO’s refusal to offer Ukraine full NATO membership. In my article I explain why that was a foregone conclusion, but here’s Justin Logan and Joshua Shifrinson of the Cato Institute explaining in Foreign Affairs why that’s a very wise decision:
Ukraine’s desire to join NATO is understandable. It makes perfect sense that a country that has been bullied and invaded by a stronger neighbor would seek the protection of an outside power. Still, strategy is about choice, and the United States’ choices today are stark. For much of the post–Cold War period, the United States could expand its international commitments at relatively low cost and risk. Those circumstances no longer exist. With fiscal pressures at home, a grave challenge to its position in Asia, and the prospect of escalation and an erosion of credibility vis-à-vis Moscow, keeping Ukraine out of NATO simply reflects US interests. Instead of making a questionable promise that poses great dangers but would yield little in return, the United States should accept that it is high time to close NATO’s door to Ukraine.
Moving on to a different — but, alas, related — topic, Caitlin Johnstone debunks Biden’s claim that the US is “not trying to surround” China:
Biden is lying. The US is deliberately surrounding China with war machinery and has been for years, and has rapidly escalated its efforts to do so during Biden’s term. There are currently no fewer than 313 US military bases in East Asia by the Pentagon’s own admission, with the Biden administration adding four new ones in the Philippines. Biden’s war machine has been busy instituting the AUKUS alliance which is specifically set up to menace China, moving nuclear-capable bombers to Indonesia, signing a military deal with Papua New Guinea, working to station missile-armed marines at Japan’s Okinawa islands, staging provocations in Taiwan, and getting into increasingly confrontational encounters with Chinese military vessels and aircraft off China’s coast as part of its dramatically increased military presence in the area.
On this topic, Martin Wolf put it well in the Financial Times yesterday:
We must not stumble into hostilities with China as we have done with Russia. Better still, we need to make this relationship work in the interests of the world. Yet the west’s concerns must not be limited to relations with China. Better relations with the rest of the world also matter. This requires the west to recognise its own double standards and hypocrisy. … We must remember the threats we now confront to peace, prosperity and planet. Tackling these will require deep engagement with China. But if the west is to have the influence it hopes for, it must realise that its claims to moral superiority are neither unchallengeable nor unchallenged. Many in our world view the western powers as selfish, self-satisfied and hypocritical. They are not altogether wrong.
Well, kudos for the honesty, Martin.
Finally, a great investigation by Kit Klarenberg on “How US Department of Homeland Security Became Global ‘Thought Police’”:
On June 26th, the US House Judiciary Committee published an incendiary report, The Weaponization of CISA, which documents how the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a shadowy division of Washington’s highly controversial Department of Homeland Security, “colluded with big tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor Americans”. The report tracks how CISA, founded in 2018, “was originally intended to be an ancillary agency designed to protect critical infrastructure” and guard against cybersecurity threats”, but quickly “metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media”. Within two years of launch, the Agency was “routinely” reporting social media posts “that allegedly spread ‘disinformation’” to offending platforms, in particular Twitter.
Scary stuff. For an overview of the new global censorship regime, check out this piece by Michael Shellenberger: “The new world war on free speech”.
That’s all for today. I hope you enjoyed this post, and thanks for the support.
Best regards,
Thomas Fazi
Website: thomasfazi.net
Twitter: @battleforeurope
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Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)
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