Up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, NATO had an explicit role in defending against Soviet expansionism. The Warsaw Pact of Soviet countries was counter-formed in 1955 in response to West Germany being allowed to re-arm along the Soviet-defined East German border, thus cementing the Cold War in earnest - until 1989. The subsequent dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 at the “end” of the Cold War, signaled what Russians informally understood to be the end for NATO too, or at least an end to the expansion of NATO.
NATO is like so many things that we think we understand but don’t, things that have a soft and slightly happy, squishy space in our brain that remains fuzzy and unclarified. In Part I of our look at NATO, we will try to understand better its purpose and structure. In Part II, we will look more closely at conflicts involving NATO.
You may be forgiven if you do not really know the difference between what NATO was and what it is. It is less forgivable when you blithely pull up your Black Lives Matter sign and replace it with a home-made blue and yellow painted poster board because you take on faith that what NPR and CNN and the New York Times say is true - that the quasi-Europeanish NATO is clearly a force for good since its formation after the Just WWII, that the US is rightly supporting this international alliance that is sort of like the UN, that it promotes democracy against fascism, communism and the unprovoked incursion by Russia into Ukraine.
But this is, as is often the case, a very scant and mostly incorrect view borne out of ubiquitous information dumb-down, oversimplification. Ultimately, it is the dross of the co-opted, highly centralized, corporate media oligarchy that has partnered with the state to become a US apologist machine, whose primary focus is to stop Trump from getting re-elected, and no alternative candidate allowed to come forward. Many people have become their mouthpieces, much as they were for the bombing wars against Iraq, Serbia, and Afghanistan, until it was way, way too late to make a difference.
Growing out of post-WWII European alliances to deter future German aggression in 1949 - there had after all been two instances in the space of some twenty years - the North Atlantic Treaty Organization subsequently set out to confront the growing Soviet threat. A military alliance with explicit focus on deterring the Soviets, the 12 founding mostly European members, with the exception of Canada and the US, agreed to join together to defend against attacks by a third party on any one member nation. Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty states:
The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
NATO’s strategy of defense amongst its members was meant to be practiced as its motto describes: animus in consulendo liber or “with a mind unfettered in deliberation.” NATO’s decisions must be unanimous. However, individual states or subgroups of allies can initiate war outside NATO’s auspices and member states are not required to participate in every NATO operation. Therein lies an octopus whose tentacles can sprout new tentacles, or be severed at will.
By 1955, NATO added two more countries, Greece and Turkey, in addition to West Germany and remained at 15 members until 1982, when it added Spain for a total of 16 members until 1999.
Certainly, it was always the case that the U.S. was clearly leading NATO, by proxy. But the massive expansion after 1999 when NATO absorbed most of the Warsaw Pact nations, has established the US as its largest defense spender, accounting for 68% of NATO’s defense budget, or $860B in 2023, over 10 times that of second-place Germany. Second, the supreme allied commander in Europe who oversees all NATO military operations is always required to be a US. flag or general officer. There is an elected Secretary-General from membership, and; although the alliance has an integrated command, most forces remain under their respective national authorities until NATO operations commence.
Moreover, the US is the primary driver of the military alliance, and also the primary supplier both through US “gifts” of arms to nations, and authorizer of US weapons manufacturers selling weapons to other nations. The cumulative financial costs of policing the post-Cold War conflicts exceed $8 trillion, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. The US is the top arms exporter in the world, in 2023 reaching a record $238B in sales, a major employer in many US states.
Member states’ primary financial contribution is the cost of deploying their respective armed forces for NATO-led operations. These expenses are not part of the formal NATO budget, which funds alliance infrastructure, including civilian and military headquarters, and stands at about $3 billion in 2023. NATO members have committed to spending 2 percent of their annual gross domestic product (GDP) on defense by 2024, and 20 of the 32 members have recently met that threshold, although prior to 2022 that number was far lower, until Trump’s threat to withdraw US support unless member nations ponied up and, of course, Russia’s invasion into Ukraine.
There is much debate about promises that may or may not have been made to Gorbachev by President George Bush Sr., Reagan, or Secretary of State Jim Baker following Soviet dissolution to prevent the alliance from moving “not one inch” into former Soviet territory. Many current and former Russian leaders believe the alliance’s inroads into the former Soviet sphere are a betrayal of alleged U.S. guarantees to not expand eastward after Germany’s reunification in 1990.
Today NATO has 32 members, but it also maintains relations with more than 40 non-member countries loosely packed into variously named “partnerships,” which brings to mind random gang alliances that are partially based on contrived rationalizations - like the color of sneakers. Thousands of soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen annually rotate among the several hundred U.S. military bases in more than 80 nations around the world, even as NATO enlargement increased by 14 the number of countries they are expected to defend.
Called the “Partnership for Peace,” Clinton pushed the idea of NATO expansion to include “partners” along with members of the former Warsaw Pact, and non-European countries. More than two dozen former Soviet countries, including Georgia, Russia, and Ukraine, joined in the following months.“ This was a pivotal maneuver, transforming a North Atlantic post WWII, Cold War alliance to something quite different. As US Senator Richard Lugar said at the time, “The common denominator of all the new security problems in Europe is that they all lie beyond NATO’s current borders.” NATO became the catch-all for US led and financed military incursions in regions across the globe, and in defiance of NATO’s original purpose of defense of the North Atlantic region.
After 1999, NATO not only grew but diversified.The partnerships more than anything appear to be a pretext for an international alliance without the international legal framework of the United Nations, but with the US as the driving force of its own geopolitical strategy. The eighteen Partners for Peace were largely former Warsaw nations, including Russia and Ukraine, and some other European nations. In June 2020 NATO made up a new category for Ukraine, Enhanced Opportunities Partner, inching closer to - but not reaching - the coveted membership. Ukraine is now one of six” Enhanced Opportunities Partners” alongside Australia, Finland, Georgia, Jordan and formerly Sweden, which recently became a member. The “enhanced” status of Ukraine was designed by the US to explicitly move into the defining border with Russia - a border Russia has said for the past 20 years that they would defend if NATO pushed.
Ukraine elected a leader in 2014 to repair Russian relations, a country divided between Europe and Russia - a leader removed with the help of the US- and now with a current leader who campaigned on a peaceful resolution with Russia.
This is not about whether or not Putin is a bad man, any more than the Iraq Wars were about Sadam Hussein being a bad man. They are bad men. This is about the lack of a rule of law, lack of rules of military engagement, and the highly questionable military decision making of our country, the United States government, by proxy. This is also about the US as the leading arms merchant in the world, selling arms to those same NATO nations, and many others, including dictatorships and theocracies.
The “Mediterranean Dialogue” is a partnership forum that “aims to contribute to security and stability” in the wider Mediterranean region, including Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia. The “Istanbul Cooperation Initiative” is a partnership forum that offers non-NATO countries in the broader Middle East region “the opportunity to cooperate with NATO.” To date, the following four countries include Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and UAE. Then there is, Partners Across the Globe, or NATO’s “engagement with…global partners…where many of the challenges the Alliance faces are global and no longer bound by geography,” including Afghanistan, Australia, Colombia, Iraq, Japan, Republic of Korea, Mongolia, New Zealand, and Pakistan.
This loose alliance represents a strategy not bound by international law, checks and balances, or any form of public review of its decision making process, which is mostly behind closed doors.
Part II of our discussion of NATO will delve more deeply into NATO military incursions, including its first combat operation in its 40 year history, when it shot down four Bosnian Serb aircraft in 1994, considered by many to be in breach of international law. September 11, 2001 resulted in NATO invoking its collective defense provision, Article V, for the first time, although no nation was explicitly proven to be the culprit. NATO responded by commanding over 130,000 troops from more than fifty “alliance and partner” countries in Afghanistan, until the United States and NATO allies withdrew their final 10,000 troops in 2021. Ukraine, not unlike Afghanistan, has been heralded as a conflict of brief duration as long as the US, and to a lesser extent other NATO members and “partners” up the arsenal. But it is important to remember, as you fly that blue and yellow flag, that shortly after the US departed from Afghanistan, the Taliban quickly regained the control they possessed twenty years later, after some 1T (trillion) US dollars had been spent. Finally, Part II will look more closely at the chronology of events that resulted in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
NATO has become an ethereal pretext, above international law, ungoverned and unbound from legal scrutiny or judicial recourse. NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg maintains this absolution from an historically US-led military strategic imperative when he said recently about the Ukraine-Russia conflict, “Stepping up our support does not make NATO a party to this conflict. The alliance does not seek confrontation with Russia.”
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