NATO Is 75
The Haunting of the Present by the Past
NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is marking its 75th anniversary. Created in 1949 as a defensive alliance against an expansive Soviet Union, the alliance should have ceased to exist when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Instead, it continued to expand to the very border of Russia. Talk of Ukraine and Georgia, former Soviet republics, joining NATO contributed to tensions that led to the Russia-Ukraine War, now in its third destructive and deadly year.
NATO’s resilience (perhaps “endurance” and “inertia” are better words) in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse demonstrates the power of institutions to sustain themselves long after they’ve lost their reason for being. While President Biden recently claimed to have created NATO, the alliance was really about containing communism in the aftermath of World War II. As European and American leaders openly admitted at the time, NATO kept the U.S. military in Europe while also shoring up U.S. imperial power around the globe. Few Europeans wanted a revived German military after the colossal destruction in part caused by German militarism in World Wars I and II.
A strong U.S. military presence in Europe wasn’t meant to be permanent. President Dwight D. Eisenhower saw it as temporary and lasting only as long as it took European countries to get back on their feet after World War II. Surely, Europe was sufficiently strong to see a U.S. withdrawal beginning in the 1960s, but it was not to be. The Soviet threat was consistently exaggerated to justify a vast and permanent U.S. military presence in Europe.
Outsider that he is, Donald Trump had the temerity to ask: Why NATO? when he served as president. Why indeed? Why does the U.S. continue to spend colossal sums predicated partly on defending Europe from a Russian attack when Europeans themselves have spent far less (based on GDP) on their own defense?
Russia remains dangerous, especially considering its nuclear arsenal. But only a Russian fool would attack NATO, and Vladimir Putin is no fool. NATO has become a sort of grab-bag of nations, dominated by the United States, spending larger and larger sums on military weaponry to corral and contain a Russian bear that is not looking to roam from its territory.
Of course, there are those who claim Putin is trying to recreate the Russian Empire or even revive the Soviet one, but if he is, he’s doing a poor job of it with Ukraine. The Russian military has improved over the last two years, but I don’t see a military configured for a major invasion of Europe. Putin doesn’t want World War III. Again, he’s no fool.
But the specter of communism remains, and thus NATO itself will remain, even though the organization has been largely chasing ghosts for the past three decades. Ghosts too can be real, if we let them haunt our minds. Especially if the haunting is profitable for all the wannabe ghostbusters out there, who charge handsomely for their services.
Had NATO disbanded when the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact disappeared, there would have been no market for all the US weapons manufacturers (aka merchants of death). Bye-bye military-industrial complex. Thus, there was only one option. Keep NATO going. But, due to their voracious greed and megalomania, they decided to double down. So, NATO expanded into all the former Warsaw Pact countries and decided in 2008 to invite some former members of the Soviet Union (Ukraine and Georgia). A sure-fire bonanza, since all the former Warsaw pact countries were forced to upgrade their militaries with US made weapons. And, what the hell---let's expand NATO's mandate beyond Europe, turning NATO into a US-led military alliance to dominate the entire globe. What a perfect recipe to make sure the mega profits never stop flowing!! Who cares if it increases the risk of a nuclear conflagration? The main goal is to ensure corporate profits keep growing at Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrup Grumman, etc. and the boys at the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, etc. keep their secure, lucrative jobs and fat pensions.
Yea, NATO is 75 and I was a boy of six when it came into existence in the same year when an independent BRD (Federal Republic) was created by the western allies and its government was filled with former Nazi officials. I do remember very well my parents outrage when they observed the rehabilitation of the those Nazis. I vividly remember the disgust of my father who had been a veteran of WW I and II. when the German military was resurrected by the west allies by 1955. The old trope of German “militarism” is nothing more than anti German propaganda. Anyone who really knows anything about German military history should know that by WW I and later WW II the military of Britain, France and Russia were numerically far superior. The Germans had superior leadership and that was the only difference.
The real reason for NATO can be ascertained from George Kennan’s 1948 long telegram from Moscow in which he stated among other things that the U.S. needs to make sure that its control of the world’s wealth and having only a fraction of the world’s population will be maintained into the future. Another reason was to prevent Western Europeans from voting for left parties; Greece became a real nasty example of English and U.S. interference in the domestic affairs of another country where left resistance to Nazi occupation had been very popular. Russia remaining a threat and the “specter” of communism being real issues is again nothing more than propaganda to support U.S. control in Europe and expand it. Russia was not expansionist towards Europe. The fact is that the West has been trying to expand into Russia (1918) and Senator Truman’s statement in the summer of 1941 makes it clear what U.S. objectives were. “If we see Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.”
Germany was defeated by the Red Army. NATO was created “To keep America in, Russia out, and Germany down” to quote the Secretary General of NATO Lord Hastings (Izmir) in 1949.
The post war world that I have lived through would have been very different if the U.S. had pursuit a more cooperative policy towards the Soviet Union (Russia). Unfortunately, for the world the post World War to mindset of the U.S. was continued in a more aggressive mode by the Wolfowitz and Brzezinski (and others) doctrines of the 1990s to the present day. Gorbachev’s offer of a cooperative world order and a Social Democratic economic system in the USSR had to be destroyed. That was accomplished most successfully when Yeltsin was actively supported from the WEST - Clinton spent hundreds of millions to guarantee his re-election in 1996. The rest is the story that will be forever a stain on the western image. This is the perception of an European historian and a German who grew up just a few hours from the Iron Curtain.