Understanding NATO

By the time of its out-of-theater intervention in Afghanistan, it became clear that NATO now had the ability and permission to operate as the policeman of the U.S.-led order...

As U.S. President Donald Trump and his national security team have – on the surface – turned their back on Europe and said that they will no longer pay for its security, the region’s leaders scramble to raise the funds to increase their support for the war in Ukraine and build up their own military production and capacity.

... NATO serves a wide range of purposes for the United States and has done so since it was founded in 1949...

Despite the rhetoric, what Trump is doing is not outside the ambit of the U.S. elite’s overall approach: namely to maintain global power through instruments such as NATO and a pliant European state system...

The idea of NATO originated during the last years of World War II, when the United States and the United Kingdom began to discuss new security arrangements once the fascist powers in Europe had been defeated...

It was based on this allowance by the U.N. Charter that the United States gathered ten European countries and Canada to sign the Washington Treaty in 1949 and create NATO...

NATO provided these countries with a U.S. military (and nuclear) shield...

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia – under a pliant President Boris Yeltsin (who owed his 1996 re-election to U.S. interference) – effectively surrendered to the U.S., and so the United States took the opportunity to use its own overwhelming military power and that of its main global instrument, NATO, to expand its dominion across Eastern Europe and punish any ‘backlash states’ (as Anthony Lake of the U.S. State Department called them in 1994) that refused to adopt the policies of globalisation, neoliberalism, and U.S. primacy...

Global North governments require the image of a menacing enemy to legitimise NATO’s existence...

At the April 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest, in the context of Europe’s increasing reliance on Russian natural gas and oil, France and Germany blocked Georgia and Ukraine’s entry into NATO...

... that China – and other countries – are able to underwrite development efforts in the poorer nations. Since the Global North is not doing this, these countries are no longer beholden to it...

NATO leaders began to speak of... ‘instrumentalisation of migrants’, which meant to them that their enemies were deploying migrants as a ‘hybrid threat’ to overwhelm their countries (a phrase that was used specifically when Russia allowed asylum seekers from a range of countries to cross the border into Finland in 2024)...

... It [NATO] wants to maintain the U.S. rules-based system and prevent other countries from developing.

That is what makes NATO the most dangerous and reactionary organization in the world today.