At 75, Has NATO Outlived Its Use?

E. Rowell:  With Biden in the White House, the referee is MIA.  A President is a referee of sorts, between competing aspects of government.  With the referee missing, agencies do what they want.  The neocons are free to run amok and threaten WWIII.  So it is not only worth asking “Has NATO outlived its use?”  but also we can ask, “Is anybody listening?”

Over three decades after the end of the Cold War, the alliance encourages perverse and dangerous behaviors in its member states.

By James W. Carden, AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE    3 April 2024

Seventy-five years ago, on April 4, 1949, the foreign ministers of 12 European and North American countries convened in Washington and signed the North Atlantic Treaty establishing NATO.

With war raging in Eastern Europe and calls from a number of NATO allies to escalate that war, unpopular yet critical questions need to be addressed with regard to the alliance’s history, its continuation, and its expansion, as well as its ramifications for U.S. national security. Indeed, several articles of faith with regard to NATO’s successes and indispensability turn out to be, upon even cursory examination, highly questionable—if not entirely mistaken.

While criticism of the alliance is effectively verboten in today’s Washington, at the time of its founding, some eminent American foreign policy thinkers such as Walter Lippmann warned that “a great power like the United States gains no advantages and it loses prestige by offering, indeed, peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get.”

An argument could be made that by the end of its first decade, NATO was already obsolete. The great Hungarian-American historian John Lukacs has argued that, by the mid-1950s, the Soviets (post-Stalin, post-Beria) were beating a retreat from the center of Europe. In 1954–55, they agreed to, in Lukacs’s words, a “reciprocal withdrawal” in Austria, paving that way for that country’s Cold War neutrality.  Within a year the Soviets relinquished their naval base in Finland (which henceforth was to also pursue neutral status—that is, until last year) and mended ties with Tito’s Yugoslavia. By Lukacs’s accounting, 1956 “was the turning point of the cold war. Perhaps even the end of it, if by ‘cold war’ means the direct prospect of an actual war between American and Russian armed forces in Europe.”

In the absence of the competing alliance systems, the Cold War might have come to a denouement decades earlier. Certainly Turkey’s incorporation into the alliance in 1952 and the subsequent decision to place nuclear-armed Jupiter missiles there did little to further peace and stability between East and West. Indeed, it did help set the stage for the nuclear missile crisis of October 1962.

Nevertheless, the decision to carry on and indeed expand the alliance was made within a mere 24 months of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. For Clinton, the impetus to expand came from domestic politics rather than the requirements of US national security.

As Ambassador Jack Matlock has recently noted,

The real reason that Clinton went for it [NATO expansion] was domestic politics. I testified in Congress against NATO expansion, saying that it would be a great “mistake”; when I came out of that testimony, a couple of people who were observing said, “Jack, why are you fighting against this?”And I said, “Because I think it’s a bad idea.” They said, “Look, Clinton wants to get reelected. He needs Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois….”

As many at the time knew, the project was fraught with risk. But in the Washington, DC of thirty years ago, one could have an actual debate on the merits of one or another foreign policies without being labeled a foreign “dupe” or a Russian “apologist.” In those years, scores of members of the Washington establishment, not least Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan and John Warner, made their objections to the expansionist project known.

One group of objectors was led by the granddaughter of President Dwight Eisenhower. In 1997, the estimable Susan Eisenhower published an open letter in an effort to persuade Clinton to reconsider his chosen course. Calling NATO expansion a “policy error of historic proportions,” the letter’s 50 signatories, including longtime hawks Paul Nitze and Richard Pipes, the prominent Democratic Senators Bill Bradley and Sam Nunn, and intellectuals like David Calleo and Owen Harries, warned that,

In Russia, NATO expansion, which continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen the nondemocratic opposition, undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West, bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement.

At around the same time, an article by the World Policy Institute’s Sherle Schwenninger noted,

NATO expansion threatens to create tensions and conflicts in the heart of Central and Eastern Europe that would otherwise not exist…The Clinton Administration justifies NATO enlargement in part as an effort to avoid a new security vacuum in Central Europe, but even as it removes some countries from East-West competition it only increases the potential intensity of the rivalry over others, like the Baltic states and Ukraine.

As those of us who were lucky enough to know and work with him knew, Sherle had a special prescience, and his warnings then were no exception.

Today, NATO’s defenders will no doubt ask: Surely after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, NATO is needed more than ever to keep Europe safe from the Russian bear?

Not really.

First, as the distinguished political scientist John Mearsheimer and others have tirelessly pointed out, there is scant evidence that Putin wants all of Ukraine, much less more real estate in Eastern Europe. Do we really suppose Russia wants to take on the burden of supporting three-quarters of a million Polish pensioners? Or waste more blood and treasure in what most certainly would be fierce guerrilla resistance in Galicia? The fact is that Russia lacks both the means and the will to establish political, economic, and territorial hegemony on the continent. Arguments to the contrary are, to be polite about it, based on a misunderstanding of Russian national security aims. The French political philosopher Emmanuel Todd (less polite) believes that the idea that Russia has Europe in its sights is the stuff of “fantasy and propaganda.”

April 4, 2024 | 4 Comments »

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  2. People like to claim that NATO is a defensive organization, but let us recall NATO’s mission statement is headlined by the statement

    ‘NATO’s goal: peace and security in Europe and North America’

    In fact, NATO’s real mission was to stand as a counterweight to the Soviet menace, and when the Russians defeated the Soviets without any help from NATO, NATO’s existence required a new purpose. Regretfully, in seeking out what that new purpose might be, NATO changed from being a defensive organization to a organization willing to play the belligerent, and as NATO began making war on the non-NATO member state of Serbia which next led to Serbia’s capitulation and division, it completely betrayed the above stated goal of maintaining peace and security in Europe.

    Additionally, it should be quite alarming to every NATO member state that any NATO member had any role in overthrowing the legitimate govt of Ukraine, as so recklessly crossing Russia’s 2007 stated Red Line threatened war with Russia. What made this even worse is that the NATO member which did this, the US, was a signatory to the Budapest Memorandum which guaranteed the political and economic independence of Ukraine. This single act by the US came to set the Ukrainian state into a 8yr civil war which morphed into a war with Russia and ultimately led to NATO arming, funding and training multiple armies in Ukraine to use against the Russians, all the while refusing to enter into any negotiations with the Russians in good faith, both before the Russians entered the war and afterwards. Furthermore, this war which could easily have been avoided has led to millions of displaced persons spread across Europe in refuge from war, the first time since WWII. Also, the cost of living in Europe is skyrocketed, driven by the de-industrialization of Europe and rising energy costs, all as a consequence to this war which should have been avoided.

    So as the peace of Europe has been purposefully betrayed by both NATO and the US, I think it is difficult to argue that NATO should be maintained as it continues to betray its stated goal of maintaining the peace and security of Europe.

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  3. https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/demands-for-ukraine-to-negotiate-with-russia-are-calls-for-ukraine-to-surrender/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=fp&utm_term=ukrainesurrender&utm_content=rothman&twclid=2-4os29g6w7jr31oeg938l4jqx0

    Demands for Ukraine to Negotiate with Russia Are Calls for Ukraine to Surrender

    Ukrainian servicemen of the 79th Brigade take part in training in Donetsk Region, Ukraine, March 4, 2024.(Oleksandr Ratushniak/Reuters)
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    From the pope on down, those who insist that Ukraine must submit to Russian aggression and commit to negotiations with its would-be conqueror insist they have Ukrainians’ best interests in mind.

    Ukraine must embrace “the courage of the white flag,” Pope Francis implored. Kyiv’s continued resistance is fatal hubris. “It is even money that Zelensky’s army will be facing some sort of collapse before November,” The American Conservative’s Scott McConnell bloodlessly opined. A “painful peace agreement” be preferable to a war that continues “until Ukraine is defeated,” the Quincy Institute’s Anatol Lieven mourned. “Peace talks are worth pursuing and would save lives,” preached the Reverend Adam Russell Taylor. “The best Kyiv’s desperate leaders can hope for is to achieve a stalemate via [a] negotiated settlement,” Brandon Weichert concluded in a National Interest piece. Indeed, continuing to provide for Ukraine’s defense is a great sin. “Team NATO keeps micturating in the wind and filling Ukraine up with false hope,” he mourned. “I just want it to stop.”

    These and others frame their desire to consign Ukraine to subjugation as an outgrowth of their profound compassion for Ukrainians. In their formulation, it’s those who would support the Ukrainians’ desire to defend themselves and their families from Russian aggression who are truly callous. Their solipsism is predicated on the assumption that Kyiv has a partner with whom it might negotiate. Their arguments, therefore, presuppose a Russian political consensus in support of a truce — a consensus that does not exist.

    Dmitry Medvedev, Vladimir Putin’s longtime right-hand man, recently articulated the terms that Russia would consider as the basis for a negotiated settlement to its war of territorial expansion. They include: “Complete and unconditional surrender,” “demilitarization,” the “recognition of the Nazi character” of the regime in Kyiv by “the international community,” the dissolution of the Ukrainian government, the absorption of its “entire territory” into “the territory of the Russian Federation” and the adoption of Russian law, and, as a sweetener, reparations to Moscow as “compensation for property damage caused to constituent entities of the Russian Federation.” How generous.

    Lest we conclude that Putin’s attack dog is merely playing bad cop to the Kremlin’s good cop, Medvedev seems only to be stating Moscow’s position on peace talks. “It would be ridiculous for us to start negotiating with Ukraine just because it’s running out of ammunition,” Putin told an interviewer this week. The Russian president isn’t banking on European paralysis; Europe has not begged off its support for Ukraine. If anything, Putin is betting that the impasse on Ukraine aid in the U.S. Congress will persist long enough for Russia to achieve its battlefield objectives. And Ukrainians know full well what those objectives are, insofar as they can be gleaned by Russia’s battlefield tactics: ethnic cleansing; rape as a weapon of war; mass execution, kidnapping, and reeducation as a tool of statecraft; and the eradication of the entity Medvedev dismisses as “Ukraine” in scare-quotes.

    The Russian regime is telling anyone willing to listen that its plan for Ukraine entails death and suffering on a scale unseen on the European continent since 1945. The naïve Westerners who seek peace at any price — surely at the cost of tiny Ukraine’s sovereignty — must conjure in their minds a Russia that does not resemble the one with which we are confronted today. Not only that, but they must also fabricate an abstracted Ukrainian who would rather submit himself and his loved ones to the horrors he knows await them on the other side of occupation.

    Theirs is a happy fiction — one that serves only to reinforce their own self-conception as noble peacemakers, bravely standing up to the warmongers with whom they are surrounded. Their concern for Ukraine doesn’t seem to be shared by Ukrainians. Their desire for peace is rejected by the Russians. It’s hard to see what else they get out of their blinkered advocacy beyond self-satisfaction.