NATO Has Lost Its Way: Let's Get Out

 COMMENTARY WND NEWS CENTER

MUCH ABOUT HISTORY

Exclusive: Nicholas L. Waddy says alliance has been pointless and detrimental since early '90s

By Nicholas L. Waddy
Published March 20, 2024 at 7:07pm

Way back in the year 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed for the excellent purpose of defending the West (meaning mainly Western Europe) from attack from the USSR. Formally and legally, NATO was a defensive military alliance. 

All members agreed that, if one of them were attacked, all would rush to its defense. 

In practice, this bound all Western Europeans together, forbade them from going to war with one another (a rather important proviso, given recent unpleasantness) and, most importantly, committed the United States to remain engaged in European security and to place all member states of NATO under its nuclear umbrella.

There was, in a sense, an implicit transaction here: 

The Europeans would acknowledge and respect American military and strategic supremacy, even placing their own forces (usually) under the command of an American "Supreme Allied Commander," and in return the U.S. would provide the bulk of the armed forces and the financing that would keep Europe free.

This was, at the time, a very elegant solution to an extremely pressing problem: 

the aggressive posture of the Soviet Union, a conventional and nuclear superpower and a communist pariah. 

By these methods, the security of the West was maintained – if not exactly "guaranteed," because no one knows what would have happened if the Soviets had called NATO's bluff – for the next 40-plus years.

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In 1989-91, the raison d'être of NATO suddenly disappeared. 

The USSR released its grip on its Eastern European satellites, which sloughed off communist overlordship in record time, terminated the Warsaw Pact, and it even officially dissolved itself, freeing its constituent "republics" to become newly independent states. 

All of these states, moreover, abandoned communism, demilitarized themselves (to varying degrees) and established friendly relations with the West.

Now, at this point, you would think that a defensive military alliance that had been formed in opposition to the expansionist tendencies of an empire that had entirely ceased to exist would … itself disband. 

If it chose to wind up its operations slowly, out of an abundance of caution, you would think that it nonetheless would – in line with its commitments to the leaders of the new "Russian Federation" – avoid any moves that would threaten to reignite old tensions, such as expanding to the east.

You would be wrong, however, because, almost as soon as the USSR's death rites were performed, the Western political and military establishment began to plot the enlargement of NATO – almost as if growth, in itself, could counteract the newfound pointlessness of the organization. 

Not for the first time, Western elites refused to take "Yes!" for an answer from their erstwhile enemies. 

NATO expansion was duly pursued, with the clear corollary that Russia would be permanently unwelcome. 

The unmistakable message to the Russians was: NATO is still in business, and its business – its only business – is containing you.

It is in this context that the current war between Russia and Ukraine should be viewed. American, Canadian and European leaders, having secured more than a dozen new members for the NATO Bloc in Eastern Europe, decided to push even farther to the east. 

A 2014 coup was engineered that overthrew the Russian-friendly administration in Kyiv, and the political, military, intelligence, economic and cultural elite of the West committed itself to the seduction of Ukraine and its incorporation into a now sprawling web of Western dominance. 

Russia's timid response to previous waves of NATO/Western expansion lulled these inveterate Russophobes into the naive assumption that Ukraine, too, could be annexed without difficulty. 

We all know what consequences this arrogant and shortsighted policy has had for the people of Ukraine.

Two things must be made absolutely clear: One is that NATO, for all the bluster about it being as strong today as ever before, has literally never been put to any practical use. 

Throughout the Cold War, and in the years since, it has never gone to war on behalf of any of its members, which is its only formal and legal purpose. 

Its only military operations to date have been symbolic contributions to Western misadventures in places like the Balkans, Afghanistan and Libya, unconnected to its core responsibilities. 

It is still, to this day, a defensive military alliance, even if it behaves sometimes more like an expansionist empire.

Second, because of its defensive institutional focus, NATO has no bona fide commitments in Ukraine, and no legal standing to intervene in the conflict. 

Thus, NATO's support of mostly American, British and German military and economic aid to that country is purely rhetorical, not practical. 

Just like during the Cold War, the Europeans expect America to solve their perceived strategic and military problems for them – but, unlike during the Cold War, this time the U.S. is under no treaty obligations to oblige, since the relevant "victim" of Russian aggression is a non-member state.

The lesson here is simple: NATO has long since outlived its usefulness. 

In fact, NATO and the Western military alliance have, by their aggressive, intemperate and inept machinations in Ukraine, placed both that country and all nations of the world in much greater peril than they would have been in had Western leaders had the foresight to disband NATO in the early '90s.

The only things that continued U.S. membership in NATO will achieve are: 

the prolongation of unnecessary conflict in Eastern Europe, the encouragement of Western Europe's most destructive fantasies about its ability to dominate the entire continent, 

the financial overcommitment of the United States to the provision of security to various European countries wholly capable of achieving it (and paying for it) themselves, 

and the stoking of a toxic animosity between Russia and the West, which is quickly metastasizing into distrust and resentment that most of the non-Western world feels toward the United States and its European allies.

For all these reasons, the next president of the United States should do what George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton did not have the wisdom or the courage to do in the early '90s: He should withdraw the United States from NATO. 

He should also suspend aid to Ukraine and definitively end the program of Western strategic expansion that began almost as soon as the Soviet Union fell apart..

For the first time in almost a hundred years, let us abandon the architecture and the mindset of incessant conflict, and let us instead give peace – or at least minding our own business – a chance.

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