NATO: 75 years of war, unprovoked aggressions and state-sponsored terrorism

More than ever, NATO represents by far the biggest threat to peace in the world today

NATO’s 75th anniversary summit that just took place in Washington, DC was a stark reminder of the Alliance’s escalating threat to global peace. Not only did NATO leaders commit more money and weapons (including F-16s) to Ukraine — thus ensuring the continuation of the bloodshed in the name of NATO’s strategic interests, namely the supposed weakening of Russia, while further worsening Ukraine’s negotiating position and dangerously raising the risk of a direct NATO-Russia confrontation, including through the deployment of longer-range US missiles to Germany — but they also confirmed NATO’s plans to further expand into Asia, thus further fuelling military tensions with China.

For the first time, NATO directly accused China of being a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war effort in Ukraine, saying that Beijing continues to pose systemic challenges to Euro-Atlantic security. Last month, outgoing NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg even accused China of inciting the “largest military conflict in Europe since World War Two” — a textbook case of political hypocrisy and psychological projection. As Warwick Powell, Adjunct Professor at Queensland University of Technology, Australia, wrote, such statements are clearly aimed at “laying the rhetorical groundwork to rationalise NATO’s expansion into Asia”.

NATO’s intention is to use Taiwan to put in place in Asia the same strategy that it has already successfully deployed against Russia in Ukraine: to progressively beef up its military presence not only as a way of preparing for a future conflict with China (or rather of preparing the US’s “allies” to fight on its behalf), but arguably as a way of deliberately provoking a reaction on China’s behalf, just as they did with Russia vis-à-vis Ukraine.

The strategy seems to have been plucked straight out of Elbridge A. Colby’s 2018 book The Strategy of Denial, where the lead architect of the 2018 National Defense Strategy argues that it is vital for the US to force the targets of its military — in this case China — to “fire the first shot” and thereby be seen as the aggressors:

Perhaps the clearest and sometimes the most important way of making sure China is seen [as a danger] is simply by ensuring that it is the one to strike first. Few human moral intuitions are more deeply rooted than that the one who started it is the aggressor and accordingly the one who presumptively owns a greater share of moral responsibility. There is thus an enormous political-strategic benefit to being seen as defending or responding to an adversary’s first move; a state or its allies reacting to such an attack may consider steps in response that they would not otherwise have contemplated. This is even more the case when such an attack is seen as perfidious or dastardly.

This strategy provides the perfect framework for understanding the US’s actions in Ukraine and — now — its actions in the Asia-Pacific region, especially concerning Taiwan. This strategy is so effective precisely because it puts the adversary state in a very difficult position: if it doesn’t react, the US will continue slowly escalating the threat to the state’s security, but if it does react, it achieves exactly what the US was hoping to achieve in the first place, giving it the perfect excuse to intensify its military escalation under the guise of responding to the adversary’s “unprovoked” action. One doesn’t need to explain how terrifying it is that the US is now playing this death game with not one but two nuclear powers.

Meanwhile, as the icing on the cake, NATO countries continue to support — diplomatically, politically, economically and militarily — Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. To most of the world’s citizens, it is patently obvious that NATO is definitely not a purely “defensive alliance… working for peace, security and freedom”, as it claims to be, but on the contrary it represents by far the biggest threat to peace in the world today. As even the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, the leader of a NATO country, recently acknowledged in a striking Newsweek article:

NATO is approaching a watershed moment. It is worth remembering that the most successful military alliance in world history started as a peace project, and its future success depends on its ability to maintain peace. But today, instead of peace, the agenda is the pursuit of war; instead of defense it is offense.

But that’s arguably always been the case. Aside from the fact that its most powerful member and de facto leader, the US, has bombed more countries than any other nation in history, NATO itself has very aggressive track record. In 1999, NATO began its 78-day illegal bombing campaign of Yugoslavia, the first act of aggression against a sovereign state committed in Europe since the Second World War. Many civilian targets were hit, including 48 hospitals, 70 schools, 18 kindergartens and 35 churches. Overall, hundreds of civilians were killed, including 81 children.

Since then, NATO has been involved in several other conflicts, most notably Afghanistan and Libya — where NATO plunged one of Africa’s most developed countries into a state of misery and conflict that includes the return of slavery. None of these interventions had anything to do with defending its members from external aggression; in all these cases, NATO was quite clearly the aggressor.

There’s also no evidence that NATO is providing “security” to Europe. On the contrary, NATO provoked Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by aggressively expanding eastward, systematically ignoring Russia’s warnings over the years. This represented a gross violation of the principle that had inspired the entire European security architecture since the Seventies: the indivisibility of security — that is, the notion that the security of NATO states and the Soviet Union (subsequently Russia) was “inseparably linked to that of all the others”, and could not come at the expense of another state’s security.

In other words, NATO played a crucial role in unravelling Europe’s security architecture and creating the conditions for the largest conflict in Europe since the Second World War. How does this square with the notion that NATO is there to guarantee Europe’s peace and security — or that, today, it represents a “bulwark” against the very chaos that it helped create?

But NATO’s use of illegality and violence hasn’t just been directed against third countries but also against the organisation’s own members. NATO was directly responsible for the setting up of Operation Gladio and other NATO stay-behind organisations — secret paramilitary networks that throughout the Cold War were “involved in serious cases of terrorism and crime” in several Western European countries, as even a European Parliament report acknowledged. That is, false flags terrorist attacks that were then blamed mostly on far-left groups in order to delegitimise left-wing and socialist/communist parties that were hostile to NATO. So much for the fanciful notion that countries are free to opt out of NATO whenever they want.

The good news is that NATO — just like its de facto leading state, the US — is on a clearly declining trajectory. It still has the ability to sow a lot of violence and chaos — and potentially set the entire world on fire — but it can’t stop the global redistribution of power underway from the West to the Rest; indeed, NATO’s increasingly aggressive posture is actually bolstering the Global Majority’s efforts to counter the West’s increasingly unhinged policies by fostering the creation of new systems of international governance, most notably the BRICS, as a means of protecting the sovereignty of states.

Moreover, NATO is clearly biting off more than it can chew. As Sevim Dağdelen, a member of the German Bundestag with Sahra Wagenknecht’s new party (BSW), said:

While its defenders speak of NATO as if it were eternal, the organisation’s drive toward escalation in Ukraine and its expansion into Asia is exceeding its own capacities. Just as with most empires, NATO is falling into a self-made trap of overextension. In this regard, NATO is a political fossil, unprepared to learn from the defeat of the German Empire in the First World War and appears to be repeating the gross miscalculations of the Kaiser’s Germany, only on a global scale. The German Empire believed it could wage a war on two fronts. Today, a similar conviction is gaining traction within NATO that it must not only confront Russia and China, but that it is also to involve itself in the Middle East. This is a claim to global hegemony now under formulation. What hubris! NATO evidently sees itself waging a war on three fronts. But if it were to do this, its defeat would be certain right from the start.

So maybe, on NATO’s 75th anniversary, there is something to celebrate after all: the beginning of the Alliance’s inevitable terminal crisis.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope 

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