The three big NATO myths

A new book by German MP Sevim Dağdelen shatters NATO's biggest myths: why the Alliance has nothing to do with defence, democracy or human rights

I’m reading a very interesting book that’s just been published. It’s called NATO: A Reckoning with the Atlantic Alliance, and it’s written by Sevim Dağdelen (@SevimDagdelen), who has been a member of the German parliament, the Bundestag, since 2005. She is member in the Committee on Foreign Affairs and foreign policy spokesperson for the party Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance — Reason and Justice (BSW) in the German Bundestag. Dagdelen is member of the German-Chinese, the German-Indian and the German-US Parliamentary Friendship Groups. She is a leading expert in Germany on security and foreign policy, and a long-standing member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.

What follows is an excerpt from the introduction:

In 2024, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) celebrates its 75th birthday, seemingly at the pinnacle of its power. More than ever before, NATO is bent on expansion. In Ukraine, NATO has been waging a proxy war against Russia in reaction to Russia’s illegal war of aggression. It participates in the war by training Ukrainian soldiers in the handling of NATO weapons, by massive arms deliveries, by sharing intelligence, by supplying target data, and by sending soldiers who fight on site. There have been discussions about the delivery to Ukraine of German Taurus cruise missiles, which have a range of 500 kilometres and the ability to reach Moscow and St. Petersburg, and about the deployment of NATO troops on a large scale. There is a storm brewing. 

Moreover, NATO is expanding its presence in Asia. By integrating new partner states such as Japan and South Korea, the military alliance is moving forward into the Indo-Pacific Region and seeking a confrontation with China. The military expenditures of the United States and the other NATO member states are reaching record heights. While the big defence contractors are popping champagne bottles, the enormous costs of the military buildup are being foisted on the general population. The drawback of this expansionist power policy is that it leads to overexpansion, rising social tensions, and increasing danger of escalation, challenging the alliance in an unprecedented way. 

All the more so, NATO now has to rely on certain falsifications of history. From NATO’s founding to the present, three big myths have accompanied the brutal history of this military pact, which I will now explore. 

MYTH 1: IT’S ALL ABOUT DEFENCE AND INTERNATIONAL LAW 

NATO is a defensive alliance. That is the narrative which we are supposed to believe and which is repeated ad infinitum. But a look back into the history of the military pact tells a very different story. Neither was mutual defence the main motivation when NATO was founded, nor can one possibly call NATO’s behaviour over the course of the past decades defensive. 

Just as in the case of the Inter-American Treaty, the signatory states of the North Atlantic pact are completely unequal in terms of power and military prowess. It is thus quite obvious that in the founding of NATO, the US was not seeking the assistance of the other alliance partners should it become necessary for the US to defend itself. Actually, Washington has from the start pursued the goal to create a “Pax Americana”, an exclusive area of influence that gives the United States, as the unchallenged leading power, control over the foreign and security issues of the other allies. 

Within the military pact, the other NATO members would then become mere client states like the ones that once used to serve as military buffer zones in the eastern areas of the Roman Empire to strengthen the empire’s grip on power.

Any domestic political change that could have challenged the foreign-policy orientation of these client states was prohibited and punished by crushing them. During the Cold War, NATO organised its own putschist organisations to prevent any such development. These were the so-called “stay behind groups”.  

Among other activities, these groups employed terrorist means to prevent political forces that called into question the membership of their states in NATO from gaining political influence or power. 

The end of the systemic competition with the Soviet Union incisively changes NATO’s previous primary purpose which consisted in creating a “Pax Americana”. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has increasingly seen itself as the world’s policeman. 

With the attack on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999, which at that time still consisted of Serbia and Montenegro, the military pact waged its first war. This was a clear violation of international law. Even the German Federal Chancellor at the time, Gerhard Schröder, acknowledges this 15 years later: “We sent our airplanes [...] to Serbia, and, together with NATO, they bombed a sovereign state — without there having been any Security Council decision on the matter”.  

After this original sin, NATO develops into a pact to wage war, which is moreover prepared to violate international law. This development clearly contradicts its own Charter, in which the NATO states commit themselves according to Article 1 “to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations”. The defence of the alliance area has now become only one part of NATO’s claim to function as a worldwide force of order. 

In 2003, the NATO members United States and Great Britain attacked Iraq in an illegal war of aggression. … Even though the war against Iraq was officially not a NATO war, there are serious reasons to regard this assault as an operation of the military pact. NATO members such as Germany did not deny the use of NATO military bases on their territory to the US nor did they refuse flyover rights to the US forces. 

Against this background, the war policy of the most important members of the alliance must therefore be attributed to the military pact itself — a least if we are supposed to take NATO’s self-definition seriously. The United States with its illegal wars thus stands as pars pro toto, as part for the whole. 

In Afghanistan, NATO had waged a disastrous war for 20 years, a war that cost the lives of more than 200,000 civilians. For the first — and as of yet only — time, in this military operation following the attacks of 11 September 2001, the alliance invoked Chapter 5 of the NATO Treaty. It tried to mislead world opinion into believing that the freedom and security of the West are now defended at the Hindu Kush. 

Apart from Belgrade, Baghdad, and Kabul, NATO’s bloody trail also leads to Libya. In 2011, NATO bombed the country to pieces, violating international law and misusing a resolution of the UN Security Council in the process. Thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands were forced to flee. 

This catastrophe brought about by NATO must also be attributed to its individual member states. Totum pro parte; here, the whole stands for each of its parts. This is true even for those of the member states which do not directly participate in the attacks. 

MYTH 2: DEMOCRACY AND RULE OF THE LAW 

According to the legitimising myth laid down in the preamble of the founding charter of NATO, its members are determined “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage, and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law”. But already in 1949, this is a flat-out lie. Not only did the US align itself with dictatorships and fascist regimes in Latin America, but its NATO allies in Europe were also by no means all pure democracies. The decisive criterion for membership was the readiness to join a front against the Soviet Union. 

As a matter of fact, NATO is simply not about democracy and the rule of law, but solely about geopolitical fealty to the United States. Just as in other cases of empires built on lies, NATO thrives on fairy tales like this. In the schools and universities, these lies are part of NATO’s educational program. 

MYTH 3: COMMUNITY OF VALUES AND HUMAN RIGHTS 

“We are bound together by common values: individual liberty, human rights, democracy and the rule of law”. This is how NATO presents itself as a community of values in its 2022 Strategic Concept. But according to a balance sheet coming from the renowned Brown University in Rhode Island, US, in the past twenty years alone more than four and a half million people have died because of the wars waged by the United States and its allies. 

This picture is not compatible with the widely circulated self-image of NATO. NATO is no community which protects human rights. On the contrary, NATO serves as a protective umbrella for the human rights violations of its members. And this applies by no means only to the violation of social human rights under the dictatorship of a massive arms buildup. Rather, NATO pursues a policy of total impunity for any war crime by its member states.

In the Global South, this Western double standard is met with increasing criticism. The NATO states’ human rights rhetoric is seen as purely instrumental, as a tool to both hide and support these countries’ own geopolitical interests. To the countries of the Global South, NATO appears as the guardian organisation of a deeply unjust world order with neocolonial tendencies. 

This is demonstrated by the fact that in their economic war against Russia, the most powerful NATO states are trying to use secondary sanctions to impose their own policy on “third states” such as China, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, violating the sovereignty of these states in the process.  

The NATO myths romanticise people’s view of reality. If we want to find ways out of the current crisis, we need to unmask them. This is what the present book does. Today, 75 years after the founding of NATO, this military pact, its global expansion, and its confrontational policies are driving the world to the brink of World War Three more than ever before. 

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope 

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