What is the reason for NATO's existence?

The Alliance is the greatest threat to peace and security in Europe

To mark the two-day NATO summit in Vilnius, which ends today, I wrote for UnHerd a myth-busting piece about the true nature NATO. The latter presents itself as a purely “defensive alliance… working for peace, security and freedom”. The reality, however, is quite different. Aside from the fact that its most powerful member and de facto leader, the US, has bombed more countries than any other nation, NATO itself has a rather violent 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 (following an illegal US-led invasion and bombing campaign) and Libya. None had anything to do with defending its members from external aggression; in all these cases, NATO was quite clearly the aggressor. It’s also far from clear how exactly NATO is providing “security” to Europe. On the contrary, there is ample evidence that NATO played a crucial role in unravelling Europe’s security architecture and creating the conditions for the war in Ukraine, the largest conflict in Europe since the Second World, by aggressively expanding eastward, systematically ignoring Russia’s warnings over the years. Read the rest of the article here.

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The first article is a piece that came out in the New York Times yesterday and which — quite incredibly — essentially makes the same case that I make. It’s tellingly titled “NATO Isn’t What It Says It Is”. Its authors, Grey Anderson and Thomas Meaney, are respectively the editor and one of the contributors to an upcoming book which I will definitely be getting my hands on: Natopolitanism: The Atlantic Alliance since the Cold War. They write that “NATO, from its origins, was never primarily concerned with aggregating military power. … Rather, it set out to bind Western Europe to a far vaster project of a US-led world order, in which American protection served as a lever to obtain concessions on other issues, like trade and monetary policy. In that mission, it has proved remarkably successful”. Indeed. Even more crucially, they argue that, “by forbidding duplication of existing capabilities and prodding allies to accept niche roles, NATO has stymied the emergence of any semiautonomous European force