Expansionist NATO poses danger to world peace
US-led alliance lacks the moral integrity to ponder the breach of its treaty provisions
NATO held its latest summit from July 11 to 12 in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Exactly 26 years ago — during July 8-9, 1997 — NATO at its summit in Madrid approved the “Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between NATO and the Russian Federation”. In other words, a permanent NATORussia forum was signed by then Russian president Boris Yeltsin and then United States president Bill Clinton in Paris on May 27, 1997.
Renowned historian M.E. Sarotte’s brilliant 550-page analysis, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, illustrates how the US, and thereby NATO, have been acting as the big-brother and manipulating against Russia. For the US, Russia was never meant to become an equal partner, as irrespective of the Russian concerns, the US and NATO always intended to promote their own interests.
While Yeltsin promoted the “founding act” as a boost for Russia, Clinton saw it as a sugarcoated pill for Russia to swallow NATO’s expansion.
What we know about the latest Vilnius Summit so far offers no indication that NATO has learned any lessons or would rethink its policy in light of Russia’s heightened concerns over the past more than a quarter of a century, not to speak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Sarotte takes the reader through all the documentation to show that then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was indeed given promises that NATO would not expand even “one inch” if it acknowledged a unified Germany as a full NATO member. It was not written into a treaty, but the “cascading” documentation, especially in the National Security Archive at George Washington University, is overwhelming nonetheless.
Sarotte explains the entire process of NATO’s expansion policy at the time and concludes on page 261: “Although the US President did not say so explicitly, ‘not one inch’ was gaining a new meaning: not one inch was off-limits to the alliance.”
Consider these statements on NATO’s 2023 Vilnius Summit page: “NATO currently faces the most dangerous and unpredictable security environment since the Cold War. How will the Alliance continue to protect its one billion citizens and every inch of Allied territory?... NATO Leaders will meet to address the most pressing challenges for the Alliance, further strengthen NATO’s deterrence and defence and bring Ukraine closer to the Alliance.”
Yet NATO does not have the moral or intellectual integrity to ask itself the most important question: Why?
The statement, “bring Ukraine closer to the Alliance”, that is, making Ukraine a full NATO member, and the three decades of NATO in Ukraine ignore the fact that in all opinion polls before the RussiaUkraine conflict broke out, only a tiny minority of Ukrainians was in favor of NATO membership.
One is reminded of a former NATO secretary-general’s reckless answer to a recent question about how he thought Russia would react to his proposal to deploy some NATO troops on Ukrainian territory: “I don’t care!”
Or, take for instance, the US secretary of defense’s statement that the aim of the US and NATO is to weaken Russia militarily and economically so it never becomes “a problem” again — or NATO’s desperate attempts to contain China, which the transatlantic alliance sees as a challenge only because Chinese values and interests are different from those of NATO.
This brings us to another trend, which is never highlighted in Western mainstream media: NATO’s daily violation of its own 1949 treaty provisions and its global expansion.
The treaty, for all practical purposes, is a copy of the UN Charter to which Article 5 on mutual defense among its European members has been added. It is distinctly defensive in nature.
But the aggressive and provocative, not at all “defensive”, alliance has been violating the very treaty it is based on since 1999 when it committed the first violation by conducting out-of-area operations in what was then Yugoslavia.
But what will happen when NATO has no more European states to add to its members’ list — the only raison d’etre of NATO today? Then it will invent a new category — partners — something the bloc has already done. NATO today has 31 members, as Sweden is not mentioned in NATO’s Vilnius Summit page, but 39 partner states. NATO also plans to open an office in Tokyo which, along with AUKUS, it will use to meddle in cross-Taiwan Strait ties and contain China.
What we are seeing is rampant militarism that “doesn’t care” about the consequences of its own provocative policies.
Making oneself strong in one aspect while losing out on all other power dimensions — diplomacy, economy, legality, creativity, vision and culture — is a recipe for disaster. NATO no longer argues or analyses; it postulates and judges everybody except itself.
It is highly disturbing that NATO’s increasing militarism is not opposed but largely tacitly accepted as the “new normal” by the media and in research, with the latter basically financed by NATO governments. Apart from a tiny group of critical NATO scholars, the vitally important discourse on war and peace has been silenced and peace studies scrapped.
If NATO “wins” this game after being largely responsible for “the most dangerous and unpredictable security environment since the Cold War”, the rest of the world will likely be pushed toward an eschatological moment.