75 years on, NATO is still crucial
NATO marked its 75th anniversary this past week. It has been one of the most successful military and security alliances in history.
In the decades preceding 1949, Europe had suffered two wars of unimaginable horror. In the years before 1949, Moscow added to its internal empire with an external empire reaching into the heart of Europe. Both were, as they would eventually be called, “evil.”
The attempt to reconstitute that empire under Vladimir Putin has caused undue fretting about NATO in recent years, with a resurgence in the isolationist stream in American conservatism. Yet it is the present Russian aggression against Ukraine that demonstrates the value of NATO.
The question in 1949 was how to deal with the threat of war in the face of Stalin’s expansionist communist tyranny. Hitler’s expansionist tyranny had plunged Europe into war. (Contra Putin and his interlocutor Tucker Carlson, it was not Polish unwillingness to negotiate away its territory.) Stalin began with a head start over Hitler; he already had occupied and subjugated his neighbours.
NATO, a mutual defence and security pact, meant that Europe was not going back to September 1939, but would make the arrangements of December 1941 permanent. When Churchill received news of Pearl Harbor, he knew that the Americans would now fight alongside Britons and Canadians against Hitler. That was not the case at the war’s outbreak, when Canada joined Britain immediately, but isolationism was too strong to overcome at that point in the U.S.A.
After the war, would America engage or withdraw? NATO was one of the answers. When West Germany joined NATO in 1955, it was an astonishing achievement by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. That Germany and France, having gone to war with each other three times in the previous 90 years, would be allied in mutual defence at the centre of Europe — this was a supreme act of statesmanship and diplomacy.
NATO contained Soviet communism during the Cold War. In the face of significant protests, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl deployed intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe in response to similar moves by Moscow. “Peace through strength” proved successful; in a few years Reagan’s “zero option” was accepted by Moscow, and an entire class of nuclear weapons was dismantled.
NATO was essential to keeping the peace and winning the Cold War. In its 40th anniversary year, newly-free East Germans danced upon the Berlin Wall.
Yet 30 years after the Soviet Union was thrown on the ash heap of history, NATO is under pressure due to Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The pressures are twofold.
The first is a lack of commitment. For too long, NATO members — with Canada in the lead — have been free-riding on the American contribution. The war against Ukraine has made that no longer tenable. European members have already increased their defence spending. It is even possible that Canada may do the same — should pharmacare, electric vehicle subsidies and school lunches not exhaust the exchequer.
The second is a lack of confidence. In 2022, too many who should have known better got taken in by Russian propaganda, namely that NATO was somehow at fault for provoking Russia with its eastern expansion. Aside from conceding that parts of Europe were permanently part of the “Russian world” imperial zone, the claim was simply false.
Why did Putin invade Ukraine, instead of, say, Latvia and Lithuania? The Baltics, after all, are more part of the “Russkiy mir” than Ukraine. Reclaiming Latvia and Lithuania would provide easy access to the Baltic Sea and unite the mother bear with its isolated cub, Kaliningrad.
Latvia and Lithuania would be easier to conquer, being much smaller than Ukraine in both land mass and population. So why not start reconstituting the Russian empire there? Because the Baltic states are part of NATO.
What would have happened if Ukraine had been admitted in 2008, instead of only being promised membership “in the future?” Would it have made Putin’s invasion more or less likely?
We can’t know, but we do know what countries that might face a Russian invasion think. After the 2022 invasion, both Finland (2023) and Sweden (2024) joined NATO, having declined to join Norway in 1949 as a founding member.
What changed? In the assessment of Russia’s neighbours, NATO membership makes invasion less likely, not more. Not admitting Ukraine to NATO did not stop Putin from invading in 2014 and 2022. Admission might have prevented it.
That moment has passed. The current moment calls for more critical support for Ukraine. NATO at 75 is not as strong as it should be. But the need for it — and for its strengthening — is as clear as ever.