Ill-Suited to Reality

Nato’​s cheerleaders like to call it the most successful multinational alliance in history. Part of that is down to its longevity. It turned 75 this year, and has now overtaken the Delian League between Greek city-states, formed in 478 BCE, which survived for 74 years. The Egyptian-Hittite ‘eternal treaty’ was in place for longer, though it included just two states, where Nato now has 32 members. But this is also a matter of definition: several Indigenous American confederacies – notably the Haudenosaunee, or Five (later Six) Nations, with some form of central council operating since at least the 16th century – can claim a longer lifespan. The Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, signed into existence by 23 states in Rio in 1947, also predates Nato, though it isn’t celebrated in anything like the same way – perhaps because the US has a record of attacking the other signatories.

The claim that Nato is unique among international alliances in duration and character is less a historical than a political assertion. Its 75th anniversary, arriving at a time when it has been rejuvenated by the war in Ukraine, has prompted a carnival of self-congratulation. In July, the leaders of all member nations, from Biden to Orbán to Zelensky, turned up in Washington for Nato’s birthday summit, including Starmer in his first week on the job and Macron days after losing his governing authority. The Danish academic Sten Rynning presents Nato as a kind of kumbaya co-operative working ‘in the service of public betterment’ and guided by ‘valiant ideas of freedom and democracy’. The journalist Peter Apps credits it with preventing the end of the world and allowing ‘whole generations’ to ‘grow up largely in peace’. In its own promotional material Nato claims to have ‘kept over one billion people safe for 75 years’.

It has suddenly become popular to cast Nato as the first benign military alliance in history, without concealed politics of any kind. But that is to erase some uncomfortable facts. The most egregious cases of international aggression since the founding of the alliance have all involved the US: Korea, Vietnam, the First Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq. Yet thanks to the alliance, US-led wars have usually been defended in Europe by appealing to their righteousness. Actions which, taken by any other state or coalition of states, would be treated as evidence of insanity have been deemed unimpeachable. Triumphalism about Nato has also tended to conceal the extent of US covert activity inside Europe throughout the Cold War, including anti-communist networks in Italy (Operation Gladio), Denmark (Operation Absalon) and France (the Allied Clandestine Committee), as well as in West Germany and the Netherlands. With arms caches in the countryside and support from European intelligence agencies, ‘stay-behind’ military and paramilitary units would be mobilised in the event of a Soviet-sponsored attack. The CIA was heavily involved in securing the takeover of Greece by a military junta in 1967. Twenty years earlier, the US had orchestrated the expulsion from government of leading political figures in France and Italy. It might be cosier to imagine a world without CIA torture sites in Poland, Lithuania and Romania, but that isn’t the world we live in.

In the Anglosphere, Nato’s history remains bound up with a mythology of the Second World War that ascribes victory to Anglo-American co-operation. The conditions for the creation of the alliance were established by Britain’s survival in 1940 and its role as a springboard for Eisenhower’s ‘Crusade in Europe’. And if the new world’s liberation of the old had to continue as a lengthy military occupation, that was because of the threat of the Soviet Union. But as the Nato official Jamie Shea observed in an address delivered for the sixtieth anniversary of Nato in 2009, the impetus for its creation was never simply Soviet military strength. It was also formed at a moment of anomalous American strength and devastating European weakness. Few international military alliances have involved quite so lopsided a balance of power among their members. Nato is far more top-heavy than the ‘definitive treaty’ signed by Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia after the defeat of Napoleon in November 1815. And it is not unique in its rhetorical commitment to high-minded ideals: even imperial Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere professed ‘mutual co-operation’ in the service of constructing ‘an order of common prosperity and well-being based upon justice’. The obvious comparison is the Warsaw Pact. But to see the two alliances as in any way similar invites the thought that Nato might not be so benign after all.

It is sometimes argued that the US was hoodwinked into forming Nato by clever Europeans seeking to surrender military responsibilities in exchange for wealth and comfort. Donald Trump expresses something close to this sentiment in his complaints about European free-riders. Others attribute its origins to the persuasive powers of Ernest Bevin (‘his crowning achievement’, in the words of the new foreign secretary, David Lammy). Apps describes Bevin as ‘the man who would strike the initial spark that started Nato’ and who took the ‘first faltering steps’ towards its creation. But however long you pick over Bevin’s correspondence with George Marshall and Arthur Vandenberg in search of British genius, the story doesn’t fit. Secret meetings between the US, UK and Canada to set up the alliance began at the Pentagon just five days after the Treaty of Brussels was signed in March 1948, leading to plans known as the ‘Pentagon proposals’. Nato’s founding treaty was delayed until April 1949 so that Harry Truman could fight off a challenge from Thomas E. Dewey in the 1948 US presidential election. Britain requested that the treaty be signed in Barbados; Portugal suggested the Azores as a symbolic mid-Atlantic location; but the US insisted on Washington and so it was. Say what you will of the Delian League, at least its early congresses were held in Delos rather than Athens.

Nato has two strategic commands: one based in Virginia, the other in Mons, Belgium. But since 1949 every holder of its senior military office, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), has been a US general or admiral. Applications for membership of the alliance must be submitted to the US government, not Nato HQ. Thirty-five years after the end of the Cold War almost a hundred thousand US military personnel are stationed across Europe: around 39,000 in Germany, 15,000 in Poland, 13,000 in Italy, 10,000 in Britain, 4000 in Romania, 3250 in Spain, 1150 in Belgium, 1100 in Norway, 600 in Greece and Kosovo, 450 in the Netherlands, 250 in Portugal and Lithuania, and around 150 each in Hungary, Bulgaria and Slovakia. Another 12,500 are with the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. Europe, from Stavanger in Norway to Souda Bay in Crete, is dotted with US military bases. Tactical nuclear weapons are deployed at air bases in Germany, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands, fitted on B61 gravity bombs. Only US officials can give orders for their use.

The descriptions of Nato by US leaders have often had little to do with the defence of Europe and a lot to do with Nato as a strategic asset to the US. In 1948 the US Army General Staff prepared a memorandum for Eisenhower making clear that ‘the US government position’ was ‘We are in Berlin by right of conquest.’ As late as 1966, Robert McNamara briefed the president that one of the objectives of US military forces in Europe was to discourage ‘the revival of German militarism’. Douglas Lute, the US ambassador to Nato under Obama, was even more explicit. The alliance ‘fundamentally serves a vital American interest’, he said, since in the event of a crisis the US ‘enters that crisis with thirty like-minded, militarily capable partners’. There is a political rationale too: ‘Alongside our 25 per cent of GDP we can bring the European roughly 25 per cent of GDP and compete unfairly in the coming decades with China.’ This gives the US a ‘geostrategic advantage’: neither Putin nor Xi ‘have anything to compare’ with it.

In the introduction to Natopolitanism, a collection of essays and leaked documents revealing less celebrated aspects of Nato’s history, Grey Anderson argues that even during the Cold War the alliance was never principally a mutual defence pact. Particularly in the early years, ‘European leaders looked to Nato as a bulwark against internal subversion as much as against the Red Army.’ Another function, as Washington saw it, was to forestall the development of an independent European military force. Charles Bohlen, US ambassador to France in the 1960s, warned the then secretary of state, Dean Rusk, that de Gaulle ‘envisaged the emergence of Europe after the war as a third power centre in the world’. Bohlen was confident that ‘it lies within the power of the US and our allies to prevent de Gaulle’s policy from coming into fruition.’ Anderson dates the emergence of modern European Atlanticism to the 1970s, when the US Information Agency, the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall Fund and the Atlantik-Brücke led a reaction against German Ostpolitik. None of this had much to do with the Cold War. In 1966 Zbigniew Brzezinski, then an adviser to Lyndon Johnson, noted that the presence of the US army in Europe would still be useful even if the Soviet threat disappeared, to help build a ‘world order on the basis of closer collaboration among the more developed nations’. In January 1992 a CIA report noted that Nato helped secure European assent on ‘economic security decisions of vital interest to Washington’.

If Nato was the main mechanism for wrangling Europeans into line, it was only natural to want to extend that influence to Eastern Europe when the opportunity presented itself. Mary Elise Sarotte, in Not One Inch: America, Russia and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate (2021), her account of Nato’s enlargement in the 1990s (a section of which is included in Natopolitanism), relates that during negotiations with Gorbachev over the reunification of Germany, the US secretary of state, James Baker, floated the idea of a pledge not to expand Nato eastwards. But the question of whether US and European leaders ‘promised’ there would be no eastward expansion is neither here nor there: Moscow was under no illusion about US intentions, and in any case was in no position to resist. Sarotte shows that what was really at work was an ambitious opportunism: Washington ‘realised it could not only win big but win bigger’. ‘Not one inch eastwards’ became not one inch of territory off-limits to Nato. As the 1992 Defence Planning Guidance put it, US policy in Eastern Europe would be ‘anchoring the East-Central Europeans into the West’ through Nato liaison and security commitments.

One of the ironies of Nato enlargement was that it was opposed most strongly by establishment intellectuals and military historians. George Kennan described the prospect as ‘a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions’, which could destabilise Eastern Europe and resurrect Cold War hostilities. In 1998, John Lewis Gaddis bemoaned that the decision to admit Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic was taken with almost no public debate and that ‘with remarkably few exceptions’ historians saw it as ‘ill-conceived, ill-timed and above all ill-suited to the realities of the post-Cold War world’. Enlargement violated the principle of magnanimity in victory, and risked driving Russia to forge an anti-hegemonic alliance with China. From the left, Peter Gowan argued in 1999 that rhetoric about spreading democracy was cover for a desire to eliminate Russian political influence from the region. That entailed significant risk of future conflict, since Russia wouldn’t always be weak. More than two decades before the event, Gowan predicted that the presence of Nato infrastructure on Poland’s borders could ‘very rapidly’ lead to crisis in Ukraine.

In the 1990s relations between the US bloc and a weakened Russia briefly showed promise. Russia opposed Nato military actions in Yugoslavia but there was enough common ground for the Nato-Russia Founding Act to be signed in 1997, committing both sides to non-aggression and to co-operation on security issues. According to the terms of the agreement, Nato would not station significant combat forces or deploy nuclear weapons in new member states. But in 2001 the US announced its decision to withdraw unilaterally from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and over the following years it set up ballistic missile defence systems in both Poland and Romania. Romania’s Mihail Kogălniceanu air base is now a major US military centre: four thousand Nato troops are stationed there and the number is set to increase. The beginning of Nato’s Baltic and Balkan expansion in 2004, along with the accession of Slovakia, coincided with the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, setting relations between Russia and the US on their current trajectory. The announcement at Nato’s summit in Bucharest in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia were on the path to membership only heightened tensions further.

Proponents of enlargement stress that Nato membership is mostly voluntary, with few strings attached. That wasn’t quite the case when the Republic of Macedonia was admitted in 2020, but only after changing its name, under pressure from Greece, to North Macedonia. And there was no demonstrated democratic mandate in favour of Nato membership plans in Ukraine in the mid-2000s when Viktor Yushchenko did much to advance them, or in Montenegro in 2017 when it joined. But for many new adherents in Eastern Europe Nato seemed to represent a shining alternative, or at least a way of overturning past errors. Rather than having to engage in a balancing act between the local great power and the global hegemon (Vietnam’s current position), the new Eastern European nationalists wanted to go the whole hog with the empire. It isn’t difficult to see why, from the US perspective, the incorporation of Eastern Europe was enticing: imperial powers have always seen the advantage of cultivating local vassals. But on neither side did the expansion of Nato have much to do with security. By the late 1990s and early 2000s Nato could in no sense be defined as a defensive alliance in Europe. As even Rynning’s fawning account admits, Nato’s ‘main challenge moving forward from 1997 was not Russia’ but balancing the politics of enlargement and ‘out of area operations’. Beyond Europe it would soon be involved in military action from Mazar-i-Sharif to the Gulf of Aden. Eastern Europe, like Western Europe before it, would be a consort in the American global project: Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq.

On the face of it, it’s strange that US political influence is even more deeply embedded in Europe than in Latin America, where the architects of the Monroe Doctrine focused their attention. Nato was never a club of democracies: it happily included Salazar’s Portugal, imperial Britain, the Greek and Turkish juntas, and – unofficially – Francoist Spain. Nato membership came to represent formal membership of ‘the West’: a synthesis of the cultural identities of North America and Europe on the one hand and the integrity of American power on the other. The most enthusiastic collaborators in the US global project, other than the UK, are the states that joined Nato in the late 1990s and early 2000s, where being recognised as part of ‘the West’ was a key goal for local elites. Having faded somewhat in the early 2010s, that status is now enjoying a revival, largely thanks to the war in Ukraine. Since the existence of an American empire in Europe is not something one acknowledges in polite society, once again the confrontation is between Russia and the amorphous ideal known as ‘the West’.

Beginning​ in 1952 and for decades afterwards, Nato ran a fleet of trucks, trailers and buses known as ‘mobile information centres’: travelling exhibitions installed for a few days at a time in cities across Europe, sometimes screening propaganda films voiced by Charlton Heston. Today no Heston equivalent is required. Popular and intellectual opposition to Nato of a kind that was once common in Europe is now rare. Natopolitanism is a collection of the strongest examples of the survival of that tradition. The chapters by Susan Watkins (on Nato and Russia), Régis Debray (on Nato and France) and Richard Seymour (on Nato and the UK) demonstrate its depth. But this is marginal dissent all the same. The alliance’s official motto – ‘animus in consulendo liber’, ‘in discussion a free mind’ – is almost unknown. But since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine there has been no shortage of European politicians ready to chant ‘si vis pacem, para bellum’ – if you want peace, prepare for war.

The question of whether the war in Ukraine was ‘caused’ by Nato expansion or the inherent nefariousness of Russia’s government is a dead end. But the strategic conditions in which a war takes place are always a first-order concern. Natopolitanism includes an essay by John Mearsheimer, ‘Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault’, first published in Foreign Affairs in 2014. In describing Nato enlargement as the ‘taproot of the trouble’ and predicting that US and European policy towards Ukraine would ‘exacerbate hostilities with Russia and devastate Ukraine in the process’, Mearsheimer attracted the ire of ideology professionals on both sides of the Atlantic for scrutinising his own side’s policies without demonising Russia in the required way. But all accounts of the negotiations held in Belarus and Turkey in 2022 between the Ukrainian and Russian governments show that Ukraine’s status with regard to Nato was a major point of contention.

In 2021, when Russia began mobilising forces near Ukraine’s borders, Nato membership was not an immediate prospect for Ukraine. But that shouldn’t stop us from asking whether the policies of the US and other Nato powers contributed to the outbreak of the war. Tony Wood’s chapter in Natopolitanism argues that ‘the US and its Nato allies necessarily played a role in shaping the context for the invasion.’ Outrage at Russia’s actions and solidarity with Ukrainians are wholly justified – but they ‘should not be allowed to shut out larger questions of historical responsibility’. In August 2021, the US and Ukraine signed a Strategic Defence Framework agreement in which the US promised to help Ukraine ‘counter Russian aggression’ while making progress towards ‘Nato interoperability’. Leaving aside the narrow question of formal Nato membership, between 2014 and 2022, under Obama, Trump and Biden, the US and its allies helped to rebuild the Ukrainian armed forces completely, an effort that played a part in worsening relations between the US and Russia, and proved critical in frustrating the Russian advance in February and March 2022.

The ostensible strategy of the Nato powers in Ukraine since the invasion is based on the premise that as soon as Ukraine is supplied with the right combination of high-tech weapons systems – HIMARS, ATACMS, FPV drones, Starstreak missiles – it will be able to drive Russia out. But since spring 2022 the war has been one of grinding attrition. No weapons systems, no matter how advanced, can bring an end to this kind of war. Unless Nato armies join the fight – which would bring an unacceptable risk of nuclear holocaust – a decisive victory in the field is very hard to imagine. For the US and its Nato allies, keeping Russia bogged down in Ukraine has its benefits: as the US secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin, put it in April 2022, the goal was ‘to see Russia weakened’. It’s not clear how effective this has been: Russia has lost many soldiers, but for now it has insulated itself from too much economic and social damage, even considering the breadth of sanctions wielded against it. But one consequence of the war is that it has considerably strengthened Nato. As Biden told graduates of the US Naval Academy in Maryland in May 2022, the Russian invasion had ‘Natoised’ Europe.

Over the last two years Nato’s ‘enhanced forward presence’ – established in 2017 in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Poland – has expanded to south-eastern Europe, with new battlegroups in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. The German government has increased its military spending to 2 per cent of GDP for the first time since unification. Romania increased its military budget by 55 per cent in a single year. Poland, which increased its spending by 81 per cent, also took out loans from South Korean banks to buy tanks and howitzers, and bought Patriot missile batteries from the US. New Nato command centres have opened in Adaži in Latvia and Elbląg in Poland. The expansion of the alliance to Finland (April 2023) and Sweden (March 2024) added two new members and 1300 km of border with Russia. Even before its official accession, Sweden granted the US the use of 17 military sites on its territory. In December 2023 the US and Denmark signed a defence co-operation agreement that allows the US to base soldiers and equipment in Denmark permanently. In May 2024 the US deployed its Strategic Mid-Range Fires missile system to Bornholm Island in the Baltic Sea, over which Nato air forces already regularly intercept Russian flights.

Internally,​ relations between Nato’s European officials and Washington still resemble those of courtiers paying tribute to the throne. Last June, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House spokesperson, was asked whether Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s secretary general, would be staying in his post for the moment. Jean-Pierre answered that Biden ‘hasn’t made any decision yet’. The lead candidate to replace Stoltenberg at the time was the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, who had the backing of both Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz. Frederiksen visited Washington but was rejected by Biden, having ‘failed the interview’. Britain’s candidate was the former defence secretary Ben Wallace, who was rejected without an audience. In the event Stoltenberg was kept on for another year. Stoltenberg’s anointed successor is now the former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, who saw off a brief challenge from Klaus Iohannis, the current president of Romania. In advance of the 75th anniversary summit in Washington, the way was cleared for Rutte to take office in October, just in time for the US presidential election.

The near unchallenged support Nato enjoys among European elites has allowed for the purchase at massive expense of large numbers of American F-35 fighter jets, now operated, or soon to be operated, by the UK, Italy, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark and the Czech Republic, with Romania and Greece to follow soon. Many Eurosceptic and ethnonationalist political forces across the continent share an affection for Nato almost indistinguishable from that of the German Greens. Even the Rassemblement National has softened on the question. The UK’s new defence secretary, John Healey, has declared Labour the ‘party of Nato’, but his Tory predecessor, Grant Shapps, was equally ingratiating: in January, he celebrated the alliance’s latest military exercise, Steadfast Defender 24, as the ‘largest deployment of land forces to Nato for forty years’, while in the same breath indulging in fantasies about mass migration as a ‘weapon of war’ and talking up threats to Europe’s ethnic composition. Far-right political movements in Germany, Poland and Italy maintain a rhetorical opposition to many forms of European political integration, but for the most part they do so while humming the ‘Hymne de l’OTAN’.

One might ask whether the fervency of the new Natoism in Europe can last. A more pressing question is whether it can last in the US. Trump frequently makes statements about the alliance that worry its adherents. In February, a week before this year’s Munich Security Conference, he complained about ‘delinquent’ Europeans refusing to spend more on their militaries and said if this continued he would not honour Nato’s Article 5, which commits member nations to come to 0ne another’s aid in the event of an armed attack. But it’s very unlikely that a second Trump term would mean the end of the alliance. However many times during his first term he threatened to withdraw the US from Nato, he never came close to doing it. Some of the people most likely to serve as national security adviser if he returns to office believe that the US should prioritise East Asia at the expense of Europe, but none can quite be described as Nato critics. Trump’s speeches are not usually anti-Nato so much as demands, thinly connected to reality, for better transactional deals with European governments. Even after blowing through the 2018 Nato summit excoriating European heads of state, he repeatedly described himself as ‘a big supporter of Nato’. Trump wants Europe to spend more on arms, especially those made in America. Even if the US were to withdraw from the alliance, it’s hard to imagine it dismantling any of its military positions in Europe: the strategy would be unchanged, just without the constraint of Article 5.

The US committed itself to Nato partly to limit independent European military strength. But it is worth keeping in mind the vast scale of European investment, and the military advantage Europe has gained from it. In June, a study by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies noted that ‘Nato’s cumulative capabilities far exceed Russia’s – even excluding the United States.’ Even before 2022, Nato armies without the US had almost double the number of soldiers and aircraft fielded by Russia, and more than twice as many tanks. It isn’t a law of nature that Dutch pilots should fly F-35s and carry US nuclear bombs on orders from Washington. Could Trump, even inadvertently, make other European security arrangements possible? The idea that American reticence about the alliance could usher in a pan-European force through the back door at present seems fanciful. The last thing Trump and his hangers-on want to see is an independent Europe entering into strategic competition with the US. Europe doesn’t want that either. One thing it gains from its subordination in Nato is immunity from American aggression. When Macron speaks of European ‘military independence’, it is in the spirit of better serving the US global project, so as ‘never to put [America] in a strategic dilemma that would mean choosing between Europeans and [its] own interests’.

A world without American military domination of Europe would be a different world. It would demand a new equilibrium between both Europe and Russia and Europe and the US. But ideas of European strategic autonomy have always been vague. The Weimar Triangle group – the alliance between France, Germany and Poland established in 1991 – does little beyond holding an occasional summit. The Franco-German defence and security councils are empty shells. Instead, European leaders still speak, as Scholz did recently, of Nato as ‘the ultimate guarantor of peace and security in the Euro-Atlantic area’. So it is now, Scholz said, and so it ‘must continue to be’. Military spending by European states has increased by more than 60 per cent since 2014. Yet G7 meetings are still surpassingly easy for US diplomats to run. Nato is both stronger than ever and just as unsuited to averting the next world crisis.