NATO – Not A Tenable Option Sally Campbell
This great acronym came from the book NATO: What You Need to Know, 2024, by Medea Benjamin & David Swanson, co-founders of Codepink and World Beyond War, respectively. NATO was the subject of a 4 week book club through World Beyond War that completed last week.
I’ve been interested in NATO for some time now, primarily wondering why they were continuing to grow, why their “terrain” seemed to be spreading so far beyond the North Atlantic region, why Trump repeatedly chastised NATO nations for not contributing “their fair share” to NATO and leaving the “burden” to the US. His declaration that NATO nations were required to spend 2% of their GDP on their militaries (and most weren’t doing so) was a total surprise to me. I certainly don’t remember Parliament formalizing any such commitment into Canadian law. Who made that decision for us? At the time (2020), our government was spending 1.3% of our GDP on the military and that amounted to plenty. 2% of GDP would mean an increase of $11 Billion for 2020 alone. I decided to investigate NATO and I learned that several groups were working hard at opening our eyes to the realities behind this seemingly benign alliance – Just Peace Advocates, Canadian Voice of Women for Peace’s No to NATO campaign, Global Women for Peace United Against NATO, to name a few.
I had some questions: Why did NATO go to Kosovo? Why Afghanistan? Libya? Why were Canadian soldiers in Latvia doing war drills before Russia invaded Ukraine? And why is NATO now in the South China Sea for heaven’s sake? It’s a big learning curve and I’ll be on it for awhile. Here is some of what I’ve learned this last while and why we need to rethink our blind allegiance to this war-making organization.
One of the most disturbing aspects of NATO is that it is utterly controlled by the US. Ever since its inception, exactly 75 years ago, the head of NATO’s military branch has been a US General. He (yes, always a man) is known as the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, and he is simultaneously, the Commander United States European Command. Go figure. NATO’s Secretary-General (now Jens Stoltenberg) plays an administrative, public relations role and is always a European.
As I wrote earlier in The Grapevine (Letter to Trudeau, 11th May, 2020: Canada’s Membership in NATO), NATO’s original purpose in Europe was: “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down” (Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay, NATO’s first Secretary General). NATO according to David Swanson, “gives cover” to US interventions, as many think NATO is part of the UN, or its actions at the very least, to be authorized by the UN.
Article 5 of the NATO Charter states that any armed attack against a NATO member is considered to be an attack against all members, and all members will take the actions deemed necessary, including the use of armed force, to assist the Ally attacked. (www.nato.int) NATO members have intervened militarily in Kosovo, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan although none of those nations have attacked a NATO member.
Going back to the 90’s, when the USSR disbanded, the Warsaw Pact which was established as a response to NATO 6 years after its founding, was dissolved. Swanson & Benjamin write that “according to declassified US, Soviet, German, British & French documents posted in the National Security Archive at George Washington University, Western leaders gave multiple assurances to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification that NATO would not move toward Russia’s borders.” US Secretary of State James Baker’s famous promise of “not one inch eastward” was only one of these promises. (NATO @ 25) Shamefully, those promises were all broken, and NATO quickly expanded to Eastern Europe, taking in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic as members in 1999, followed by Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004. NATO troops (including 20,000 Canadians) began conducting war drills on Russia’s very borders. The US is now in the process of constructing its largest European base – on Romanian land, right up against Russia – which will house nuclear weapon capability planes, missiles and drones.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a great gift to NATO. Since then, formerly neutral Finland and now Sweden have joined, and the NATO countries have significantly increased their military budgets, which means they are buying more (mostly US) weapons. Ukraine, which could easily have opted for neutrality and avoided a grinding war on its soil, still wants in. Surprisingly, NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, in a NATO conference opening remarks September 7, 2023, claimed outright responsibility for provoking Russia’s invasion. He said that in the fall of 2021, Putin sent a draft treaty he wanted NATO to sign, promising no more NATO enlargement in Europe. “It was a precondition for not invading Ukraine. If course we didn’t sign that, he said. “We rejected that. So he [Putin] went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders”. (NATO @ 100) What clearer statement of NATO provocation could there be? Yet NATO (and that includes Canada) and the US’ massive propaganda machines have labelled this tragic and unnecessary disaster: “The Unprovoked War”. This in no way excuses the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but it does invite reflection on our role in the current cycle of “endless wars”. Militarism breeds militarism. Is this our vision for a peaceful world?
(To be continued next week)
