NATO – Not A Tenable Option (Part 2) Sally Campbell
Many of my learnings about NATO are found in the excellent little book: NATO: What you need to Know, by Medea Benjamin & David Swanson, published this year, in time for NATO’s 75th “anniversary celebrations”, which sounds so benign to describe the world’s largest arms trading cabal.
Some of the book’s key points are:
NATO is run by the US
NATO is unaccountable to its members NATO’s primary function – weapons dealer
NATO has “partnerships” worldwide, including many dictators NATO members violate international law
NATO has an expansionist agenda
NATO partnerships
This was new information for me. NATO has dozens of “partners” circling the globe, from Columbia to Mongolia, including Iraq, Pakistan, & Afghanistan. A key concept of partnership is interoperability, which means “partners buying the same weapons, relying on the same people to maintain and repair and upgrade those weapons…to train military personnel on those weapons, and organizing militaries to function under the same command” (NATO@ 66). It involves the integration of new partner militaries into NATO through war drills such as are held in the Baltic Sea each year, and by participation in wars like Afghanistan & Libya. Training & war-preparation are also offered to NATO partners, through NATO’s 30 “National Partnership Training and Education Centers”, the NATO School in Germany, and the NATO “Defense College” in Rome. NATO has been a way to tie Europe to the US’ military, geopolitical and economic interests. (NATO@13) Of the US’ more than 900 military bases around the world, NATO forces use 54.
Canada is already deeply enmeshed in the US military machine. We have had interoperability with the US for years. (In fact, Amlo, Mexico’s very popular outgoing President, described Canada as “almost an associate State of the US”. Because of that, Mexico included Canada in their recent “pause” in diplomatic relations with the US. What does that say about us?)
NATO members and partners account for 69% of the world’s military spending. China spends 19% of what they spend. Russia spends 6% and Iran spends .4% of what they spend. (NATO@76)
Israel is a special partner, with a permanent “official mission” to NATO headquarters since 2017. There is close cooperation between Israel and the weapons industries of NATO members, who have bought billions of dollars’ worth of weapons from Israel (NATO@ 77). American- Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper’s eye-opening book: War against the People: Israel, The Palestinians & Global Pacification (2015) exposes Israel’s mastery of technologies of control –
exporting high-tech weaponry, security systems and means of pacification around the world, “field-tested in Gaza”.
NATO Support & Procurement Agency
Even though I knew a big part of NATO’s purpose was to benefit the arms industry, I underestimated the extent to which arms-dealing is foundational to NATO. This agency lines up weapons deals between manufacturers and governments, is headquartered in Luxembourg, and has “operational centers” in France, Italy and Hungary. It actually has a greater number of staff, and handles greater amounts of money than does NATO itself. NATO has a relatively small budget, about $3.6B. It’s Procurement Agency has over 1,400 civilian staff and a budget of over
$5B Euros annually. NATO obligations are not really about dues; they are about how much money each country spends on its military, most of which spending goes into US coffers.
The NATO “Defense Ministers” decided amongst themselves in 2006 that each NATO country should spend a minimum of 2% of its annual GDP on military spending. (www.nato.int) In 2014, only 3 NATO members met that goal. In 2023, with much pressure from the US, that number had climbed to 24! (NATO@87) Canada is still not there, but our military is lobbying for our country to “meet our obligations” by increasing our spending to this arbitrary number, tied to our economy. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg now calls this target a ”floor, not a ceiling”. The US spends 3.5% of its GDP on the military, but somehow even that sounds more benign than $1 Trillion/year which is the actual tab if you include nuclear weapons (under the “Energy” budget), Veteran’s Affairs & Services, and Department of Homeland Security.
Naturally, the US military is much bigger than all other NATO militaries combined which perhaps gave members some false sense of security that “Big Bro” would protect them if need be, when actually our “protector” uses NATO as a cover for its global hegemony agenda.
Here at home, our military budget has nearly doubled in the last decade, from $20B to $39B per year. In 2023, we spent $3B on environment and the climate crisis. Canada is the 6th highest military spender of NATO nations and the 14th highest military spender in the world in 2021!
NATO’s expansionism is well-illustrated by its describing Western Asia & North Africa as “our southern neighbourhood”, a chilling parallel to the US Monroe Doctrine claiming Latin America as its “backyard” (NATO@124). NATO plans for world dominance are well-described in the book, which I recommend reading.
(Next week: NATO & the Parliamentary Petition)
