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 75^th “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 6^th highest military spender of NATO nations and the 14^th 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)

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, 11^th 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)