NATO’s Waterloo

Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay famously said that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Ismay made this remark in 1949, prior to becoming the organization’s first secretary-general in 1952. After the intervening decades of shifting geopolitical realities, it is fair to say that NATO has long outlived its initial raison d’être. The Soviet Union is gone, America’s defense concerns have shifted toward Asia, and a reunified Germany is again the dominant (economic) power in Europe. Is it time to bid this relic of the Cold War adieu?

As early as 1993, even committed Atlanticists such as former Senator Richard Lugar argued that NATO must go “out of area or out of business.” Closer to our time, Donald Trump, while ungifted with wisdom, declared NATO an outdated relic during his 2016 political campaign. Emmanuel Macron subsequently termed NATO “brain dead” in a noted interview with The Economist. It is a position the French president appears still to hold.

Out of business when Lugar raised the matter in the 1990s might have been the better way to go, given today’s mounting tensions between NATO and Russia. Of course, many powerful financial beneficiaries of great-power competition, chiefly U.S. and U.K. defense contractors, would have lost out had NATO dissolved itself. They certainly had no interest in turning off a seemingly perpetual money spigot.

And so, amid barely a hint of public debate but widespread, suppressed misgivings, what was once a major contributor to global security has increasingly become an instrument of international instability, as NATO has expanded steadily eastward.

“What’s the point of NATO today?” is not a question deemed worthy of a serious hearing in the corridors of power. Likewise, analyses of the escalating conflict in Ukraine are devoid of any historic context. The Western press performs less as a disseminator of news than a Pentagon PR machine that continues to confuse cause and effect when it comes to reporting on the increasingly fraught relations between Washington and Moscow. This conceptual confusion has been particularly evident in the aftermath of last week’s video summit between Presidents Biden and Putin. The coverage consisted of almost universal praise for Biden’s tough talk while according no legitimacy to Russian security concerns.

This intellectual laxity—in the administration, at NATO headquarters in Brussels, in the Western press—bears a significant price. The missed reality, in my view, is that Ukraine stands a good chance of marking the beginning of NATO’s eventual demise: It can’t go in on Kiev’s behalf and Ukraine’s accession to membership is highly unlikely. It is along Ukraine’s borders, then, that the alliance will reach the fence posts marking its limits. It is there, in short, that NATO loses its 69–year war for Atlantic supremacy.

Recall that when Biden was inaugurated as America’s 46th president, he announced the end of “relentless war” and the start of “relentless diplomacy.” Yet, having just removed U.S. troops from a seemingly endless conflict in Afghanistan, Biden and his NATO allies appear to be stumbling toward another stupid war of choice on terrain where Russia enjoys significant logistical military advantage. Biden may not (yet) be continuing Washington’s seemingly endless presidential hectoring from President Reagan onward for NATO’s European members to expand their defense expenditures, but he has increasingly deployed pressure, particularly on Germany, to squeeze Moscow.

And with the recent retirement of former Chancellor Angela Merkel, the U.S. government may now find that it has a more receptive audience in Berlin. The new coalition government’s incoming foreign minister, Green Party co-leader Annalena Baerbock, is a liberal imperialist in the mold of Samantha Power, Susan Rice and, queen of them all, Hillary Clinton, with whom Baerbock has compared herself.

Which brings us back to Lord Ismay’s point about “keeping the Germans down.” Let us consider the irony here as it relates to NATO.

Germany is the only country that could add substantial credibility to any NATO guarantees offered the Baltic states, Poland, and especially (should it, for the sake of argument, move toward accession) Ukraine. But today Berlin’s army and air force are small and weak, particularly in terms of their power-projection capabilities. This weakness is especially true for combat logistics (a big problem on the Eastern Front in World War II). And for all the happy talk about “an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe” it is hard to believe that most Europeans truly relish the idea of their security coming under the aegis of a strong Germany, especially after the way Berlin flexed its economic muscle in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

That is why Germany remaining “down” (at least in a military sense) is better for everybody, including and especially Germans themselves (who, in the wake of decommissioning their nuclear power plants after the Fukushima disaster in 2011, are more dependent than ever on Russia’s energy resources, particularly its natural gas). There is the closely related problem of Western Europe’s growing dependence on Russian energy supplies coupled with the evident, if slowly emerging economic opportunities implicit in a kind of neo–Hanseatic League centered on East–West sea lanes along the southern littoral of the Baltic Sea all the way to St. Petersburg, as well as land lines of communication to the interior.

NATO’s mission creep started almost immediately after the Soviet Union’s collapse, when, in the early 1990s, it determined to expand toward the newly constituted Russian Federation’s borders—this in contradiction to the assurances George H.W. Bush gave at the time to Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet advocate of glasnost, opening. This transgression was followed by repeated bombing campaigns in the former Yugoslavia (opposed at the time by Russia) and, in 2011, the military intervention in Libya.

It is worth noting that, in the Libya case, Putin’s stance was not one of unremitting hostility to the West. Russia did not exercise its U.N. Security Council veto, despite its opposition to the bombing. Moscow also initially supported the United States’ “war on terror,” going as far as providing logistical support for American forces in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks.

Yet NATO’s activities have, in sum, become increasingly antagonistic toward Russia since the Cold War’s end. The alliance’s ex–Warsaw Pact members have powerful economic interests in fanning what has consequently evolved into a crisis. Countries such as Poland and Lithuania seem to think the worse this crisis becomes, the greater their chances for getting more military aid and stronger forward deployments of NATO, particularly U.S., forces. For years, American defense contractors have viewed the Russian threat as being “great for business.” This was an original motivation for NATO expansion in the 1990s. As a result, NATO has heightened tensions on Russia’s doorstep in Ukraine, contributing to a slowly percolating war that, if expanded much further, could well lead to destruction of NATO itself in the process.

With all of these negatives, one would think there would be considerably more interest in tamping down the trumpets of war in Ukraine. Sadly, to the contrary, the increasingly bellicose tone of Western press reports and analyses today evokes the yellow journalism of the late 19th century.

To read most Western commentary, one would be led to believe that the root cause of today’s current tension in Ukraine comes from Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Ominously, there appears to be a mounting bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill that the U.S. imperative is to defend Ukraine rather than tamp down the inexorable march to war. As one would expect from The New York Times and The Washington Post, the prevailing view is that only the political, economic, and military strength of the United States can facilitate a diplomatic solution to a crisis engineered by an increasingly corrupt and autocratic Putin regime.

Supposedly.

But as is so typical of most American commentary on Russia, the charges against Moscow lack historical context and continue to mix up cause and effect. As the Russian presidential spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, recently indicated to Russia’s TV Channel One in advance of last week’s Biden–Putin video summit: “The Augean stables in our bilateral relations can hardly be cleaned out over several hours of negotiations.”

The reference to the labors of Hercules cannot be dismissed as Moscow’s fanciful indulgence in Greek mythology. Rather, it reflects legitimate, longstanding Russian grievances pertaining to NATO’s broken promises as to its expansion eastwardly. These assertions have been vigorously contested by various American government officials, who firmly denied that the topic of extending NATO membership to former Warsaw Pact countries was raised during negotiations with Moscow on German reunification, much less that the United States made a “pledge” not to pursue eastward expansion.

Gorbachev’s noted mistake was not getting Bush I’s assurances in writing, and the policy cliques in Washington have ever since blurred the record of that occasion. But declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British, and French documents from the national security archives provide conclusive evidence of Bush I’s breached promise—along with those of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, President François Mitterrand, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and their foreign ministers in 1990: Unfortunately, all committed by way of diplomatic contacts (as opposed to formal treaty) not to expand NATO eastward and not to extend membership in the NATO alliance to former member states of the Warsaw Pact. As Melvin Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, a former C.I.A. analyst, and therefore no stranger to Washington’s imperial pursuits, recently argued, absent these pledges, the reunification of Germany could well have marked a dangerous new escalation of the Cold War rather than bringing about its cessation.

At the time, the end of the Cold War held great promise as the usher of a new partnership among Washington, the E.U., and Moscow. Instead, the expansion of NATO’s activities into areas where the West has had no compelling strategic interest has brought forth renewed conflict. Of particular note was the mooted promise to extend NATO membership to Ukraine in 2013, as noted above, along with the European Union’s offer of a formal economic association to Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s president at the time. Yanukovych hesitated to sign when he saw that the exorbitant terms resembled less a partnership than an attempt at economic colonization. In the wake of Yanukovych’s prevarication, protests erupted in Kiev, centered on Maidan Square, which, in turn, led to the overthrow of the Yanukovych government. Yanukovych was then replaced by a pro–Western clique made up of his political opponents.

Supporters of the uprising argue that the protests, and the corresponding offer of associate membership in the E.U., gave Ukrainians a way out of the corruption and kleptocracy allegedly brought about by the Yanukovych administration. Of course, this version of events conveniently ignores the very active role played by U.S..officials, notably Victoria Nuland, then assistant secretary of state, and Geoffrey Pyatt, then ambassador to Kiev, in shaping the outcome. The orthodox rendering of events also ignores the fact that Viktor Yanukovych was legitimately elected in response to the corruption of previous administrations (albeit doing little himself to alleviate the same problem, sadly a longstanding feature of post-independence Ukrainian politics). In any event, what has since been termed the “Maidan coup”was without question what induced Putin to annex Crimea: This has been a matter of record since late–February 2014. And this, in turn, has led to today’s low-intensity civil war between Russian– and Western-tilted Ukrainian nationalists backed by Moscow and Washington respectively.

Western media today are doing precisely what they did during and after the 2014 coup: Then and now, they cut out half the story to avoid reckoning with cause and effect and Western responsibility for the crisis. This time around, their news reports and analyses have it that Vladimir Putin is massing troops on Ukraine’s border to lay the groundwork for an imminent Russian military invasion. Typical has been the tabloid-like reporting of The Sunday Times of London, which confidently asserts that Putin’s ultimate goal is no less than the reclamation of the old Soviet empire. No basis is given for this assertion, and it ignores a number of inconvenient facts: NATO’s ongoing attempts to expand its own force projection to Russia’s borders, Washington’s sale of lethal arms to Ukraine (ironically initiated by Putin’s so-called “poodle,” Donald Trump), diplomatic support for Ukraine’s hostile posture, and escalating U.S. and British naval exercises a mere 12 miles from Crimea. Taken in aggregate, these have had the effect of limiting Biden’s scope for diplomacy.

In the American press, there has been much approving commentary for the Biden administration’s tough talk with Moscow, including the video summit last Tuesday, even from his traditional media opponents. But even though Biden himself seems to recognize that diplomacy is preferable to World War III, there are a few old-line neocons around ready to stiffen his spine by citing the tired Chamberlain-in–Munich analogy.

In response to the West’s apparent determination to stoke this latest crisis—and with history certainly in mind—Putin has demanded explicit guarantees that NATO will not continue to expand further eastward or put missiles in Ukraine that could target Russia. The Western press purports to be shocked that Moscow isn’t simply passively accepting what it perceives to be existential threats to its own national security. Given the conflicting claims surrounding previous NATO pledges, Putin understandably wishes to avoid any future ambiguity regarding the West’s future intentions toward Russia and Ukraine, which seems like a reasonable means of de-escalating the conflict, as well as addressing Moscow’s legitimate security concerns.

The counterargument to Putin’s demand is that a genuinely sovereign and independent Ukraine should be able to establish its own defense and national security arrangements; in any case, goes the argument, responding in the affirmative to such a request in the face of a major troop buildup on Ukraine’s borders would be tantamount to acquiescing to extortion, thereby encouraging further aggression on the part of Moscow.

These arguments, however, are somewhat undermined by the actions of the Biden administration itself, which has reportedly told the Ukrainian government that NATO membership is unlikely to be approved within the next decade. This concession implicitly concedes legitimacy to Putin’s demands. In effect, it acknowledges a core feature in post–Cold War relations between East and West: If spheres of influence are a 19th century technology, spheres of security are a 21st century reality.

But Biden’s assurances do prompt a good question: Why restrict the pledge to 10 years, given that this encroachment represents an ongoing existential threat to Russia?Do we seriously believe that Washington would have accepted a time-limited constraint by Moscow on putting offensive missiles in Cuba to resolve the Cuban missile crisis in 1962?

Looming over all these considerations stands one crucial fact: NATO is a collective defense pact, and membership carries with it reciprocal obligations that go well beyond the aspirations of theUkrainian government. Being drawn into a Russo–Ukrainian conflict has implications for all NATO members. This is not merely a decision for Kiev to make on its own.

Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty states that an attack against one ally is considered as an attack against all its members. Are the U.S. or NATO’s European members seriously prepared to risk thousands of lives to defend Ukraine as a newly enshrined member of this club? Biden was clear on this point last week, when he said, “Sending American troops is not on the table.” Why, then, perpetuate this unnecessarily provocative situation with Moscow?

It is also worth noting that Ukraine is one of those nations that sit on the fault line between West and East. It is far more profoundly divided—by history, culture, language, political traditions, familial ties—than any of its NATO counterparts. It has a substantial Russian-speaking population, especially in the east, many of whom wish to retain close ties to Russia. Accession to NATO, therefore, could well create the conditions for civil war, as the recent conflict in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine has illustrated.

And then there’s the problem of Crimea. According to every NATO member, as well as the current government of Ukraine, Crimea is still part of Ukraine. Therefore, if Ukraine joins NATO, one of three possibilities must follow: NATO goes to war with Russia over Crimea, NATO recognizes the Russian annexation of Crimea, or Article 5 is a dead letter.

Which will it be? There are no other alternatives. Given that an activation of all-out warfare against Russia would certainly create the conditions for World War III (featuring several nuclear armed powers), it is most probable that Article 5 would not be invoked. In which case, NATO as a collective defense treaty would be dead. In effect, those who are arguing to bring Ukraine into NATO are arguing for its destruction.

Senator Lugar’s old observation about NATO has never seemed so prescient. For NATO to remain true to its goal of promoting peace and international security, it is time to put it out of business once and for all.