The Old NATO and the New NATO

However, under President Bill Clinton, the first US leader to be elected after the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the first of his generation of baby boomers to become president, all this changed radically. 

By the end of Clinton’s two terms of office, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary – all previously members of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact – had been brought into the Alliance. The stated purpose of these moves was not to double cross or aggressively threaten Russia but to end the entirely unanticipated resurgence of bitter ethnic conflicts across former communist Central Europe, especially in the Balkans.

Under the next US president, George W. Bush, just as Russia was regaining its economic stability and rebuilding its fearsome thermonuclear power, the neoconservatives whispering into the ears of Bush, Jr, his Vice President Dick Cheney and his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld manically urged the incorporation of the three tiny Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – total population still only 6 million in 2023 – into the Alliance. Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Slovenia were brought into the Alliance too. Apart from some arms sales, the strategic and practical benefit to America from all these efforts was nonexistent.

On June 15, 2001, Putin responded to these moves by setting up with Chinese President Hu Jintao the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which today has grown to include two more formidable nuclear-armed Asian powers, India and Pakistan, and also Iran.

Since then, the growth of NATO and its expansion to the east has continued at an ever more manic pace. Yet all the new nations joining NATO do not strengthen the Alliance, they critically weaken it.

NATO now has 31 member nations. These include tiny Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, North Macedonia, Croatia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Montenegro. Each one of them, at least in theory, carries as much weight in the organization’s councils as the United States itself, Canada, Britain, Germany or France. A vastly disproportionate amount of the very limited talent pool of experienced US diplomats is sucked into the hair splitting and brain-numbing minutia of keeping these tiny fractious entities all corralled and reasonably polite to each other – at least in public.

Throughout US public discourse on NATO, one mantra is always repeated ad nauseum: It is that the Alliance, the United States and the West are vastly stronger and enjoy a practical and military as well as diplomatic and moral superiority neither Russia nor China, nor even both of them acting together can hope to match. 

However, American and also British policymakers and pundits have been hypnotized by the superficial magic of numbers and cheap, worthless self-deluding rhetoric. As the great British historian Lord Correlli Barnett (not insignificantly Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s favorite historian) pointed out in his masterpiece “The Collapse of British Power,” more than half a century ago, members of any alliance have to be assessed by how much strength they add to the grouping and to its leading member. Or whether, in reality, they detract from it.

As I have previously pointed out, and hope to again, throughout European history of the past 700 years, having the small, brave and fiercely independent but also fractious and eternally feuding tiny nations and peoples of Central Europe on their side only serves to distract great imperial powers, weaken them, endless drain them of resources and eventually plunge them all into endless wars that in the end they are always doomed to lose.

Germany at the height of its power and glory in Bismarck’s Second Reich was destroyed by falling into this trap. Kaiser Wilhelm II rashly gave Austria-Hungary a blank check to pull it into global war against Russia and France, and eventually the British Empire too, in 1914.

In the 1920s and 30s, France sought security by creating a “Little Entente” of three supposedly middle rank East Central European nations, Yugoslavia, Romania and Czechoslovakia. It proved utterly worthless.

During World War II, Nazi Germany after swallowing Czechoslovakia and Poland easily pulled all the remaining nations of Central Europe into its grip. Its only real advantage was grabbing the formidable Czech armaments industry which happily produced 22,000 first class Messerschmitt 109 combat fighters for the Luftwaffe through the war.

However, the supporting armies from Italy, Hungary and most of all Romania crumbled like sand before the Soviet Red Army’s onslaught at Stalingrad in November 1942 condemning Hitler’s stormtrooper spearhead, the fearsome and previously invincible infantry of the Wehrmacht’s Sixth Army – 300,000 irreplaceable elite men – to be trapped and annihilated.

After the war Stalin seized all of Central Europe in his merciless grip and the Soviets held it for four and a half decades. But Central Europe proved to be an economic energy and security drain and a strategic disaster for them too.

Since Bill Clinton took office in 1993, US policymakers and their eager NATO acolytes have tirelessly dived into the same doomed cesspool with comparable results. Integration of the chaotic and usually tiny militaries of Central Europe in NATO and bringing them up to US standards has proved to be a will of the wisp – endlessly pursued yet never achieved.

All the while, Russia quietly, systematically and successfully totally modernized its strategic nuclear forces and brought to fruition an entire generation of formidable new nuclear delivery systems ranging from hypersonic glide strike weapons to fifth generation, ICBM carrying nuclear submarines able to annihilate Western Europe and North America from their impregnable stronghold under the Arctic Ocean.

The NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania on July 12, 2023, laid bare at least some of the deep divisions within NATO. By enlarging the alliance so promiscuously, and at least pretending to give the Central and Eastern European members as much say and dignity – and often a far more respectful hearing – than the major nations of Western Europe, US policymakers and leaders have blinded and befuddled themselves.

They are trapped in an endless echo chamber of tiny irresponsible Central and Eastern European leaders obsessed with their hostility to Russia and forever urging the major Western powers into more aggressive, hostile and confrontational policies towards Moscow.

Endlessly the rhetoric of Britain and France’s shameful capitulation to Adolf Hitler at the Munich meeting of September 30 1938 is brought up. But the lessons of history did not start at Munich: And they did not end there – or with the Nazi invasion of Poland – the next year.

Over the past 30 years NATO has fulfilled the warning of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – a philosopher of politics and history now universally derided across the Anglo-Saxon Anglophone world. But Hegel, presciently, warned that what he called the dialectic forces of history (and unlike Karl Marx, he saw a profound moral and spiritual dimension to their workings) meant that over time, movements, political parties and even nations would evolve into their opposite.

And so it has been with NATO since the end of the Cold War.

An international security body renowned for its fear of the Soviet Union and its cautious consensual restraint and determination to avoid being sucked into wars while being focused on the defense only of its member nations has transformed into its very opposite.

Today’s new NATO lacks the cohesion, practical military power and simple diplomatic and strategic cohesion of the old. It approves military commitments all across Eurasia and even in the Pacific region. It has drastically lowered its standards for admission and demands for internal political conduct of member governments. It is obsessed with micromanaging the Balkans – a region Bismarck in vain urged his countrymen to steer widely clear of.

NATO now has 31 members compared with only 16 at the end of the Cold War 34 years ago, of whom only five or six were universally recognized to really count. From being a disciplined and unified defensive legion, it has become a cacophonous Tower of Babel – a global joke.

Like a bid poker play, the Atlantic Alliance now proves incapable of recognizing a losing hand, or weak and failing policies from Afghanistan to Ukraine. And against all the odds, its members insist on piling more chips that they cannot possibly redeem on the global strategic table.

But soon the Last Bluff will be called, The Last Trump siren warnings of coming thermonuclear global war will sound at last and the Final Judgment will be at hand.