By Satyaki Chakraborty
North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) turned 75 on April 4 this year marking a journey with many twists and turns in both cold war and post-Soviet period. When NATO was formed in 1949, its Cold War apologists claimed that its mission would be to repel “Soviet aggression,” a lie rooted in anti-communism. The real expansionist force in Europe then, as now, was U.S. which initiated NATO as part of its policy of encircling the Soviet Union. NATO’s real aim was to destroy the USSR—an obsession that even included plans for pre-emptive nuclear war.
NATO’s second assignment was to ensure U.S. military and political hegemony over its European “allies.” The Supreme Allied Commander of NATO has always been an American, and Supreme Allied Command-Europe is based in Norfolk, Va., even though the official “headquarters” are on the continent. European NATO members have always been junior partners, taking their orders from the Pentagon.
From 1949 to the 1960s, the focus was mostly on the Soviet Union nd eastern Europe.. East Germany called German Democratic Republic was on the radar of NATO. The US and its European partners were not reconciled to the existence of a communist dominated Germany in the eastern part. The rift between Soviet Union and China beginning the early 1960s was taken advantage of by NATO during those two decades. The internal contradictions in the communist Parties of Eastern Europe helped the NATO to build its ties with a section of the army in these countries. In 1990 end, the East German government collapsed beginning the process of disintegration of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe.
The NATO achieved its primary purpose when socialism was destroyed in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991. Of course, that did not mean U.S. took a break or that NATO diluted its role. The pledge that Western leaders made to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev when the Cold War ended that NATO would not expand eastward, was broken soon after.
In the following years, former Warsaw Pact countries like the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and others were swallowed up. Later, even former republics of the USSR itself—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—were brought into the pact.
With Russia weakened, NATO also began engaging more directly in armed aggression, starting with the Balkan Wars and the sectional dismantlement of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, alliance members joined the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan and deployed soldiers to Iraq. Later, NATO planes participated in the bombing of Libya that into a civil war.
Despite spreading its tentacles toward new targets, attention never drifted away from confrontation with Russia. Since 2002, NATO has openly courted Ukraine to join its anti-Moscow alliance. Though rebuffed by former President Viktor Yanukovych, the 2014 coup in Ukraine brought to power a right-wing government eager to hitch itself to Washington. It was the U.S, which had helped put it that same government in power.
Weapons supplied by NATO fuelled Kiev’s campaign in the Ukrainian civil war in the east, always with the goal of splitting the country away from cooperation with Russia and opening a pathway for eventual NATO membership. It was the threat of U.S.-controlled troops and weapons being stationed in a NATO-aligned Ukraine, a country that had been a part of the Soviet heartland, that played a major role in sparking the war that erupted following the Russian invasion of 2022.
Europe, Afghanistan, the Middle East, North Africa, Ukraine—none of these have proven to be enough for those who lead NATO. In recent years, they’ve also set their sights on the Pacific, with the alliance’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, recently declaring China “a threat to security and democracy.” As they did before, the European powers are joining in yet another Cold War.
In the 75th year, NATO has been on an expansion spree and this time, the focus is both Russia and China. Though NATO’s immediate focus is on weakening Russia through its whole hearted support to Ukraine, the generals are worried at close collaboration between Russian and the Chinese Presidents these days. NATO knows that China is a top military power and its backing of Russia in any confrontation with NATO, will be costly for the western military alliance.
NATO has given membership to Finland posing a security threat to Russia. In Europe, there is a rightwing shift these days in the outcome of the elections. That gives comfort as also worries for NATO. There is nationalistic upsurge and some of the parties which may win in EU elections may like to support an independent defence and security policy in their own country without caring for NATO.
But the most serious worry for NATO in the year 2024 is the outcome of the Presidential elections in USA in November this year. If Donald Trump wins in the elections, the entire US policy to NATO will be recast again. In his last term, Trump initiated the process but this time, he has declared that the USA will substantially cut its spending on NATO. The other countries will have to properly share the expenses. Further, elected Trump may come to conclude separate deals with Russia and China without caring for NATO.
That way, 2024 developments bring lot of uncertainties about the future of NATO in the year 2025 and beyond. The focus of the western powers led by the US in NATO remains the same but the geopolitics has changed. The expanded NATO has to reorient its role taking into account the ground realities. Just expansion is not helping the organization in the present period. (IPA )
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