Zelensky’s calls for security guarantees from NATO, or even for direct military involvement in Ukraine, bring into sharp focus fundamental questions about the role of the alliance. Both of these proposed courses raise concerns about a generalized world war, while at the same time highlighting how NATO itself functions as a factor of instability.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded in 1949 with the main purpose of preventing Soviet expansion and guaranteeing security for Western Europe. Of course, it was the same West that in 1949 saw the “expansion of the USSR” as a danger, which stopped the advance of Patton’s forces so that the ally of the USSR could enter Berlin first….
And of course the Warsaw Pact did not exist in 1949, it was not established until 1955 and the accession of West Germany to NATO. Thus, one could reasonably claim that it was the West that took the first step of confrontation and that the establishment of the Warsaw Pact was from the beginning a defensive move.
In any case, the world for which it was designed has now disappeared. Instead of terminating its operation after the completion of its original purpose, namely the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, NATO proceeded with successive expansions! As it had given guarantees to Gorbachev’s USSR that it would not expand to former USSR member countries, this course transformed the organization from a “defensive” formation into a global actor whose action has an influence – mainly negative – on global security.
Article 5 of the founding treaty, which provides for mutual defense, functions in practice as an automatic commitment of the United States to military conflicts. The alliance’s expansionist tendencies have involved the West in complex conflicts that were avoidable, negative in effect, and certainly immoral.
The alliance now includes 32 member states, as opposed to the original 12, creating obligations for the United States to protect countries far from its real strategic priorities. Maintaining NATO in its current form does not seem to ensure peace. On the contrary, it reinforces the risks of a larger, perhaps global, conflict. Recognition of this reality is becoming increasingly imperative, in order to consider scenarios of dissolution or radical reconstruction before the fatal arrival at a point of no return.
The End of the Original Mission (1991)
At its founding, NATO’s mission was clear: to counter Soviet influence in Europe. The alliance’s foundation was a simple directive: collective defense under Article 5, which states that an attack on one member is an attack on all. This mutual support structure acted as a deterrent against the Soviet Union, ensuring that an attack on Western Europe would be met with the full force of the United States and its allies.
The year 1991 marked the collapse of the Soviet Union. The ideological and military threat that had been NATO’s primary raison d’être had ceased to exist. This historical moment should be seen as the natural end point of the alliance’s mission. Nevertheless, NATO embarked on a policy of successive expansions, which ignored the initial bilateral agreements with the Soviet leadership.
In 1990, in the context of negotiations for German reunification, Western leaders assured Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that the Organization would not expand eastward. This verbal commitment played a decisive role in Moscow’s decision to agree to German reunification within the Western camp. However, within a decade, NATO had included former Warsaw Pact states, with the accession of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999. This was only the beginning. By 2004, the alliance had expanded further, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, right up to Russia’s western borders.
At a particularly critical juncture in 2008, President George W. Bush crossed (according to later CIA Director Bill Burns) “the clearest red line” for the Kremlin: In the Bucharest Declaration, Bush declared: “We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO,” offering the promise of membership for Georgia and Ukraine. The policy of expansion continued with the accession of Albania and Croatia in 2009, Montenegro in 2017, Skopje in 2020 and, most recently, Finland and Sweden in 2023.
The latest chapter of this story is now being written, as the US, hurt by huge economic deficits, essentially asks NATO members to assume the costs of maintaining and expanding the NATO mechanism, while the US will maintain primacy, as an invisible leader, since it will maintain its troops in Europe. Troops that arrived with the Second World War and never left, maintaining the mantle of a defending ally. It was not the NATO member states or the EU that decided on the expansion eastward, but they unwillingly obeyed the US orders.
Each new accession creates an additional potential fear of friction, gradually increasing the risk of a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia. A Russia that has really tolerated a lot! Which has operated for decades as a close energy partner of the EU, which through Putin’s mouth revealed that it had even proposed joining NATO, which is treated as an enemy, completely unjustifiably, thus depriving the EU and Europe in general of the possibility of an expanded cooperation and market.
You see, in reality Europe must obey the US, since it warms up American occupation troops in its bosom and under the auspices of NATO, has given all its strategic and sensitive defense information to the US.
It is a common secret that unfortunately, no European state anymore has the ability to autonomously conduct military operations – not even France with its capable defense industry – and thus Europe will be dragged behind the US tank like an expendable ally. It should not escape us that Europe is the extension of the American empire on the European continent, as are Japan and South Korea, with the Philippines on the Asian side of the Pacific Ocean.
