“What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO,” stated French president Emmanuel Macron in an interview with The Economist in 2019.
“America is turning its back on us,” he declared to everyone’s annoyance, as if he decried it wantonly. Macron’s analysis was prescient, as even the staunchest supporters of NATO will now have to admit. But the alliance was not so much brain-dead, suffering from the sudden haemorrhage of its raison d’etre after the implosion of the USSR, but from acquired immune deficiency syndrome. It is an unhealthy body.
NATO, in the words of its first secretary general, General Hastings Ismay (1952-1957), was formed “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down”. It evolved from a defence pact between the UK and France, later including the Benelux countries, against German aggression.
From 1949 onwards the US transformed it into a line of defence against a menacing Soviet Union, which had turned Eastern Europe speedily into puppet regimes. West Germany was admitted in 1955 and used as a forward base against Russia. At the height of the Cold War, 400,000 US soldiers were barracked in Europe, mainly in Germany and Italy. It was to “keep the Russians out” in earnest. But the BRD (West Germany) remained an occupied country.
Germany did not have to wait for NATO membership to receive economic and military support from the Americans. Generous grants ‒ the German Marshall Fund ‒ helped rebuild the destroyed country.
When Stalin imposed a land blockade on Berlin in 1948, the US army, with the help of Great Britain, supplied Berlin by air. Food, petrol, everything necessary was flown in, even new trees for Berlin’s denuded Tiergarten park. In 1963, 20 months after the Berlin Wall was erected, President John F Kennedy gave his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech to 120,000 Berliners in front of the town hall.
When the Berlin Wall was brought down in 1989 and the former Communist block rapidly disintegrated, governments in Western Europe, looking at an enfeebled and much friendlier Russia, started to question the purpose of NATO.
Gorbachev and 41st US President George H.W. Bush agreed to allow German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to reunite both Germanies, the BRD and DDR (East Germany). Russia’s angst about the ex-DDR now becoming the next, new NATO outpost was becalmed with reassuring promises.
The Cold War was over in earnest, why would a defence alliance against the Soviet Union now expand?
A new security architecture including Russia was envisaged.
Europe’s policymakers may have seen it that way. But the United States saw an opportunity going to waste. Without Soviet resistance they could expand their geostrategic reach, hoodwinking and humiliating an old foe. They only had somehow to make plausible that they wished to stay in Europe, which saw no need for it.
First, they tried to give NATO, bereft of its anti-Soviet purpose, a new lease of life with nebulous, all-world programmes, to the consternation and head-scratching of many European politicians. Then they started to advocate its rapid extension.
Their blueprint included not only former Warsaw Pact countries, like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary but also the ex-Soviet republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, as well as Georgia and Ukraine. For old Europe, this looked dangerously provocative. How to explain this to their new, Russian friends? Why on earth now, when it’s all over?
For the new countries which had so suddenly and miraculously escaped the suffocating rule of Moscow, NATO membership looked like the best thing that could possibly ever happen: a defence pact against the old overlord.
For the Americans it looked like a geostrategic opportunity not to be squandered: the US military might expand far to the east, right to the border of, and encircling, a shrinking Russia.
The problem with NATO is that, without an ironclad US commitment, it is worth very little- Andreas Weitzer
It looked cost-free too. Russia, economically and politically in turmoil, could do nothing but protest, so it seemed. It did so repeatedly. Against NATO’s “Enhanced Forward Presence” in the Baltics; against the Iraq campaign; against the joyous financial and organisational support of insurgencies from the Arab world to Kosovo and Ukraine.
And when Russia finally lashed out, cruelly and without regard for human life, it came as a surprise. In Georgia first, then Crimea, Donbas and Syria, culminating in the “Special Military Operation” meant to quickly subjugate a former colony.
All US presidents had a go in the build-up to this. Bush Sr, Clinton, Bush Jr, and Obama, whose government not only gave a helping hand to the Maidan crowd toppling an elected, albeit Russia-friendly, president.
Obama’s government also keenly supplied the new, ultra-nationalist government with sophisticated US weapon systems. Trump 1.0 too delivered high-precision, ‘Javelin’ anti-tank missiles.
And now we see a US president who wants to have nothing to do with all this. He doesn’t want to dig into details of who did what. In his view, Ukraine’s president not only lacks democratic credentials but also started this senseless conflict, thereby soliciting unjustifiable financial and military support from the US.
Trump wants compensation for this, in the form of natural resources, money, or whatever. He wants peace and quiet. And he wants to be friends with Putin again.
There’s business waiting, now that Europe has been successfully alienated from Russia. Therefore, he shows America’s erstwhile proxy force the door, literally ‒ kicking Ukraine’s president Zelensky out of the White House, under shouts and abuse.
The European Union, in Trump’s mind only invented to rip off the United States, will not only be put in place by punitive tariffs, but also punished for its inherent audacity with the task of sorting out a security problem that had not existed before.
Because Putin, now given a free hand by America, will not treat Europe kindly after what he must perceive as a massive betrayal. First in line are former Soviet republics with sizable Russian minorities; particularly when, as is the case in Estonia, Russians are discriminated against. Even Moldova could soon be in the crosshairs. Ukraine will never be safe without powerful protectors, quite evidently.
Europe has to improve its defence capability, as I wrote in this newspaper before. But the problem with NATO is that, without an ironclad US commitment, it is worth very little. Such commitment has gone missing for good.
But as long as the US remains a major pillar of NATO, it can never become the necessary security structure Europe needs to defend itself against any possible threat, which also includes the United States, having just threatened Denmark with the invasion of Greenland. And as we have seen in the past 35 years, as a military outpost of the US, Europe cannot possibly agree to its own, self-interested, economic and security arrangements with Russia.
I say Russia, because the relationship between Europe and Russia needs to be addressed not only now, but long after Putin is gone. Russia after him will not look much different.
Everyone has learned their lesson, and a memory of events will linger on for decades to come. The US has played Russia too many times to be ever considered trustworthy again. No matter how much Trump will try to be best buddies with Putin, the US will not find in him a willing partner to take on China.
Andreas Weitzer is an independent journalist based in Malta.