David Swanson offers a critique of NATO.

NATO: Not A Tenable Option
David Swanson / World BEYOND War
Remarks on Canada-Wide Peace & Justice Network Webinar on August 28, 2024

(August 28, 2024) — When NATO gathered in Washington D.C. several weeks ago, we held a counter-summit and a rally, did a bunch of interviews, wrote a bunch of articles, etc. All the videos and reports are at nonatoyespeace.org to watch and read at your convenience. I won’t try to read them to you. We had a minimal impact on U.S. and global communications about the NATO summit. We promoted Sevim Dagdelen’s book, which is a bestseller in Germany. We promoted my and Medea Benjamin’s book, which is now being published in more nations. I have an absurdly short article on what’s wrong with NATO coming out in Congressional Quarterly.

NATO didn’t do much at its summit other than celebrate and commit to more of the same. It declared Ukrainian NATO membership to be irreversible, which didn’t mean it wouldn’t happen and didn’t mean that it would happen and didn’t mean anything else. The U.S. media interest was almost exclusively in terms of what the events might mean for the years-long presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Biden called Zelensky Putin and Harris Trump, and generally appeared befuddled.

So, a change of face was seriously considered and eventually made, with Kamala Harris now promising the most lethal fighting force in the world and eternal devotion to NATO. But no question was ever raised about Biden’s support for NATO or his pretense that Trump is an enemy of NATO, even though Biden’s big claim was to have increased NATO military spending (something Trump did more of than Biden) and to have added more NATO members (something made possible if not inevitable by a war that could have easily been avoided, and something likely to contribute to the vicious cycle of arms races, wars, and the risk of nuclear apocalypse).

Some of the discussions surrounding the events in July clarified for me the case to be made against NATO, which I think can be broken into five points.

1. On its own terms and by its own admission, NATO is a recipe for failure. NATO’s outgoing secretary general says that insistence on NATO membership for Ukraine is what brought on the current war, agreeing of course with decades of predictions, the observations of numerous smart people, and the reason the war was named The Unprovoked War, namely the extent to which it was obviously provoked. NATO’s answer to this disaster is more of the same, more insistence on expanding NATO, more bases, more weapons, more military spending, more threats and provocations, more rejection of negotiation, diplomacy, or the rule of law. And numerous NATO officials have lately been predicting all-out NATO war with Russia within five years or so — not in order to avoid it, but to prepare people for it — whatever that may mean (preparing for Armageddon). So even if you think NATO was a brilliant or unavoidable idea that did everything just perfectly for 75 years, the fact that NATO itself thinks it is driving us toward nuclear war ought to be grounds to try something different, even if there were no good options but only unlikely straws to grasp at.

2. There are good options. Have you ever looked at NATO’s account on Twitter? It claims to be “working for peace, security & freedom for one billion people,” which ought to make you wonder what it’s working for for the other 7 billion and how it thinks one group can have peace and the other not, as well as why one is the International Community and the other isn’t. Anyway, on August 24th, NATO tweeted a video interview with a former president of Latvia recounting how the Baltic states freed themselves from Soviet rule through nonviolent action — basically the story that’s in the wonderful filmThe Singing Revolution. That NATO could deviate from false claims of having itself had something to do with Baltic independence and advertise the accomplishment of the superior tool of unarmed civilian defense highlights how little NATO worries that anyone will even notice. But unarmed defense is a good option, scorned by governments purely because governments fear their own people. Negotiation is a good option, failed in Ukraine because of outside, U.S. and UK, pressure. The rule of law, disarmament, demilitarization, and cooperation are very good options. Most of the world opposes NATO and supports these other approaches in polls, but most of the world is that 7 billion who don’t matter when there are weapons to sell in the name of democracy.

3. NATO is not what NATO is imagined to be by its defenders. NATO is neither legal nor legalistic. It is a violation of the United Nations Charter for a group of nations to swear to join each other’s wars, and should they ever do so it would not legalize, authorize, legitimize, or sanctify a war. War is a crime, and when a larger gang joins in, the crime is simply larger. But NATO has never waged a war to defend against an invasion or an attack or even a threat to any NATO member. NATO has only once demanded that all of its members join in a war, and that was the already-underway U.S. war on Afghanistan — with predicted catastrophic results. NATO’s other wars in Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya have been wars of aggression without legal fig leaves; on the contrary, NATO’s participation has been presented to the world as itself being the legal fig leaf. NATO has devoted huge resources to this propaganda.

4. NATO is first and foremost a weapons dealer. It has more staff overseeing more money in arranging weapons sales than everything else it does. NATO deals weapons to its members, and pressures them to spend ever more on weapons and ever less on people and the environment. NATO also deals weapons to its partners, dozens of them, spread across the globe, including the worst and most shameless dictatorships on Earth. That this can be the main thing NATO does, and NATO still sell itself as a proponent of democracy may reflect the funds NATO has, and the peace movement does not have, to invest in video and graphic and social media production.

5. NATO is brutally hostile to democracy, not just in the world at large, but also within its own administration. It votes on nothing. It makes decisions by means of the U.S. government threatening and bribing other members until they all agree. Then the unelected secretary general pretends to be a world leader and bustles about demanding that presidents and prime ministers do as he says. That’s a threat to democracy, not its glorious defense. A relatively subtle, bank-shot means of pushing back against NATO would be for its members to celebrate it as a bastion of democracy and demand that it adopt internal democratic procedures, without any veto for those who are more equal than others. Do that, and the U.S. government will shut NATO down for us.

To the extent that Canada refuses to dump as much money into the war machine as NATO demands, it should be celebrated and thanked and encouraged to go further in the no-to-NATO direction. When NATO’s members play NATO’s game, the principle thing they accomplish is persuading incredibly ignorant members of the U.S. public that something vaguely legalish has legitimized mass-murder sprees. Increasingly this risks driving us to nuclear war.

Of course in making the case against NATO to a NATO supporter, a handy way to shoot yourself in the foot is to adopt the childish notion that NATO’s designated enemies are all saintly sources of truth, justice, and peaceful harmony. In fact, you’ll have virtually no chance of getting anyone to listen to the preceding facts about NATO until after you have put a significant effort into getting them to recognize that you are aware of the evil of war including when Russia does it. Nothing makes leveling villages acceptable, not even opposition to NATO. Nothing does more to strengthen NATO and doom us to further bloodshed than for NATO’s enemies to play its game, walk into its traps, and slaughter men, women, and children under the banner of resisting it. You can disagree, but only at great cost to your own decency, to your persuasiveness, and to the plausibility of calling yourself a peace activist.

What we need is not a balance of powers or a so-called military success. What we need is what NATO pretends to want: power to the people, and institutions that hold criminals accountable universally. NATO may be doing us a favor in this regard in conveniently holding its next meeting next June in The Hague. I hope to see you there.

David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is executive director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson’s books include his latest: NATO What You Need to Know with Medea Benjamin. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org. He hosts Talk World Radio. He is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and U.S. Peace Prize recipient. Longer bio and photos and videos here. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook, and sign up for: Activist alerts or Articles.