Image by Marek Studzinski.
NATO is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. In fact, it is holding its annual summit July 9-11, causing Metro station closures and traffic detours in D.C.’s muggy and hot summer. Of course, self congratulatory praises are appearing in the pages of US imperialism ‘s marketing apparatus (commonly known as the media). From outgoing NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg’s insistence on the military alliance’s indispensability in the empire’s number one journal Foreign Affairs to various op-eds and editorials in daily newspapers around the country, US imperialism’s propaganda machine is working overtime to convince us that the weapons industry’s favorite client should last forever. Fortunately, antiwar activists Medea Benjamin and David Swanson have responded to this birthday celebration of the NATO death star with a timely and instructive critique of NATO.
Concisely written and to the point, this book, titled NATO: What You Need to Know, provides the reader with essential facts about NATO’s inception, its purpose and its history. These facts go beyond the myths one is told in school, in the news and on the campaign trail. Although Swanson and Benjamin’s take is not as explicitly radical as my antipathy towards the organization, the book raises piercing questions about mainstream conceptions about NATO and reveals more fundamentally honest rationales for its existence than most anything one might see or hear in media sources consumed by the majority of the public. Likewise, these rationales challenge the conventional understanding of why NATO came into being and why it continues to exist.
The text is concise and straightforward, outlining the organization’s beginnings after World War Two, its history throughout the Cold War and its current role in pursuing Washington’s dream of world hegemony. Given its brevity, the book cannot cover every single aspect of NATO and its underlying raison d’etre. Still, this does not detract from the text in any way; it just must be understood as an introduction, not the final word on NATO and the mischief it instigates. Most importantly, Benjamin and Swanson make it very clear that NATO is not a defensive alliance that puts peaceful means before other possible actions. The obvious complement to this view is that NATO is first and foremost a military alliance whose primary approach is a military one—either the threat of military action or actual military conflict. The numerous examples of this in the text substantiate Benjamin and Swanson’s position repeatedly. Taken as a complete dossier, it is clear that NATO’s role is to maintain and expand US capital’s tentacles throughout Europe and the world.
Obviously, an important part of the current discussion around NATO involves the war in Ukraine. One aspect of the US and NATO support of and involvement in that unnecessary conflict is that NATO always extracts a price. In the case of Ukraine, that price has been the war with Russia and an almost certain future as a US neo-colony. Kyiv ‘s potential lot as a sovereign independent nation was lost when the current rulers rejected neutrality and became NATO’s front line in its aggressive posturing against Russia. In its discussion of Finland’s entry into NATO, the text suggests that, as long as NATO pursues an adversarial and military relationship with Moscow, Ukraine’s fate could end up being Finland’s as well.
One of the more interesting questions raised by the authors is the question of NATO’s legality. The reason for this question is the clause in the NATO charter that calls for action by other member nations including armed force when another member is attacked. Of course, the United Nations directly opposes this call for armed force, emphasizing instead the requirement to pursue all peaceful possibilities first. Unfortunately, as it has become clear the past couple decades (and arguably before), the United States ignores the UN and international law whenever its goals conflict with those entities. Given NATO’s subservient role as Washington’s hit squad, it is no surprise NATO feels free to do the same.
I once wrote a piece for Counterpunch’s print magazine titled “The Military Beast: Can NATO Still Make America Great?” The article was about Donald Trump’s supposed dislike of NATO and examined the substance of that proclaimed dislike. My conclusion was that NATO wasn’t going anywhere and, if it actually did dissolve, the trumpists and the rest of the US political/military and economic establishment would design a new organization with the same job of maintaining US dominance. Benjamin and Swanson come to a similar conclusion. The way it looks right now, though, is that NATO will remain.
As the self-congratulatory celebration of NATO’s seventy-five years of consolidating US power, selling US weapons and maintaining a threat of war with Moscow comes to an end in Washington, DC, criticism of the organization from the antiwar left becomes ever more crucial. Too many US residents (and one assumes Europeans, too) believe NATO helps keep the peace. For those folks, NATO: What You Need to Know provides a first-rate challenge to that assumption. For those already suspicious of NATO and the myths it promotes about itself, the text is an easy-to-access discussion of why their suspicions are valid.
