Meet NATO, the Dangerous “Defensive” Alliance Trying to Run the World
In a stop last week on his way to Belgium for Monday’s NATO summit, President Joe Biden visited a Royal Air Force base in eastern England. “In Brussels,” he told the assembled crowd, “I will make it clear that the United States’s commitment to our NATO alliance and Article 5 is rock solid. It’s a sacred obligation that we have under Article 5.”
These lines were aimed at a tiny number of human beings. Certainly almost no Americans have any idea what “Article 5” is part of or what it says.
But Biden’s words were genuinely significant. Article 5 is a clause in the North Atlantic Treaty, the founding document of NATO, which states that any armed attack against any member of the alliance “shall be considered an attack against them all.”
This is at the core of how the U.S. runs the world and intends to keep running it in the future. It also signifies that should we face the prospect of sharing power with others — today that mostly means China — we may end up destroying the world.
The North Atlantic Treaty is also known as the Washington Treaty, which tells you most of what you need to know about it. It was written in 1949, a time when U.S. power was so overweening that it could simply dictate terms to its allies. Most of whatever little discussion there was with other countries’ diplomats took place in secret over two weeks at the Pentagon. It was co-written by the delightfully-named Thomas Achilles, a State Department official who later said his boss had told him, “I don’t care whether entangling alliances have been considered worse than original sin ever since George Washington’s time. We’ve got to negotiate a military alliance with Western Europe in peacetime and we’ve got to do it quickly.”
The public rationale for NATO was that it was a defensive alliance necessary to stop the Soviet Union from invading Western Europe. The private rationale, as articulated by Achilles, was somewhat different:
At that point Western Europe was devastated, prostrate and demoralized and it badly needed confidence and energy within. With the Soviet armies halfway across Europe and still at their full wartime strength and the Communist parties the largest single political elements in France and Italy, something to inspire Soviet respect was equally essential.
Some top U.S. officials did honestly think that the Soviet Union was poised to stage a military attack. Whether that belief had any basis in reality is extremely debatable; about 27 million Russians, or 1 in every 6 people in the country, had just died in World War II. The equivalent for the U.S. today would be 50 million dead Americans. Even Joseph Stalin might have had a tough time motivating the country to immediately embark on another such event.
A more reasonable concern for the American government was a political, rather than military, threat. As Achilles said, there were powerful communist parties across Europe, especially in France and Italy — ones that could plausibly win honest elections. The anti-communist forces in those countries needed the “confidence and energy” of NATO to fight back. Meanwhile, NATO would “inspire Soviet respect” that would hopefully lessen Russian support, material and moral, for Europe’s communist parties.
Something else is notable about NATO’s founding. The original 12 members were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the U.K., and the U.S. — in hindsight, something of an all-star league of European colonialism. It’s difficult today not to notice the blindingly alabaster complexion of the officials who signed the treaty. The original version of the treaty even specifies that it applied to any attack on “the Algerian Departments of France.”
A fuller reading of history suggests that the formation of NATO helped intensify and institutionalize the Cold War.
In any case, the architects of NATO would say that they were simply responding to the Cold War, already in progress at the instigation of the Soviets. A fuller reading of history suggests that the formation of NATO helped intensify and institutionalize the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact, after all, was not created until 1955, six years later, and its text is in many ways a replica of that of NATO’s treaty. It even has its own Article 5 language, except it’s in Article 4.
https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/80197/meet-nato-the-dangerous-defensive-alliance-trying-to-run-the.html