NATO Inc. at 75: More Guns Less Butter

NATO’s anniversary is soaked in the blood of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers

My first experience with what NATO has morphed into after-1989 dates back to 2008. On the 11th of November, I was passing through Toulouse. The French were celebrating Armistice Day, which marks the end of the First World War.

The anniversary was used by the Estonian ambassador to Paris to stir up Russophobia during a public lecture held at Sciences po in Toulouse, where he used to be a masteral student. Together with two assistants, the ambassador claimed that the Russian-speaking Estonians were fomenting trouble in the tiny Baltic republic (when in fact they were reacting to provocations by the Estonian majority).

During discussion time, I asked him whether he knew what the French were celebrating that day. He obviously knew about the significance of this date in French history. What he overlooked, I told him, was the fact that the spark which ignited the First World War originated in another tiny republic like his -Serbia- which dragged much more powerful countries from Western, Central and Eastern Europe into an enormous conflict, with catastrophic results for  the world.

I was also referring to the still-fresh example of the Russo-Georgian war from August of that year, when the government in Tbilisi nearly provoked a major conflict between Russia and NATO. That event, to be sure, would have probably never happened if, during the NATO summit which took place in Bucharest a few months earlier, American politicians had not promised to accept tiny Georgia and Ukraine as members of the Alliance at a future date.

In his reply, the Estonian ambassador told the audience that he did not personally agree with having to badmouth Russia among the students in Toulouse, but as a career diplomat he was bound to abide by his minister’s instructions…Undoubtedly, however, his own government had been encouraged to crank up tensions with Russia, both domestically and internationally, by its new alliance chiefs in Washington. As a new member of NATO, Estonia was in no position to refuse to tow the line.

Nowadays when NATO is celebrating its 75th anniversary, it is a good opportunity to look back to its history and to search for some answers as to why and how it changed from a peacekeeping alliance into a menace to world peace.

From the start it should be said that nothing had been planned in advance before the 1989 revolutions, the reunification of Germany and the implosion of the USSR. After almost 50 years of Cold War, most Americans and their political leaders wanted to concentrate on solving domestic problems long neglected due to events overseas.

In other words, keeping the NATO alliance going after 1989 and especially its expansion in Central and Eastern Europe were very controversial issues at the beginning of the 1990’s. Moreover, the subsequent decision to keep Nato and even enlarge it did not address any threat posed to the US, or any geopolitical or foreign policy imperative. 

The question is then: why did it happen in the first place ?

As discussed elsewhere, as of 1992 US foreign policy had been farmed out to the Defence Department, the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex. Traditionally, the American public paid more attention to domestic issues than to what was going on overseas and this was ably exploited by the ideologues who charted the US’s new strategic course. The main foreign policy and military blueprint for the next 30 years, elaborated in 1992, became known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine. 

This, however, was complemented politically in 1994 by the Republican manifesto “Contract with America”. This document specifically mentioned NATO enlargement as the policy of a forthcoming Republican administration, and it is still creating deep divisions between supporters and opponents to it to this day. There were two camps involved in the debate that preceded the first NATO expansion (1999): those who wanted a fast-track enlargement and those who refused to consider enlargement altogether. The voices of those arguing for the dismantling of NATO were suppressed.

The Clinton administration tried to address the problem by launching the “Partnership for Peace” initiative, which was supposed to cover the security needs of former Soviet satellite states, but also to prevent extending full NATO membership to them. Except for the likes of Strobe Talbott, Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke, no one in the Clinton administration was really favourable to NATO expansion- a feeling shared by most members of Congress. Indeed, expansion was not - as Holbrooke considered- “ logical and essential “. Instead, as Carrol described it in 1997, it was an “epic fateful error”. 

Most Europeans were clearly not on board with NATO’s expansion, especially Western nations like France, Italy, Spain and the UK. Bill Clinton, nevertheless, decided to include the expansion on his foreign policy agenda because:

“NATO expansion cannot be said to be part of any grander foreign policy design. Insiders tell us that the idea came to Clinton and his advisers for all the wrong reasons: celebrity appeals from Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa; the personal ambitions of advocates from within the administration; lobbying by US arms manufacturers (who just happened to be big campaign contributors); ethnic East Europeans in the United States (who just might vote); the desire to rob Republicans, who endorsed NATO enlargement in the “Contract with America”, of a campaign issue; polling results…” (Foster, 1998)

In hindsight, it is obvious that President Clinton’s support for NATO enlargement was adopted in order not to alienate Central European diaspora constituencies which could have voted Republican instead. The fear of losing the ethnic vote was complemented by the furious lobby of American arms manufacturers.

There was strong domestic pressure from the Polish-American Congress and from Zbigniew Brzezinski personally, who organised a major letter-writing campaign aimed at the White House, calling for Poland’s admission into NATO. Meanwhile the Republican Party was accusing Clinton that he was “dragging his heels” on NATO’s enlargement. Even Joe Biden was for it, stating that “the expansion of NATO has great political appeal in the United States because of the various ethnic American groups”.

A major lobbying force dedicated to NATO expansion, on the other hand, was that of the arms industry. The military-industrial complex financed the US Committee to Enlarge NATO, whose boss was Lockheed Martin Vice President Bruce Jackson. The military lobby also determined the Polish-American community to put pressure on the Clinton administration. Thus, “in the two years leading up to the Madrid Summit [1997], the six largest military contractors in the US spent over $51 million lobbying the US government. NATO enlargement was one of the issues on their agenda”.(Goldgeier)

Joel Johnson, former Vice President for International Affairs at the Aerospace Industry Association, argued that “the stakes are high. Whoever gets in first will have a lock for the next quarter century for a possible $10 billion market for fighter jets, transport aircraft, utility helicopters, attack helicopters, communications and avionics. Add them together and we’re talking real money”.

It should be emphasised that the issue of NATO enlargement happened in a climate of total lack of public interest for the issue. Accordingly, “a member of Congress often has tremendous freedom to act in foreign policy because most voters are not paying attention to these issues”. To vote against enlargement did not yield any dividends, so most members of Congress were convinced by the administration to vote in favour of it.

Nobody took into consideration a cost estimate for Nato expansion, which at any rate was developed by the DoD, the Rand Corporation and the Congressional Budget office. In fact, “no systematic effort to assess costs was undertaken when the administration first began to consider enlargement” (Goldgeier, 1999). 

Those against expansion, such as academics and journalists, were writing in newspapers, journals and magazines, but their efforts were not organised and could not compare with the well-oiled machine of NGO’s - such as the Polish-American Congress or the Central and East European Coalition - bankrolled by the military-industrial complex.

Consequently, expansion happened in waves and was completed in 2024 with the inclusion in the alliance of Sweden and Finland. Today the alliance has 32 members, many of them of questionable economic or military value. Tiny countries Montenegro or North Macedonia were accepted into it because of the nuisance value they represent for Serbia, which since 1999 has become a NATO adversary. The same rationale had applied to the admission of the three tiny Baltic republics, which were meant to irk Russia.

So far, the promise to offer iron-clad security guarantees to the new Central and Eastern European members of the alliance is on paper only. The only tangible accomplishment belongs to the American military-industrial complex, which has succeeded in greatly increasing its sale of helicopters, fighter jets and other military hardware in countries like Poland, Romania, Czechia or, to a more limited extent, Bulgaria. 

In reality, the expansion of Nato was meant almost exclusively to serve the business objectives of American weapons manufacturers. To this end, the armed confrontation in Ukraine is exactly the type of conflict promoted by NATO in Russia’s neighbourhood. One which, if carefully managed, could prevent an all-out war between Nato and Russia whilst exponentially boosting the sales of American arms manufacturers to Ukraine and its immediate neighbours (Poland and Romania), as well as to Finland and Sweden. 

The fact that over the past thirty years NATO has become a huge menace to world peace and a potential trigger of all-out nuclear war has, however, had a sobering effect on more and more members of the US political elite. Thus from strong supporters of expansion, many Republican members of Congress are nowadays fiercely opposed to allocating further financial assistance to Ukraine, even if -as Senator Lindsay Graham claimed- most of the billions invested in the Ukraine war come back into the pockets of American arms manufacturers and translate into job opportunities in the US.

During the war in Vietnam, renowned American economist John Kenneth Galbraith made the astute observation that since the beginning of the 20th century, in most wars in which the US took part or initiated, the country’s participation was decided on by Democratic administrations (W.Wilson, FDR, LBJ) and usually ended by Republican ones.

Unfortunately since the beginning of this century, the roles have been reversed. It’s Republican administrations now that start wars, think Bush Sr and Bush Jnr. in the Middle East and Central Asia. Obama, a Democrat president, withdrew American troops from Iraq, tried to reduce the military budget by 10 percent and refused to give heavy weapons to Ukraine. Joe Biden withdrew US troops from Afghanistan in 2021 and only reluctantly agreed to send weapons to Kiev. In doing so, they have acted in the US’s national interest.

It should also be stated in no uncertain terms that about seventy percent of the responsibility for keeping NATO going after 1989 and for expanding it belongs to the Republican Party, with only a minor and initially reluctant contribution to this process from the part of the Democratic Party.

This is why we cannot reasonably expect Donald Trump, in case he wins the presidency again this year, to make good of his promise to dismantle NATO or to withdraw the US from it, leaving the Europeans to provide for their security themselves. Indeed, his stated objective of making peace with Russia would be meaningless unless the administration dismantles the organisation that triggered the war in the first place.