NATO: What You Need To Know

© 2024 Medea Benjamin and David Swanson

Published by OR Books, New York and London

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First printing 2024

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paperback ISBN 978-1-68219-520-8 • ebook ISBN 978-1-68219-521-5

CONTENTS

Preface: What You Need to Know About NATO

Introduction

1When and Why Was NATO Formed?

2NATO Expansion

3NATO’s History of Aggression

4NATO in Ukraine, But No Ukraine in NATO?

5NATO Partners Around the Globe

6Who Makes the Decisions and Who Pays ?

7How Does NATO Relate to the UN and International Law?

8NATO and Nuclear Weapons

9What Are the Divisions Within NATO?

10 What Are NATO’s Plans?

11 What Are the Alternatives?

Acknowledgements

Notes

About the Authors

PREFACE

What You Need to Know About NATO

Jeffrey D. Sachs

This is an indispensable primer. It can save your life— indeed all of our lives. NATO is a clear and present danger to world peace, a war machine run amok, that operates beyond the democratic control of the citizenry of the NATO countries.

The war machine lines the pockets of the arms contractors at the core of NATO, U.S. companies like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, and Europe’s arms manufacturers, including Britain’s BAE Systems, Germany’s Rheinmetall, and Sweden’s BAE Systems Bofors. In doing so, NATO also sucks one nation after another into the vortex of war, instability, displacement, and poverty. During the past 30 years, NATO has fomented a vast arc of violence stretching from Libya to Afghanistan and with many victims in between.

NATO also draws us ever closer to nuclear Armageddon. The war in Ukraine was caused by the United States’s long-standing obsession to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia, with the goal of surrounding Russia in the Black Sea. The Ukraine war has brought the world’s two largest nuclear superpowers, Russia and the U.S., into a direct and escalating military confrontation.

We urgently need the clarity of this volume since NATO operates through propaganda and misdirection. NATO, we are told by our governments, is peace-loving, even as it provokes one war after another. NATO, we are told by our governments, is defensive, even as it violently topples other governments. NATO, we are told by the alliance’s own founding treaty, is about the North Atlantic even as it spreads its warmongering to Africa and Asia.

The supreme irony about NATO is that its great expansion has taken place after the end of the Cold War. The original purpose of NATO, after all, was to defend Western Europe against a possible invasion by the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union ended in 1991, NATO should have ended with it. Instead, NATO expanded, from 16 members in 1991 to 32 members today. NATO’s eastern push was designed to weaken Russia if not topple it or break it apart.

As this volume carefully documents, there was no shortage of warnings by leading diplomats that NATO enlargement would inflame tensions with Russia and thereby endanger the peace. The dean of U.S. diplomacy, George Kennan, warned in 1997 that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era. Fifty leading foreign policy experts wrote to President Clinton in 1997 with the same message.

We are reminded in detail in these pages of NATO’s utterly dismal track record of the past 30 years. Its military forays have led to years, and sometimes decades, of destabilization in the targeted countries, including Bosnia, Serbia, Afghanistan, Libya, and Ukraine among others. In Orwellian fashion, all of this violence and instability has been justified as defending the rules-based order, even as NATO has repeatedly violated the core precepts of the UN Charter.

The sad truth is that NATO is neither a defensive alliance nor a bulwark of global rules. After 1992 it became an expeditionary force to promote a delusional U.S. hegemony. The very aim of U.S. hegemony is an act of supreme hubris, as if 4% of the world’s population could truly presume to dictate to the other 96%. The United States’s presumption of primacy, and its use of NATO to achieve it, not only runs against both common sense and international law, but also against the limits of the United States’s wisdom and power.

As the reader will learn in the pages that follow, there are real life-saving alternatives to the endless wars. We can and must build a safer world based on the UN Charter, peace, and diplomacy. As the authors compellingly advise, it is the time for a global grassroots movement to Say No to NATO and No to War.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a professor at Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Introduction

We wrote this book on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of NATO’s founding in 1949. Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, NATO looked like a tired, stale organization filled with bickering members in search of a reason to stay together. A generation after the collapse of communism, the Western alliance was adrift and confused. There was little reason to fear Russia, a country whose GDP was equivalent to Spain and which spent five times less on its military than the 28 EU states combined. And the mighty U.S. military, the most powerful, high-tech force on Earth, was licking its wounds from its failures in Afghanistan and Iraq.

French President Emmanuel Macron called NATO brain dead.¹ Donald Trump called it obsolete.² Allies wondered if NATO under Donald Trump would really intervene if they were attacked. One European analyst compared U.S. forces in Europe to the Berlin wall before its fall. Strong and powerful from the outside, it can collapse from one day to the other.³

But when Russian troops poured across the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, NATO got a new lease on life. Divisions in the ranks were quickly papered over and the United States, which had lost so much credibility with its disastrous war on terror, was once again leading the charge to save the free world.

But while NATO has been temporarily resurrected, the unity will surely be short-lived. For beneath the surface, NATO is still a Cold War relic that should have dissolved when the Soviet Union fell apart.

In this book, we go through NATO’s origins, including its purpose as stated in its charter and the real purposes—not only checking Soviet expansion but defeating communist and socialist movements throughout Europe, crushing overseas liberation movements, and making sure the U.S. was the dominant power in Europe.

We explain why NATO, rather than declaring victory and folding when the Soviet Union fell apart, not only forged ahead but expanded right up to Russia’s borders.

We also detail NATO’s history of aggression—its military forays into Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Bringing its history of aggression up to date, we look at NATO’s role in the Ukraine conflict, including its provocative call for Ukraine to become a NATO member, its role in the 2014 coup, its training and arming Ukrainian forces in preparation for war with Russia, and its quashing of negotiations that could have ended the war in its first month.

Our chapter on NATO partners shows NATO as a global behemoth with partners that encircle the globe from Colombia to Mongolia to Australia. We look at how decisions are made (spoiler alert: the U.S. calls the shots) and the truth behind U.S. complaints that NATO members are not paying their fair share.

The chapters on international law and nuclear weapons reveal how NATO has repeatedly violated the precepts of the UN Charter and how the placement of U.S. nuclear weapons in five European nations violates the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

We point out the divisions in the alliance over the years—from France wanting military autonomy to Turkey opposing Sweden’s membership to the very different perspectives on Israel’s war on Gaza.

Looking ahead, we expose NATO’s dangerous plans with regards to Russia and China, and we wrap up with the most important discussion—what are the alternatives to NATO and how can we build a movement to clip NATO’s wings.

In commemorating the alliance’s 75th anniversary, U.S. Senator James Risch of the Foreign Relations Committee commended NATO for its role in maintaining security and defending freedom, calling it the most successful political-military alliance in the history of the world.⁴

Professor Jeffrey Sachs says just the opposite. He calls NATO a clear and present danger to world peace, a war machine run amok.

Who is right? Read on and make your own decision.

1

When And Why Was NATO Formed?

On April 4, 1949, as the contours of a new Cold War were emerging after the devastation of the Second World War, foreign ministers from 12 countries came together in Washington, D.C., to sign the North Atlantic Treaty and form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The original members were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

According to NATO, the alliance was created with a three-pronged aim: deterring Soviet expansionism, forbidding the revival of nationalist militarism in Europe through a strong North American presence on the continent, and encouraging European political integration. Or, as the alliance’s first Secretary General Lord Ismay quipped, its purpose was "to keep the