On June 29 and 30, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will hold a Summit in Madrid. “A unique community of values, attached to the principles of individual freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law”, NATO presents “its unique and essential role” as being to guarantee the defense and security of its member countries (Strategic Concept, 2010). But is this Organization really what it claims to be, and can its consolidation bring us peace and security?
A hegemonic instrument
From 1949 to 1989, presenting itself as a bulwark of the free world against the threat of communism, NATO was first and foremost an instrument for integrating Western Europe into the global Cold War strategy of the States United against the USSR. Then, after the dissolution of the USSR, the United States sought to maintain this integration of Western Europe into its new global strategy and extended it to the countries of Eastern Europe and even to some of the former Soviet republics. This expansion of NATO to its doorstep represents, for Russia, an undeniable security threat, which has been one of the determining factors of the current war in Ukraine.
Over the past thirty years, NATO’s field of action has expanded from the North Atlantic to the entire world. As early as 2007, Daniel Fried, US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, said: “NATO has transformed itself into a transatlantic organization carrying out global missions, of global scope with global partners […]. Everything potentially belongs to the NATO zone”.
A warrior alliance
Far from being just a defensive alliance, NATO has been at the origin of two wars: the war in Kosovo (1999) and the war in Afghanistan (2001-2021). In 2011, NATO also launched a war against Libya, which plunged the country into chaos until today. And that’s counting without the wars in Iraq and Syria, in which a large number of NATO countries hastened to participate.
In 2021, military spending by NATO members (30 countries) accounted for more than half of the global total, which amounted to US$2.113 billion. U.S. military spending alone made up 38% of global spending, more than the combined total of the other nine countries at the top of the list, including China (14%) and Russia (3.1%). ). Regarding the global arms trade, for the period 2016 to 2020, six of the top ten exporting countries are NATO members, accounting for nearly 60% of sales.
human rights
A brief historical overview suffices to show that the attachment of NATO — and of their leader, the United States — to democracy and human rights is more a matter of sustained propaganda than of reality. As early as 1949, NATO included Portugal, where the Salazar dictatorship was raging, among its founding members. In very many countries, the fight against communism has simply served as a pretext to prevent by all means the political currents of the left from gaining power.
This is the case with the dictatorship of the colonels in Greece, which in no way called into question the country’s participation in NATO. And of all those military dictatorships in Latin America (Paraguay, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Brazil, Honduras, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, El Salvador, etc.) that the United States supported and even installed in power in the 1960s, 1970 and 1980.
In recent years, we can also see the void of this attachment to democracy and human rights, particularly in their close collaboration with warlords in Afghanistan or moderates affiliated with al-Qaeda in Syria, and in their systematic practice of torture against terrorism at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib (Iraq), Bagram (Afghanistan) and the many secret sites of the CIA.
Suicidal nuclear policy
NATO may affirm that it wants to “create the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons”, but that rings hollow when its “Strategic Concept” also affirms that the “supreme guarantee of the security of the Allies is provided by the strategic nuclear forces of the Alliance, especially those of the United States”. By what right then can we want to prevent other countries from also providing themselves with this supreme guarantee? And how does a threat of annihilation of humanity ensure our security?
On January 22, 2021, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) entered into force. Following the watchword of the United States, none of the thirty member countries of NATO signed it.
Canada and NATO
Canada, a close ally of the United States in NATO, plays an important role there through its participation in wars, its command roles in various respects and its support for NATO’s nuclear policy. In the current war in Ukraine and the crisis that preceded it, Canada was one of the countries which—along with the United States and the United Kingdom—have preferred confrontation to negotiation: insistence that Ukraine and Georgia be admitted to NATO, the leadership of NATO’s “Enhanced Forward Presence Battlegroup” in Latvia (on Russia’s very doorstep), resounding statements that Ukraine’s aggression poses a threat to the whole world and leads to genocide… There is really nothing in this to encourage diplomatic channels.
The upcoming summit
At the NATO Summit, we will again be treated to the alliance’s declared determination to protect democracy and the rule of law and the announcement of the accelerated accession of Finland and Sweden . The United States, which has already, since 2018, replaced the war against terrorism as the main axis of its defense strategy by strategic competition with China (especially) and Russia, will finally see NATO – including the recalcitrant Germany and France were until recently — to follow in their footsteps.
The simplistic logic of good guys (Westerns) versus bad guys (Chinese and Russians) would see us closing ranks behind NATO. But how can this really guarantee our safety? When NATO is dominated by the United States, a country whose world hegemony is disputed, but above all — and this is what should worry us — a country which is ready to do anything to preserve its hegemony, even going so far to declare that “if deterrence fails”, his army “stands ready to win”. How can the exacerbation of conflicts, a new arms race, the modernization of nuclear arsenals and the maintenance of Canada in NATO guarantee us security and peace?
* The godparents of the white poppy are: François Avard, Ariane Émond, Martin Forgues, Jacques Goldstyn (alias Boris) and Christian Vanasse.