The failed fairytale behind NATO's creation - opinion

The vast majority of commentators rightfully present NATO as one of the most important achievements of the United States and its European allies since the end of World War II. Observers lament the current state of the alliance and look nostalgically to the past as the golden years of NATO and a blueprint for its potential eventual rejuvenation.

NATO, from the day of its birth, was an American project. US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt conducted the American pursuit of total victory in World War II under the assumption of a new world order arising at the war’s end. That order was internationalist, making WWII the last war fought, and envisaged by all the great powers, primarily North America and the Soviet Union, to work in unison and in a friendly manner to preserve world peace.

President Harry S. Truman might have lacked FDR’s worldly mystique, but he possessed common sense and the ability to read people (Stalin in particular) and see the world exactly as it was. And the reality on the ground in Europe, and everywhere else across the world, did not suggest the new world order was anything but a pipe dream. Then NATO came into being.

Many contemporary observers fail to appreciate the real nature of NATO. It was not, as it is fashionable to claim today, a force to augment the institutional supremacy of the United Nations. It was a force to replace the UN when reality required action.

Truman realized that peace in Europe would not be based on cooperation between the US and the Soviet Union. A permanent American presence in Central and Western Europe was the only guarantee to prevent the Soviet Union from conquering the rest of the continent, yet the president did not want the Americans to resemble or even to be perceived as the occupying force.

Hence, the effort was presented as an agreement between equals. There was hope that European NATO members would eventually recover from the devastation of the war and field their own able military to the best of their abilities. But at the time of the alliance’s formation, in 1949, that was more of a dream than a distant future.

The Marshall Plan and the social upheavals across Europe of the early post-war period required a strong military force to be present lest the sabotage and propaganda of the Communist parties, lavishly supported by the Soviet Union, were to submerge the already devastated continent into catastrophic civil wars.

NATO proved a great stabilizing factor in allowing the recovery of Europe outside the Iron Curtain. There, the interests of the participants started to diverge.

President Dwight Eisenhower, following old American anti-colonial policy, tragically failed to appreciate and understand Soviet influence behind the anti-colonial movement after the end of the world war. American aggressive and forceful demands against its NATO allies, the UK and France, had long-term negative strategic consequences beyond Egypt. This crisis eliminated both countries as independent military forces and removed military initiative, as a political tool, from the Continent for good.

The Soviets felt they had an almost carte blanche and used it later that year against the Hungarian uprising. Arguably, current American complaints about the absence of a viable European military force stem from the consequences of the Suez Crisis. President Donald Trump can, again, blame his predecessors from his own party.

The other two crises, while no less significant, were of a purely political nature. In 1966, France, under Charles de Gaulle, left NATO’s Integrated Military Command structure. It did not leave NATO completely but weakened its military and political influence. The irony is that Charles de Gaulle actually did what President Emmanuel Macron is accusing President Trump of contemplating doing. France did rejoin many decades later, in 2009; some say because by then it had nothing to risk.

Then, in 1967, German chancellor Willy Brandt introduced his new policy of Ostpolitik. It was, as framed by the authors, “change through rapprochement.” The policy encouraged change through a policy of engagement with the Soviet Union and the rest of the Communist Eastern Bloc.

This policy of befriending and economically engaging the Soviet Union, providing it with much-needed hard currency and hoping for its improved behavior, remained a hallmark of Berlin’s policy towards the Kremlin, culminating with the recent reign of chancellor Angela Merkel. Yet again, those decades of active engagement with the Kremlin were the exact policy President Trump is currently attempting in his handling of President Putin.

Continental Europe resented and was openly hostile to president Ronald Reagan’s hawkish policy toward the Evil Empire. In general, NATO countries, upon stabilizing their economies after the war and after the Suez Crisis, viewed NATO as a cheap insurance policy and American foreign policy in general as a dangerous military adventurism. Most of NATO’s history is the story of Europeans attempting to minimize the costs of that insurance policy without really believing in its actual necessity.

The first prior warning came in the Russo-Georgian War of 2008 and Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2014. Everything changed in February of 2022 with Russia’s attempt to conquer the entire Ukraine.

Suddenly, the raison d’etre for NATO’s existence had become relevant.

Will NATO survive this moment when it is actually needed and is called upon to serve the purpose for which it was created? It may, but only if the Europeans understand that they are not mere holders of the insurance policy called NATO, but are actual majority stake shareholders.

There is no policy in existence to cover the lack of resolve.