- by Peter Farmer
- The Guardian
- Issue #2155
What’s the biggest threat to world peace? Is it those nuclear weapons Iran is supposed to be working on? Is it the much-demonised country of China? Is it nuclear weapons in general?
There’s a case to be made that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is the most dangerous organisation on the planet. In fact, someone has made that case. In a ‘dossier’ for the Tricontinental Institute, the case is made that NATO isn’t in crisis, but is in fact proceeding according to a very dangerous plan.
If Australians think about NATO at all, it will probably be because they’ve seen some news item about US President Donald Trump wanting the alliance to spend more money on arms. Like a very expensive mobster in charge of a protection racket, Trump is supposed to have told the NATO nations that if they don’t put their hands in their pockets more deeply, he won’t guarantee that the US will protect them. It’s a serious threat because mutual defence is the point of NATO, its excuse for existing.
Needless to say, mutual defence isn’t the real reason for NATO. As Tricontinental says, NATO “serves a wide range of purposes for the United States and has done so since it was founded in 1949.” The so-called alliance is a way for the US to keep its position of global power. As the dossier argues, NATO is going to keep helping the US to project power, regardless of gripes about arms spending.
Political Scientist Peter Gowan wrote that NATO states are “hell-bent on exacerbating the inequalities of power and wealth in the world” and that the member-states have fooled their electorates into thinking that they’re leading the world towards a just and humane future.
As well as giving a history of NATO and of its role in helping US imperialism, the dossier looks at how NATO has reinvented itself as a kind of global policeman, intervening in the Global South. NATO has “used its dominion to punish states that refuse to adopt the policies of globalisation, neoliberalism and US primacy.”
All right, Australian readers might think, that’s bad, but we’re a long way from Europe here. This is not our problem.
That’s a tempting thought, but it’s wrong. NATO has drawn Australia in to conflicts such as Afghanistan and Australia engages with NATO as an ‘observer nation’. The expansion of the alliance is ongoing and there’s no reason why it might not include Australia in some way in the future.
The other danger NATO poses to Australia is by making the world a less safe place. A key example of this is Libya. NATO had a key role in the destruction of Libya which has had knock-on effects around the world in terms of arms movements and migration flows. Under pressure from the US, NATO is steadily beginning to join in demonisation of and aggression towards China. In 2019, NATO said that China provided both “opportunities and challenges.” In 2021, NATO dropped the ‘opportunities’ and worried about China’s “assertiveness” and threats to the “rules based international order.”
Really what NATO is after, says Tricontinental, is to “maintain the US rules-based system and prevent other countries from developing.”
Now that’s dangerous.
