‘NATO Is Dead’?

With America reluctantly withdrawing from NATO, panic seems to have gripped European capitals. It’s not yet dead but the empire is crumbling. On March 3rd, Timothy Ash of elite British state-connected ‘defence’ think tank Chatham House made a series of startling proclamations in an interview with Bloomberg. His topline message was stark– “NATO is dead.” He spoke following the very public February 28th Oval Office fallout between Volodomyr Zelensky and Donald Trump. The impact of that debacle reverberates today, with questions abounding over continued US aid and intelligence sharing with Kiev, pending the Ukrainian leader’s sign-off on a White House-endorsed minerals for security agreements deal.

European leaders evidently echo Ash’s analysis. A day later, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen outlined a €800 billion plan to “rearm” the bloc. Many member state chiefs reportedly “largely endorse” the plan, which calls for Europe to “become more sovereign, more responsible for its own defence and better equipped to act and deal autonomously with immediate and future challenges and threats.” Nonetheless, polls indicate European citizens oppose increased defence spending, and contractors warn this grand scheme will “take time” to realise.

If NATO truly is dead, it represents another long-overdue nail in the Empire’s coffin. It is also yet further confirmation that the US-dominated unipolar order, which has wrought untold death, destruction and misery over the past quarter century, is no more, and never to return. Residents of the Global South can breathe a collective sigh of relief–meanwhile, in a bitter irony, the same Western states that aided and abetted Washington’s unchallenged hegemony now find themselves defenceless.

The unipolar world was forged in an incendiary baptism of airstrikes and atrocity propaganda in Yugoslavia, March–June 1999. For 78 straight days, NATO relentlessly blitzed civilian, government, and industrial infrastructure throughout the country, killing untold innocent people, including children, and violently disrupting daily life for millions. While the US oversaw the ruinous campaign, both publicly and privately, British Prime Minister Tony Blair was an ardent advocate of even greater belligerence against non-military targets, despite the grave concerns and warnings of government legal advisors.

Then again, NATO’s assault was in itself completely illegal, conducted without UN Security Council approval. Such an intervention would’ve been unthinkable during the prior decade. Throughout the 1990s, Washington carefully constructed the chimera of a world united behind US leadership by ensuring UN backing for all its overt imperial actions across the globe. The bombing of Yugoslavia represented an unprecedented, highly controversial break with this strategy, specifically intended to serve as an exemplar thereafter.

An eerily prescient April 1999 New Statesman article noted NATO’s unauthorised bombing was no “one off”, but “just the beginning” of a “brave new world”, in which the military alliance acted autonomously as a worldwide “riot squad”. In this context, whenever China and/or Russia could plausibly use their Security Council vetoes to block US intervention overseas, NATO would simply invoke the UN Charter’s self-defence clause to strike whenever and wherever its members perceived a “threat”, without hindrance or any consideration for international law:

In return for serving as the Empire’s dependable, unquestioning dogs-bodies, protecting US economic interests abroad, and purchasing all Washington’s exorbitantly-priced, barely functional military equipment, European governments were granted a sense of invincibility, courtesy of NATO’s Article 5. In the meantime, their armies and industrial bases could be left to rot, safe in the delusion that America and newer alliance allies would come to the rescue and do the fighting and dying for them if they were ever attacked. As George Soros wrote in November 1993:

The Ukraine proxy war has brought this suicidal upshot of the unipolar world into sharp relief. Despite the Trump administration’s determination to end the conflict, European leaders show no sign of backing down, desperately scrambling to make up the vast shortfall in financial and military assistance abruptly created by the cessation of Washington’s aid. As yet, no credible solution to this glaring deficit between rhetoric and reality has been proposed. Even Ukrainian leaders admit “nobody can replace the US when it comes to military support.”

[Contributed]

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Frontier
Vol 57, No. 41, Apr 6 - 12, 2025