While leaders of its member countries attend the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 75th annual summit this week in Washington, peace organizations around the globe are meeting at the same time to protest NATO and to demand that it be dismantled.
To many Canadians, the idea that NATO should be disbanded seems a shocking and even insane proposition. After all, isn’t NATO a defensive alliance dedicated to peace and stability? Isn’t NATO the only force protecting us from the depredations of powerful and aggressive countries like Russia and China? These sentiments are expressed repeatedly by Western corporate media and political elites. However, an examination of the alliance’s historic and present-day actions reveals a starkly different reality. Overwhelming evidence instead shows NATO to be a prime mover of the conflict and geopolitical instability that blights our earth and that increasingly threatens us all with nuclear war.
NATO was founded in 1949 by the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and nine other European countries. The Alliance was initially intended to provide a military counter-weight to the Soviet Union and a check to the spread of European Communism.
This Cold War balance of power between Eastern and Western Blocs is what today’s NATO apologists use to justify the alliance’s “defensive” nature. However, NATO’s formation has to be understood in the context of the post World War II geopolitical landscape, in which the United States and the United Kingdom, partners in a “special relationship”, sought the world-wide expansion of Anglo-American political, economic, and military power. As Lord Ismay stated at NATO’s founding, the alliance was intended to “keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”.
From its inception, NATO was seen as a threat by the Soviet Union and Communist China, and in response to the alliance’s creation, the Warsaw Pact was formed. Eastern Bloc fears were well-founded, as during the Cold War, NATO increasingly became a means to militarize Europe, to fill its member states with American military bases, troops, and armaments, and to eventually expand the American nuclear arsenal to European countries, thus bringing the threat of a nuclear first strike close to Soviet borders.
The aggressive nature of NATO became even more apparent after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. At this time, the Warsaw Pact was disbanded and the former Soviet Republics, including the Russian Federation, sought peace with the West. During the negotiations between Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush about the Soviet Union’s dissolution, several senior Western diplomats promised that NATO would not expand eastward. This promise was key in alleviating Russian fears of Western aggression.
Tragically, the United States and its NATO allies did not seize the unprecedented opportunity for peace that the end of the Cold War brought. Instead, the West refused desperately needed economic aid to the Russian Federation, dooming the Russian people to over a decade of severe economic and social crisis. In addition, NATO began an inexorable eastward expansion, eventually incorporating Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics.
The real threat of aggression that NATO presented to the Russian Federation grew during the 1990s and early 2000s. During this time the alliance expanded toward Russia’s borders, waged an illegal war against the former Yugoslavia, and staged the illegal invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. In addition, United States foreign policy became increasingly dominated by the neoconservative Project for a New American Century, a group of unabashed American Imperialists who seek to exert “full spectrum dominance” over the globe. Chief neocon figures like Zbigniew Brzezinski and Dick Cheney spoke openly of a desire to “break apart” Russia, and promoted the aggressive expansion of American nuclear weapons into NATO’s newly incorporated Eastern European states.
In the past two decades NATO’s provocations in Europe have only increased. In 2000, seeking to diffuse growing geopolitical tensions, Russian president Vladimir Putin asked to join NATO. This request was rebuffed. In 2007, Putin invited NATO countries to create a joint missile defence system, but this proposal was ignored. In 2008, the United States announced that Ukraine would become a NATO member, crossing what Russia had long said was a “red line” that threatened their very existence. In 2014 the United States supported a far-right coup against the democratically elected government of Ukraine, sparking a civil war in that country, and setting the stage for Russia’s 2022 invasion.
Since the 2014 civil war began, NATO has been flooding Ukraine with weapons, turning it into a defacto NATO member, while thwarting peace at every turn. Western governments entered the 2015 Minsk I and II peace agreements in bad faith, using these supposed attempts to peacefully resolve the Ukrainian conflict as a means to stall for time and arm Ukraine. After the 2022 Russian invasion, when a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine had been agreed-to, NATO again intervened to prevent peace. At the behest of Washington, Boris Johnson pressured Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky to scuttle the agreement.
The reckless promotion of war and aggression in Ukraine continues to this day, as NATO appears ready to double-down on prolonging the war, with devastating effects on Ukraine’s infrastructure and horrendous losses to its soldiers and citizens. As well, the threat of a direct nuclear confrontation between the United States and Russia grows each day the war continues. Such an outcome would mean the end of human civilization as we know it.
What the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the world desperately need is a negotiated end to the Ukraine War and a new framework for lasting peace in Europe and Asia. NATO continues to be an impediment to these goals, and as such, activists across Canada are demanding that our government formally leave the alliance and instead commit to an independent foreign policy based on peace, cooperation, and international law. In making this move, Canada would be aligning with the global majority who, contrary to Western propaganda, see NATO as a vehicle for Western imperialism and see the United States as the greatest threat to world peace.
Removing Canada from the NATO straightjacket isn’t just about peace. It’s also about freeing up the resources our government spends on weapons for NATO and Ukraine and directing them instead toward pressing domestic concerns. Canada has more than enough problems here at home. We have encampments of homeless people in every major city. We have a dire housing crisis in which rents and home prices have escalated far beyond the reach of working people. We have students languishing under crushing levels of debt. We have underfunded health, education, and social services systems failing to meet the needs of Canadians. Finally, we have a desperate need for coordinated global action to confront the climate crisis and to halt the destruction of the biosphere.
None of these critical issues can be dealt with while Canada remains part of an aggressive military alliance that promotes the West’s failed and delusional dreams of global domination. It is high time we charted a different course.