The enemy it was created to fight hasn’t existed for a generation, but NATO was never about common defense. NATO has always been about making the United States the world’s only superpower.
World War II was scarcely over and the victors were salivating over the spoils. The United States had set its sights on being the world’s newest empire and this required beating the competition – the Soviet Union. In 1947 a career diplomat, George F. Kennan, formulated the policy of “Containment.” “The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”
President Harry S. Truman is best known for the first and last use of nuclear weapons on human beings. But he is also known for the “Truman Doctrine” – which promised to contain communism in Greece and Turkey by any means necessary. The chessboard in the Middle East had already been set up by the departing British, and in 1948 Truman put his own piece on the board by recognizing Israel. The competition between Capitalism and Communism in the Middle East was just getting started.
Dwight D. Eisenhower formulated his own “Eisenhower Doctrine” in 1957. It went a step beyond Truman and decreed that any country that felt threatened by Communism could request help from the United States. This set the stage for America as World Policeman. Shortly after this came the Suez Crisis of 1956, in which Egypt nationalized the Suez canal and all the usual suspects – the U.S., Britain, and Israel – attacked Egypt. The following year the United States used Eisenhower’s doctrine to intervene in the Lebanese presidential elections of 1958, assuring Camille Chamoun’s victory. Chamoun, a Christian Maronite, supported the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
NATO was founded in 1949 under Truman’s administration. It bound a number of nations in a mutual defense pact: the U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. NATO was an outgrowth of the military coalition formed in World War II, whose Supreme Commander was Eisenhower. Eisenhower was also the natural choice for NATO’s first SACEUR – Supreme Allied Commander Europe. In 1951 Eisenhower set up shop for NATO in Paris in temporary quarters at the Hotel Astoria. A second “Supreme Commander” was installed in Norfolk, Virginia in 1952. That same year Greece and Turkey joined NATO. In 1982, King Juan Carlos, who had been restored to the Spanish throne by the fascist dictator Francisco Franco, joined NATO. These were NATO’s earliest members.
Predictably, all this was seen as a threat by the Communist world. The Warsaw Pact was formed in response to NATO five years later, in 1955 when NATO added an additional member, West Germany. The Warsaw Pact’s signatories included the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. A bit later came Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Slovakia. The Warsaw Pact was never very strong. In 1958 Hungary tried to withdraw, only to have its independence brutally crushed. In 1962 Albania was kicked out for being closer to Beijing than Moscow, and the Warsaw Pact dissolved in 1991, two years after the Berlin Wall fell. The New York Times reported the Warsaw Pact’s obituary, noting that it had died at the relatively young age of 36.
But NATO kept growing even after the Warsaw Pact dissolved. In 1982 the Czech Republic, formerly a Warsaw Pact signatory, joined NATO along with Hungary and Poland. In 2004 Bulgaria and the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined them. Then Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, and Croatia. NATO now represented a coalition of over 7 million soldiers from 28 countries with a combined population of almost a billion people.
But NATO was never merely a mutual aid society. Canada, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Greece, and the Netherlands had battalion-sized units attached to U.S. Army divisions in Korea. Turkey also deployed an infantry brigade. NATO’s charter was never limited to encircling the Russian Bear, and NATO has been involved in military action in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Macedonia, the Mediterranean, and in Africa, Today NATO is an obese 67 year-old man aiming his rifle at a enemy who vanished long ago.
But that’s not really the point of NATO in the 21st Century. NATO is a tool wholly-owned, funded, and led by the United States. In recent years many on both the Right and Left have criticized the exorbitant costs to the United States of maintaining military bases in 150+ countries, the subsidies to European nations who do not have to pay for their own defense – if “defense” is the right word. And plenty of people are aware that NATO no longer has a Soviet enemy to fight, though we have now turned our attentions to the Middle East and a region of the Pacific China now claims.
The United States needs military, economic and global coalitions like NATO, the TPP, and the G8 more than ever – if it wants to remain Top Dog.
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