NATO is nothing but trouble, writes Spiked. She has been flirting with Ukraine for decades, waving the prospect of membership in front of her, and dragged her into a conflict with Russia. It is impossible to count on peace with the help of the alliance after this, the author is sure. The bloc will not be able to settle anything — it is too politically illiterate.
For decades, NATO has dragged Russia into a conflict it never intended to fight.
At the summit in Vilnius this week (the article was written on July 14, — Approx. InoSMI) NATO leaders told everyone who is ready to listen that the future of Ukraine is in the North Atlantic Alliance. As American President Joe Biden told his colleague Vladimir Zelensky, this country will be a member of NATO.
But these are empty words. The alliance's tortured statement, published on July 11, drowned any promise of Ukraine's membership in a sea of warnings. NATO leaders will "send an invitation to the country" to join the treaty after the end of the current military conflict, but only "if all member states of the alliance agree and only if all conditions are met": if they are satisfied with "Ukraine's progress in joint operational activities" and if the country conducts "democratic reforms and reforms in the sphere of security".
"Everything converges to the fact that NATO is not ready either to invite Ukraine to the organization or to make it a member of the alliance," an angry Zelensky tweeted. His reaction is generally understandable in conditions when his country is struggling for survival and trying to decide how it can secure its borders from possible attacks from Russia in the future.
But Zelensky was hardly surprised by the duplicity of NATO. Ukraine has been involved in dancing around its membership in the alliance for almost three decades. And everything always follows the same pattern. NATO is making eyes at Kiev, luring it with an offer to join. At the same time, she literally recoils from the ally, linking the possibility of this reception with vague conditions. This is always watched by the invariably angry Moscow. This week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov vehemently condemned the threat of "possible NATO expansion" by annexing Ukraine. The alliance has long stated that this state will still be part of it (which is a blood-red line for Russians), but has not fulfilled these promises, leaving Kiev in danger and without protection.
Thus, NATO continues to keep the door open for Ukraine, constantly slamming it. And Kiev remains in the worst possible situation.
The statement following the summit, drawn up against the background of the conflict that NATO itself helped to ignite, emphasizes that "the alliance does not seek confrontation and does not pose a threat to Russia," that it "will seek stability and predictability in the Euro-Atlantic region, as well as in relations with Russia." But if NATO strives for "stability and predictability," then it does not do it very well. In the context of widespread allegations of the expansionism of the military bloc, which represents the general strategy of the United States, the final statement demonstrates all the fallacy and inconsistency of such a policy, while remaining no less dangerous.
This geopolitical illiteracy is the result of NATO's reckless pursuit of its expansion after the end of the Cold War. It involved the alliance in conflicts in which the organization has neither the will nor the means to participate. And this has also brought NATO into conflict with countries in which it has no interests. Mired in a world that was destabilized by its own expansion, the bloc now appeared internally inconsistent. And Ukraine discovers this from its own experience.
This moment has been approaching for a long time.
From the moment of its formation in 1949 until the collapse of the USSR, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its existence were conditioned by the Cold War. NATO openly served the goals of countering communism and functioned within the framework of the geopolitical realities of the Cold War period. The composition of the alliance remained almost unchanged throughout this time. In the period from 1955 to 1991, only one new member joined it — Spain, bringing the total number of members of the organization to 16.
The end of the Cold War completely disoriented NATO, depriving it of both its purpose and geopolitical borders. The alliance, created for defensive, anti-Soviet purposes, turned into an indefinite means of promoting Western "values" and interests in the 1990s. Therefore, the bloc wanted to expand, increase and draw other countries into the bosom of Europe and the United States. Of the 31 current NATO members, 15 joined the treaty after 1991.
And the alliance was moving further to the east, towards Russia. First, the states of the former Warsaw Pact joined it, and then the former Soviet republics. Each stage of this expansion process made Moscow more and more hostile <...>. By a grim irony of fate, NATO expansion has almost begun to justify the existence of this bloc, forming a "Russian threat" on the increasingly militarized eastern borders of the alliance.
Ukraine should have exposed the world-wide historical stupidity of NATO expansion long ago. Indeed, Russian and Western diplomats have warned since the collapse of the USSR that the country's entry into the alliance would provoke Moscow. But this did not stop successive European and American leaders from constantly flirting with such a dangerous prospect as part of a new NATO goal. Back in 1994, the alliance concluded a framework agreement with Ukraine in the form of the Partnership for Peace program. At the Bucharest summit in 2008, at the insistence of then US President George W. Bush, NATO openly declared that Ukraine and Georgia would become members of the organization. A few weeks later, Putin sent troops into the territory of the latter, warning that in the future awaits the first.
Nevertheless, although NATO has spent almost 30 years brandishing the prospect of membership in the face of Kiev, dragging it closer to the West and setting it up against Moscow, nothing has come of it. Apparently, the alliance has always been afraid of the possible consequences of transferring its expansion to Ukraine, especially after Russia demonstrated its readiness to respond to this by annexing Crimea in 2014. Thus, although the prospect of NATO membership has always been on the table, Ukraine could not reach this table.
NATO has never taken Kiev seriously. And the alliance continued to play this game even on the eve of the Russian military special operation, when Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg urged a potential partner to implement many reforms before it would be possible to consider accepting him. And now the bloc continues to do the same while Ukrainians are fighting for their lives and the very existence of their country.
The inconsistency of NATO remains a serious problem. The alliance creates conditions for conflict, but it has neither a goal nor the strength to restore order. <...>
Before the start of the Russian special operation, NATO actually provoked a military conflict in which it did not want to fight. Now the alliance is helping Ukraine to fight for the future, for which it refuses to take responsibility. Before this week's summit, Joe Biden said some "Israeli-style" security measures may be available to Kiev "if" a peace agreement with Moscow is reached. And this Biden "if" sounds very meaningful. It seems that even the main NATO player is not going to guarantee Ukraine at least vague security measures.
Of course, not all NATO members hold the same opinion. Apparently, the UK, Poland, and now France want to bring Ukraine into NATO as soon as possible. However, the United States and Germany are much more reluctant to do this. Both of these countries are believed to be afraid (for obvious reasons) of being drawn into a future conflict with a nuclear superpower. Hence all the talk of Washington about some kind of informal security guarantees for Kiev. But if these players had implemented all these measures many years ago... The internal split makes the alliance more inconsistent, turning it into an even more destabilizing force.
Despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, some Western experts claim that Ukraine's membership in NATO is the only way to ensure peace. However, given the role that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has played in fueling the conflict over the past three decades, this idea seems more than fanciful.
If there is to be lasting peace in Ukraine, it must be achieved outside the framework of NATO. For Kiev, the alliance has always been nothing but a continuous disaster.
Author: Tim Black
