LITERARY REVIEW: A BIOGRAPHY OF NATO

Intro: NATO’s modus operandi is centred around the pledge that an attack on one member is an attack on all. In a provocative new book, however, the author asks: would any nation today really put itself in the firing line to protect another?

DURING the depths of the Cold War, 40 years ago, there were undoubtedly gullible victims in Britain of Moscow propaganda.

Paradoxically, many of these people have now become warmongering Blairites, keen advocates in bombing distant countries. But back in the 1980s, they detested NATO with every human fibre. Houses were plastered with peacenik posters; many camped out at the U.S. Air Force base at Greenham Common, protesting against the presence of American cruise missiles; others still chained themselves to fences and blocked roads leading into the Naval base at Faslane; the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was rampant among the militants who were disruptive in their aims and actions.

Many of these people were perceived as being deluded as they actively wanted the former Soviet Union to dominate all of Europe. They failed, yes, but actually, only by a narrow margin.

They failed because NATO held together under very great pressure from the Kremlin and from the European Left. The Communist Empire had exhausted itself in one last failed attempt to destroy the Free West, and the Soviet Union sickened and eventually perished.

Many things contributed to that demise, but many military commentators and analysts believe that the battle over cruise missiles, and the resolve of NATO, were decisive.

The NATO alliance, set up in 1949 specifically to prevent a Soviet takeover of Western Europe, still exists almost 33 years after the collapse of the Soviet empire. Yet, an oddity is at play. The alliance was created to deal with that particular menace, which still exists long after that threat melted away.

Even more surprising, NATO has actually got bigger since its arch enemy vanished. An explanation is more than overdue.

We should therefore be very grateful to Peter Apps, a British Army reservist, and Reuters columnist, for writing a comprehensive and full history of NATO since its inception in 1949 to today.

The workings of this book started life under the rather exalted working title “Sacred Obligation”. But are we looking at an organisation that has become the world’s most successful bluff?

Mr Apps spends a great deal of his time chronicling the endless unresolved tension between the mighty, rich, and powerful U.S., NATO’s backbone and muscle, and Europe, its vulnerable and pitifully weak underbelly. It was of course this tension which the USSR ceaselessly sought to exploit.

NATO’s historic and famous promise, that an attack on one would be an attack on all, was and remains a very precarious gamble. History features sad examples of security pacts being called out and exposed as bluffs.

The normally pugnacious Lord Palmerston wriggled out of Britain’s 1860s pledge to defend Denmark against Prussia – when he realised it would get us into a war we would lose.

Neville Chamberlain’s 1939 guarantee to protect Poland from Germany failed to deter Hitler from invading. Even worse, when the invasion came, Britain did nothing.

And we shouldn’t forget, either, how fiercely determined America was in 1939, and for years afterwards, in staying out of European quarrels. Donald Trump means what he says, too.

Washington only went to war against Berlin after Hitler declared war on America, not the other way round. Any careful and studious reader of this book will begin to wonder whether NATO, far from being an enshrined promise of aid in time of trouble, is in fact a good way of avoiding any real obligation to fight.

The much-touted Article 5 of NATO’s charter is not quite the magnificent guarantee of armed support from the strong to the weak that it appears to be. Members of the alliance pledge to assist an attacked nation “by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force”.

Read carefully. This means that if a NATO member does not “deem” armed force to be necessary, it can send a note of protest instead, or make a fierce and angry speech at the United Nations.

America would never have signed or ratified a treaty which obliged it to go to war, which is why the clause is so weak.

All the small, poor ill-armed countries on NATO’s eastern edge would be well advised to take note of that. During its 40-year life cycle, NATO has shown how cautious, limited, and risk-averse it has been. Its recent reinvention as a kind of mini-United Nations task force has been mainly outside its original operational area, in former Yugoslavia, Libya, and Afghanistan.

Its founding membership was carefully restricted to countries already well outside the Soviet sphere of influence.

It stood aside when Russian tanks crushed the 1953 East Berlin rising, the 1956 Budapest revolt, and the 1968 Prague Spring.

It did precious little when Moscow ordered Poland’s Communist rulers to curtail a democratic and Christian rebellion by imposing brutal martial law there from 1981 to 1983.

Where the West did stand up to Soviet power in Europe, mainly in West Berlin, it tended to be the U.S. which did most of the heavy lifting. We should suspect it is still much the same. In an enlightening passage, Apps describes a recent scene at NATO’s Joint Force Command in the Dutch town of Brunssum.  

He writes: “Officials in its 24-hour operations room described their main role as stopping the Ukraine war spreading to alliance territory”. Well, quite. For who knows what stress would be placed on NATO if, thanks to some rash incursion or off-course missile, it faced a direct war with Russia?

As it happens, the task of avoiding the spread of war into NATO territory would be much easier if NATO had not expanded so far east in the past 30 years. Its leaders had been warned.

In 1997, the greatest and toughest anti-Soviet U.S. diplomat of modern times, George Kennan, said shortly before he died: “Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”

Recalling his generation’s successful handling of Soviet power, he sighed: “This has been my life, and it pains me to see it so screwed up in the end.”

– Deterring Armageddon: A Biography of NATO by Peter Apps is published by Wildfire, 624pp