An Attack On One

There is no NATO without the United States, so for all practical purposes NATO no longer exists. Not even The New York Times can still be bothered to get its name right. Far from NATO’s having kept the peace, its expansion has directly caused the war in Ukraine. Finland looks silly for having joined. Sweden looks downright irresponsible for having sacrificed its work and reputation in peacemaking and in aid.

Membership of NATO subjects our military personnel to the command of officers who were ultimately answerable to Viktor Orbán, or to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, or to Donald Trump. As a member both of the Executive Board and of the Gaza Executive Board of Trump’s Board of Peace, does Tony Blair retain a Labour Party membership card? If so, then why does anyone else? And does Trump’s British fan club now love Blair, who is the only British member of the Board of Peace?

The canonisation of NATO “because of Attlee” does not extend to the NHS, or to the public ownership of the utilities. That NATO was founded by Ernest Bevin on the principles of British trade unionism is a pious if self-regarding fiction that has a parallel in every original member state, including what was then Salazar’s Portugal.

And it is comical to assert that NATO was devised by Denis Healey, who was all of 31 when it was created, and who in any case went on to inflict monetarism on Britain, after he had perpetrated against the Chagossian people the evil that was later compounded by David Miliband of extraordinary rendition infamy.

But on Tuesday, the Chief Justice of the British Indian Ocean Territory overturned the 2004 ban on Chagossians living on the Chagos Islands, as four of them were already doing. Therefore, Chagos is now inhabited by people, by a people, with the right to self-determination. Never mind NATO. Celebrate that.