In anticipation of tonight’s Lindisfarne grudge match, 1233 years of hurt, consider that Norwegian membership took NATO to the land frontier of the Soviet Union from its inception, six years before that of the Warsaw Pact, which it has outlived by 35 years. Far from NATO’s having kept the peace, its expansion has directly caused the war in Ukraine, as Nigel Farage used to have the wit to say, but no longer does. 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 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or to Donald Trump, or until recently to Viktor Orbán. 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. Nobody just gives up a million dollar salary in the capital of the world for the £67,505 of a British Cabinet Minister, and that without even the £98,599 of a member of the House of Commons. Indeed, a peerage would in practice prevent Miliband from ever becoming Prime Minister, which David Cameron had already been in addition to being independently wealthy. At 60, why is Miliband considering this? There must be something very badly wrong with the International Rescue Committee, and he needs to get out of town. Who is going to look?
From a P5 state, Keir Starmer never could have become Secretary-General of the United Nations; that delusion was in the tradition that stretched back through the fantasy that Blair was going to be “President of Europe” to the hallucination that Elizabeth II was going to be “Queen of Europe”. But the position of Secretary General of NATO (why does that have no hyphen when the UN job has one?) is within Starmer’s grasp, and that says everything about them both. Albeit with a disappointing coyness about the prominence of senior Nazis in the early decades of NATO, Lily Lynch writes:
The Nato summit in Ankara was a showcase of Turkish hospitality and ruthless authoritarian efficiency. Journalists were showered with Turkish delights, perfumes, and porcelain coffee cups, and even Turkey’s cats were enlisted in the charm offensive: white Angora kittens were introduced to cooing journalists in the press centre. The roads were freshly paved and the shiny Nato shuttle buses all ran on time. The entire spectacle was sustained by staggering levels of security: roughly 70,000 personnel secured the event — almost double the number present at last year’s Nato summit in The Hague. In the weeks leading up to it, all protests were banned and hundreds of Nato critics and Left-wing activists were arrested. While Trump praised the spectacle, some liberal Atlanticists present told me they were a touch squeamish about the entire display. In their view, the Ankara summit was a deviation from enlightened Euro-Atlanticist democracy, something supposedly intrinsic to the alliance.
However, a better assessment would have understood the Ankara summit as Nato returning to its roots. In recent months, the theme of Nato reverting to its original Cold War purpose — European deterrence and defence — has been advanced by the Trump administration. The idea was rolled out in February as “Nato 3.0” and is the brainchild of Undersecretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby, a restrainer who advocates for limiting military interventionism and who has therefore been maligned by the liberal Atlanticist set and reportedly spied on by Israel. As Colby describes it, Nato 3.0 is not an abandonment of Nato but rather “a return to and validation of its foundational purpose”. In other words, “make Nato great again” by ensuring Europeans pour billions into defence industrial production and technological innovation so they can take care of their own conventional (non-nuclear) defence.
At this year’s summit, I witnessed the transition to Nato 3.0 in real time. The Trump administration surely regards Europe’s acceptance of its shift in policy and philosophy as a major foreign policy “win”. Multiple senior Nato officials spoke of the need to build “a stronger Europe in a stronger Nato”, and repeatedly recited figures testifying to leaps in European defence spending in accordance with Trumpian demands. One senior Nato official spoke of the “simultaneity problem” — the Trump administration’s concern about a scenario in which the US military would be forced to fight multiple major conflicts at once, which he described as the reason “why Europeans are stepping up and taking more responsibility for their own defence”. Whatever their distaste for Trump’s bullying rhetoric, it was clear that Nato officials and allies are now taking the Trump administration’s words very seriously.
A few weeks ahead of the summit, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth echoed Colby at the Nato defence ministerial meeting in Brussels, tying Nato 3.0 to Washington’s demands that allies raise defence spending. “That’s what defence spending commitments are all about,” he said, “transforming Nato into a real military alliance that’s focused on hard power and real deterrence, a Nato 3.0 modelled on the Nato 1.0 that won the Cold War.” During the same meeting, Hegseth gave trans-Atlantic allies an ultimatum. Going forward, he said, American Nato dues would be contingent on allies meeting their own defence spending targets. “Where other allies do not spend with urgency, our dues contributions will go down,” he warned. He also told allies to expect a review of their progress in six months. If insufficient strides had been made by then, the US would spend less on Nato. This threat contributed to a sense of elevated fear in Ankara. It wasn’t an entirely irrational one either: the Trump administration is dramatically scaling back its involvement in other multilateral institutions. In January, the United States withdrew from 31 UN entities and is currently withholding around $4 billion in mandatory UN dues.
To understand “Nato 3.0”, it’s essential to understand the alliance’s evolution. Nato’s founding was rooted in Cold War ideological and military competition with the Soviet Union. As such, Nato 1.0 was a firmly Right-wing organisation, one interested above all in strengthening American dominion over Europe and confronting the Soviet threat. But it also had several other functions, among them spreading the gospel of free markets and crushing internal Left-wing subversion. The North Atlantic Treaty signed in April 1949 established the military alliance and outlined Nato “values”; the pact promised “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law”. From the very beginning, not all members lived up to the pompous rhetoric. Founding member state Portugal was then ruled by dictator Antonio Salazar, whose one-party regime Estado Novo, or New State, employed a menacing secret police and outlawed all opposition parties; the dictatorship’s “new” name was an irony, as according to Tom Gallagher, the puritanical Salazar “manifested the true reactionary’s horror of change”.
The United States was often the alliance’s biggest proponent of working with unsavoury regimes, pushing for Franco’s Spain to become a member of Nato with overwhelming support in Congress and the Senate. The US saw Francoist Spain as an ideal ally owing to its “strategic location and furiously anti-communist sentiment”. When some European member states objected to admitting Franco’s regime into the alliance, the United States signed the Pact of Madrid with Spain in 1953, furnishing the dictatorship with aid and allowing the US to build military bases on Spanish soil. French colonial Algeria was also an original part of Nato, with Article 5 extending to the colonised country where systematic torture and concentration camps were used to subdue the population. Meanwhile some former Nazis from West Germany’s supposedly “clean Wehrmacht” — the alliance shamelessly propagated the myth that Wehrmacht officers fought honorably during the Second World War — were also integrated into the pact, with some rising to Nato’s senior leadership. In the face of the Soviet threat, there could be no enemies to the Right.
Nato 2.0 covered a period we might describe as the “long Nineties” and was characterised by End-of-History hubris and excess: rapacious eastward expansion, self-aggrandising rhetoric about liberal values, and zealous out-of-area operations. Nato’s “out-of-area” actions — operations undertaken beyond the territorial limits of member states — undermined its claim to be a “purely defensive alliance”. As “humanitarian” operations, their results ranged from mixed to disastrous. While the 1999 Nato bombing of Yugoslavia forced Serbian security forces from Kosovo, it did not bring down President Slobodan Milošević; he wouldn’t fall until a contested election several months later. Indeed, Milošević’s own Minister of Information during the bombing, Aleksandar Vučić, has been leader of Serbia in some form for 14 years, and his regime employs Serbian nationalist rhetoric barely distinguishable from that of his former boss. In 2011, Nato intervened in Libya with even more catastrophic results: though sold to the public as a “humanitarian intervention” to protect civilians, the real goal was regime change, with the removal of leader Muammar al-Gaddafi judged a strategic imperative worth many Libyan lives. In the end, a report from Harvard’s Belfer Center determined that “Nato’s action magnified the conflict’s duration about sixfold and its death toll at least sevenfold”. Nato 2.0 also included the Great War on Terror, which meant the emergence of non-state actors as a new threat; costly cross-border operations and occupations ensued. If Nato 1.0’s main purpose was containing the Soviet Union in Europe, then Nato 2.0 represented the mother of all mission creep.
“If Nato 1.0’s main purpose was containing the Soviet Union in Europe, then Nato 2.0 represented the mother of all mission creep.”
The summit in Ankara was the alliance’s response to Trumpian demands for a Nato 3.0: a scaled back, “Europe-led” pact that doesn’t rely on the United States as the guarantor of Europe’s conventional defence. As such, the summit kicked off with a grandiose Defense Industry Forum, where Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte repeatedly invoked the term “defence industrial revolution”. The event was an opportunity for Turkey to hawk its indigenous defence industry wares, but it was also an opportunity for Europe. As one official from a European defence ministry wryly put it to me, the forum allowed allies to make a big show of complying with Trumpian dictates to spend more on their defence.
Just to drive the point home, President Zelensky gave a speech at the event likening the current revolution in drone technology to the invention of missiles. He described Ukraine as a reluctant defence industrial powerhouse forged in war and asserted that it should therefore be admitted to Nato. In other characteristically immoderate statements, the Defense Industry Forum was widely touted as a success. A Nato official confirmed that “at least” $50 billion in new defence deals were announced at the forum; among them were $40 billion worth of investment in counter-drone capabilities and multi-country initiatives for the continued militarisation of space. The pivot to Nato 3.0 would appear to be well underway.
Turkey is perhaps the model Nato 3.0 ally, which makes its hosting of the first summit of this new chapter richly appropriate. Though Turkey has contributed to Nato 2.0 peacekeeping missions and interventions in places like Kosovo and Bosnia, Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, like Trump, has no time for liberal internationalist pieties. Like Trump, he would like to see Nato stripped bare to its raw essentials of defence and security, ditching democracy promotion and the dissemination of “Western values”. Turkey has the second largest army in Nato and a burgeoning defence industrial base: Turkish defence and aviation exports broke records last year, exceeding $10 billion. All of this has won admiration from Trump. Throughout the summit, Trump repeatedly praised Erdoğan, calling him “really a great man”, “a great leader”, and “a strong person”. Trump’s affinity with Erdoğan suggests that what is most valued in Nato 3.0 is a capacity for deterrence and defence; democratic deficiencies are of little concern in an ally that is seen to be pulling its weight.
Despite the notable absence of liberal rhetoric in Ankara, elements of Nato 2.0 remain for now, including the tradition of the annual summit. During the Cold War, Nato held just 10 summits. Today, it holds a wildly expensive summit every year. Last year’s one in The Hague reportedly cost about €1 million per minute, with some media reporting that it was the most expensive meeting in the alliance’s history. Preparations for this year’s summit reportedly cost €235 million. In addition to being expensive, international relations scholar Patrick Porter believes that annual summits present risks. “The curse of regular summitry…wasn’t a feature of Cold War Nato,” he tells me. “There are these relentless opportunities for trouble and mischief and misunderstanding.” It’s a critique now shared by some other allies. While Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte told journalists in Ankara that the next summit will be in Albania, he would not confirm that it would happen next year.
Whatever the similarities between Nato 3.0 and Nato 1.0, there are also a few striking differences. Nato once justified itself with the Cold War platitudes of prosperity and liberty. This was propaganda to be sure, but it was still integral to winning an ideological battle that once divided the world. Now, the rhetoric of prosperity and freedom has been replaced with the cold, uninspiring promise of “security” — a nebulous, constantly expanding concept emblematic of an ideology that has lost the ability to excite or be believed, and must now rely on coercion, censorship and repression to get its way. While Nato holds a lavish summit each year and member states ramp up spending for a “defence industrial revolution”, people living in allied countries are being told they must endure brutal cuts to health care, education, and social welfare to pay for it all. Alliance boosters like to boast that Nato “protects one billion people”. If it does, it does so at a steep cost.
The holding of a Nato summit in Ankara is so ridiculous that nobody dares say how absurd and insulting it is. For Ankara is not a democratic city on the side of freedom and peace.
It is the grim capital of an aggressive despotism whose former democracy has been cut to ribbons over the past 20 years. It represents pretty much everything Nato is generally believed to stand against.
The story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, in which everyone is too scared to say that the vain tyrant is in fact naked, has nothing on the story of Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In Ankara, everyone is too cowed to admit he is a repressive despot who scares his neighbours.
Mr Erdogan is as near as anyone gets to being the twin brother of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. His troops sit on someone else’s soil, in Northern Cyprus. He shows his muscle in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Azerbaijan. He likes to pose as the new leader of the Islamic world, the heir of the Ottoman sultans who once ruled much of the globe from Istanbul.
He keeps surprisingly good relations with Putin, and has bought advanced military equipment from Russia, against strong US objections. His prisons contain several journalists and dissidents. His main political opponent likewise rots in a jail cell.
Pro-freedom campaign groups report that the Turkish state made multiple attempts to suppress dissent in the weeks before the Nato summit. They said reporters were placed under house arrest, restricted by suspended sentences, or put through long, drawn-out trials for critical commentary on social media. The campaign group Reporters Without Borders accused Turkey of using ‘all possible means’ to undermine its critics.
It placed Turkey 163rd out of 180 on its world press freedom index (the UK is 18, Russia is 172 and North Korea 179). Turkey used to be 100th but Erdogan and his Islamist backers worked hard to change this. Around 90 per cent of Turkey’s national media – once diverse and full of rivalry – are now under direct or indirect government control.
But the repression goes wider and deeper. The very idea of opposition is unwelcome in Erdogan’s Turkey. You can, and probably will, go to prison for it. A huge new courthouse has been built at Silivri, next to Marmara prison, on the far western edge of Istanbul’s colossal urban sprawl.
This spree of repressive construction has much to do with the shocking crushing of Ekrem Imamoglu, the most significant rival to Erdogan in Turkish politics. Mr Imamoglu became a successful mayor of Istanbul and looked likely to be the opposition’s candidate in the presidential election due in 2028.
Last November, he was arrested on astounding charges of corruption and espionage, which it is very hard to take seriously – except that the Turkish courts obviously do. The state prosecutor accused him of running a criminal organisation and called for him to be sentenced to more than 2,000 years in prison.
Yet Nato, which likes to pose as the great defender of democracy and freedom, and spits defiance at Moscow, welcomes Turkey as a member and politely ignores its similarities to Russia. Yet it is very hard not to notice that Turkey is not a normal country.
You might have glimpsed Mr Erdogan’s spectacular military display yesterday on the TV news, a crazy mixture of Ruritania and Genghis Khan, as his troops welcomed Nato big cheeses to the country’s capital. But you probably haven’t heard of his gigantic, vainglorious new White Palace – Ak Saray in Turkish – three million square feet of it, and featuring lots of top-grade imported marble and silk wallpaper.
Despot? Can this be just? Surely the Turkish president is democratically elected? Yes, he is. But don’t make too much of that in a state so skewed and suppressed.
Early in his long march to power, mainly fuelled by militant Islamism, Erdogan said: ‘Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.’ He said this when he was the mere mayor of Istanbul, which has a fine tram network.
Opinions differ about when exactly he alighted from his Istanbul tram and slipped into a much more luxurious and secluded vehicle for his ride to the very top. But it is a long time ago, as anyone who has ever crossed him can testify.
So this summit raises the seldom-asked question ‘What is Nato?’ which we all might do well to try to answer. It has never been totally democratic, though its founding nations were dominated by democracies.
In its early years, when the shadow of Stalin lay across Europe, it was not fussy about who joined. The grim Salazar dictatorship in Portugal was welcome, as were the Greek colonels who overthrew democracy in Athens in 1967, and continued to stifle it until they fell in 1974.
Entry to the alliance is, in reality, controlled by the US. Nato has no actual procedure for expelling an errant member, though a country may quit if it gives a year’s notice.
Another pressing question is whether Nato is truly defensive any more? Its 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia probably wasn’t legal and certainly wasn’t defensive. Nor was its 2011 attack on the Gaddafi regime in Libya, which undoubtedly did more harm than good. Its deployment in Afghanistan remains puzzling. It is hard to get much further from the North Atlantic than Kandahar or the Khyber Pass.
Nato is also that strange thing, an alliance that might get weaker as it grows bigger. The much-boasted, much misunderstood Article 5 of the Nato Treaty says an armed attack against one or more member ‘shall be considered an attack against them all’, and permits retaliation ‘as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force’. Yet the wording is in fact far from binding.
The US would never have agreed to anything tougher. The Nato member can – if it wishes – defend another member with armed force. But it can equally well send a rude diplomatic note to Moscow, or demand a meeting of the UN Security Council. There is no actual commitment to fight.
The real question has always been ‘will the US, or any of Nato’s nuclear powers, risk a Soviet (or nowadays Russian) nuclear attack on its capital for the sake of, say, Lithuania or Denmark?’ To which the answer can never be more than ‘perhaps’. And the great paradox is that the more small, weak countries Nato allows in, the feebler this airy commitment is.
In the Cold War, Nato was a quiet organisation with a modest HQ and a believable threat. Now, it is a rather noisy body with a huge eco-friendly £1billion head office in Brussels, which looks like a spaceport, and at least one very dubious member.
Behind the anthems and the flags and the parades, is this alliance actually what we need?
No comments:
Post a Comment