NATO, The Gargoyle of Globalism
- October 14, 2024
Given this summer’s much-publicized and feted 75th anniversary of the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), it is natural to reflect on NATO’s effectiveness and legacy. The alliance, after all, was created in the aftermath of World War II to meet specific regional and situational strategic challenges posed by the Soviet Union. So long as it stayed within those original parameters and geographic limits, it successfully deterred the threat of Soviet expansionism in Europe.
However, as NATO’s mission devolved and lost its focus after the end of the Cold War, it has become increasingly apparent that the alliance has shed its defensive basis and been reconceived as an organization whose primary directive is to expand America’s sphere of influence globally through the continuous encroachment on various regional powers’ more immediate spheres of interest. NATO’s rhetoric and actions — especially since its intervention in Yugoslavia in 1999 — signal an intentional strategic shift toward adopting a globalized agenda, thereby facilitating its transition to become the global military arm for the U.S.-led liberal international order. Ironically, this rather aggressive and maximalist reorientation also puts America’s core national interests at risk.
This systematic push for subordinating the strategic autonomy of NATO’s relatively powerful members to Washington’s priorities is often achieved through a neo-Wilsonian approach. This approach instrumentalizes the nationalism of smaller states to justify intervention abroad, diluting a more robust idea of American national interest here at home. The national self-determination of smaller states outside NATO is utilized to guilt and unify the alliance behind the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s priorities. In the process, this approach undermines the agency, sovereignty, and foreign policy of many allied states, not to mention those of the American people.
NATO’s new raison d’etre has thus become the global defense of smaller faultline nation-states — which are not party to the alliance — from revisionist great powers that dare to challenge U.S. global hegemony by insisting on their own historical sphere of interest. This is especially questionable in a world moving towards multipolarity and away from the stark binaries propagated by those who defend permanent U.S.-centered alliance networks using ideological frameworks and Cold War logic.
Given its highly bureaucratic and top-down structure, NATO displays intense disapprobation of member states that attempt to assert their own interests. This often occurs when member states seek new minilateral security arrangements with countries outside the alliance or even work together to sidestep the alliance and create more localized alternative arrangements.1 Such diplomatic and strategic maneuvers are particularly obstructed when their aims contradict NATO’s institutional agenda.2
NATO: From Focused Defense to Haphazard Offense
According to the U.S. State Department, NATO was originally conceived as a purely defensive alliance meant to deter Soviet expansion and aggression toward Western Europe and the Mediterranean.3 Lord Ismay, the first Secretary General of the alliance, was quite blunt in stating that the pact’s purpose was “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”4 In other words, it was an attempt to solidify cooperation between the anti-Soviet regions of Europe and North America — a specific reaction to the perceived threat of Soviet expansionism in the postwar era.
A key element of NATO’s initial success and its realist conception was that, in those formative years, ideological litmus testing was wholly absent: Portugal, under the authoritarian leadership of Salazar, became a founding member of the alliance with full Western backing.5 Other authoritarian anti-communist states followed. Greece and Turkey became crucial members in 1952, courted for their highly strategic location used to safeguard the Straits of Marmara from Soviet domination. Peace and stability — not ideological posturing or “democracy” — were foremost in planners’ minds: any domestic reform would be a secondary outcome of real gains in peace and security. The common threat of Moscow was the main reason for solidarity among new allies.6
With the collapse of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact in 1991, the alliance needed a new reason to persist lest it also find itself at risk of dissolution. Leaving aside the philosophical question of whether it too should have ended once Russia lost its superpower status, NATO pivoted away from a defense-focused military alliance that deterred great power war in Europe. In order to become self-perpetuating, the alliance instead transformed itself into a universalist, values-driven ideological project. Its new initiatives subsequently served to create the very conditions that its original founding had intended to fight against, provoking insecurity and war. NATO’s survival and permanence as an organization was now an end — the end, even — in itself. Early considerations of a new, inclusive European security architecture — through an alternative European defense pact that would include Russia or by offering Moscow a path to NATO membership, for example — quickly fizzled.7
Instead, starting with Bill Clinton, consecutive U.S. administrations chose to expand NATO onto smaller countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Since these newly sovereign, post-Soviet states were predictably apprehensive and resentful of Russia, Washington was, therefore, able to more easily trade on the historical specter of a threatening Russia to secure buy-in for NATO expansion. The alliance played an active and central role in military operations in Bosnia (1995) and openly intervened in Kosovo (1999) — policies that were determined in Washington, offensive in nature, well outside the Treaty’s original parameters, and did not involve the defense of any actual NATO countries.8
The alliance’s famous Article 5 — stipulating collective defense in the case of an attack on a member — was only ever invoked in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, marshaling NATO troops against the Taliban.9 This eventually (if indirectly) led to the somewhat strange situation of troops from various European countries being sent to the Middle East on what was initially a counter-terrorism mission but rapidly became a bloated exercise in “counter-insurgency” and nation-building in Afghanistan and later Iraq. Needless to say, these objectives had nothing to do with European security.10 Ten years later, NATO would again engage in a regime change operation — pushed mostly by Britain and France — in Libya, which once again saw NATO’s airpower deployed well outside of the boundaries of the alliance. Taken together, all of this shows that, despite the continued rhetoric of a defensive pact, the alliance adopted a consistently offensive, even aggressive, character in recent decades without giving much weight to the long-term national interest of most NATO members.11
A trend of NATO decoupling from its regional focus toward a more global horizon is also apparent. Afghanistan and Libya were strange enough deviations from the core base of the alliance, but recently growing ties with Japan on the opposite side of the world signal that this trend has become a deliberate blueprint.12 In this case, NATO seems to be preparing for the possibility that a war over Taiwan or the South China Sea could be a trigger to thrust Europe into the Pacific. Recent joint military exercises in the latter involving European NATO members reflect also the artificial merger of different regions, each with its own distinct security needs, into ever-larger strategic concepts like the “Indo-Pacific”. Clearly, such actions belie an agenda for global expansion.13
It is as if the “North Atlantic” part of NATO has been entirely replaced with vague classifications like the “free world” or alliance of liberal democracies. Thus, in the minds of the NATO hierarchy, there appears to exist a set of chosen nations occupying hollowed ground whose sacred light must be protected from their nebulous barbarian other: this they cast as a battle for the future of human civilization, downplaying questions of actual strategic interest and/or geographic limits.14
The trouble is that such an expansive global posture and attitude not only decouples an alliance network from its original basis in regional defense but also decenters its real security and strategic imperatives in favor of moralism and ideological conformity. Through its globalism, the alliance substitutes a limitless, abstract, and Manichaean justification for self-perpetuation. Arrangements of these types view all conflicts as existential and zero-sum rather than local in origin and context-dependent. What’s more, a NATO fixated on the “Indo-Pacific” is a NATO that no longer sees collective European defense as its main objective: its new aim is, instead, the maintenance and expansion of U.S. hegemony through the liberal international order in such a way that the ideological and geopolitical ends of NATO and liberal internationalism become functionally indistinguishable from each other.15 This means that any local flashpoint can easily become a globalized conflagration with missionary undertones as various alliance networks (having consolidated into binary blocs) are activated in response to a random outlier event, similar to how the July Crisis of 1914 spiraled into the Great War.
Within NATO proper, for instance, Hungary and Turkey are regularly singled out for outsize criticism, because they try to pursue a flexible, multi-aligned, and interest-based policy toward the current Ukraine War. Hungary has sought to play a key role in facilitating a diplomatic solution to the conflict — making this push a centerpiece of its foreign policy.16 Turkey, meanwhile, has kept diplomatic channels open with Moscow, but it has increased both its arms exports to Ukraine and its influence in the Central Asian countries in Russia’s near-abroad.17 Both countries have also threatened to hold up new accessions into NATO until they receive certain concessions, further intensifying the pushback they receive from their nominal allies.18
Moreover, both nations oppose Russian actions toward Kyiv, yet also find the international sanctions regime ruinous. Of course, this is far from a heretical position. The record of sanctions in bringing about desired policy changes is quite dubious even from the American perspective.19 In September 2024 President Trump — an ardent proponent of sanctions in his first term — himself appeared to admit not only the inefficacy of sanctions as a long-term policy regarding both Russia and Iran but also the risk that the prevailing use of sanctions poses to the global position of the U.S. dollar.20 This all goes to show how criticisms of NATO consensus may start on the periphery, but could over time spread to other nations, even the United States itself, as the alliance’s official policy comes to clash with the members’ national interests.
Despite the criticism leveled at its outlier members and the explosive growth in the alliance’s global reach, the performance of NATO-affiliated countries in recent military operations away from Europe seems extremely dubious. Wherever these countries insert themselves outside of their core region (in Europe), they end up in quagmires and lose influence. They do very poorly relative to other competing power blocs in terms of power projection, especially one that is economically sustainable in the long run. This can be seen in coalition activities in the Sahel,21 and Libya most overtly,22 — whereas countries like China have successfully grown their Middle Eastern profile without such costly interventions.23 The West’s miserable performance leads to further insecurity, bluster, and a growing and questionable list of priorities, including investing in transnational venture capital enterprises from the for-profit sector which have a direct financial interest in increasing cooperative defense spending.24
Considering the vast resources and influence at the disposal of the Washington-led alliance network, this should not be the case. The question cannot simply be one of resources, but rather how they are allocated and the logic used to justify their misuse. This dynamic is inextricable from policy priorities set by the Blob, priorities that foreground the agenda of globalization at the expense of national interest — reducing America into a beacon for “democratism” and neoliberalism and instrumentalizing the U.S. alliance network, global influence, and soft power toward that end. Today NATO is the embodiment of this mindset. The upshot is the standardization of much of the planet around the values and economic models of the postwar order’s chief architect and most powerful state, the United States.25 In its final iteration (beginning with 9/11 and the Global War on Terror and culminating in the “defense” of Ukraine), the U.S. establishment (and its counterparts in allied nations) have falsely conflated their globalist project with the concept of national interest when they are in fact antithetical.26 This leaves countries that engage in realpolitik and continue to espouse their core national interests at an immense advantage in crafting a more efficacious grand strategy.
The very idea of national interest — a cost-benefit calculation for how a specific state with a defined territory and a set geographical horizon should act in an anarchic and insecure international environment to maximize its own security and autonomy — is thus disproportionately undervalued among Atlanticist countries in no small part due to the globalizing and idealistic objectives adopted by NATO itself. Under conditions of multipolarity, this is a severe disadvantage for it undercuts geopolitical realism as well as the sort of pragmatism and adaptability such realism entails. It is worth examining how the North Atlantic experience — decentering national interest — diverged so much from the norm in other parts of the world.
‘The Rest’ Adapts; ‘The West’ Remains Inveterate
With the end of the Cold War and the dawn of the unipolar moment, the North Atlantic world entered first a decade of immense triumphalism and self-congratulation, followed by a decade of furious vengeance against anyone who had refused to accept the “end of history” and objected to the liberal West’s newfound hegemony. The latter was unleashed in response to the 9/11 attacks and the continued existence of revisionist states such as Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, which were dubbed the “Axis of Evil”. At the same time, much of the rest of the world largely failed to be convinced by the narrative of linear progress where all countries would have to wear a “Golden Straightjacket” and accommodate themselves to the triumph of the neoliberal order.27 While perfectly happy to eke out a profit in various trade deals with developed countries, most of the non-Western World simply could not afford to ignore the realities of regional politics and the necessities of self-preservation in their rather precarious positions. In the long run, this privileging of interest-based thinking made them more discerning and pragmatic about their policies, strengthening them in the process.
Such insistence on sovereignty and interest was seen as backward-looking by the then-dominant North Atlantic nations, who were still in the thrall of seemingly perpetual economic growth. Trade barriers were abolished internationally while financialization took over the domestic economies. The downsides of industrial offshoring were not yet fully understood, and, as it turned out, the developing world’s experience with globalized manufacturing would be uneven, with more benefits going to the countries that retained some degree of state regulation over the process. At the same time, the NGOs based in the Global North became increasingly central to “international development”, they were steadily discredited around the world.28
China was perhaps the greatest beneficiary of this experiment in globalization. Adopting an export-led growth model, Beijing used its cheap labor and vast resources to reap massive economic gains while becoming an industrial powerhouse and a major global force. The historical experience of rapid development — going from an agrarian economy to an advanced, industrial one in less than two generations — modernized China’s infrastructure and significantly boosted its technological knowledge and capacity. Importantly, it also signaled the end of the two centuries of humiliation, raising Beijing’s national confidence and ontological security. All this set the stage for China’s rise as a great power and America’s only peer competitor. The new China was open for business and less ideologically driven than Washington allowing it to trade free and agnostic Coupled with the fact that China does not see foreign nations as questionable partners due to their internal domestic political structure, they become an easier partner for many governments to work with.29
China’s rise was the biggest success story for the non-West, but it was not an outlier. The trend can also be observed on a smaller scale in other non-Western middle powers in the post-Cold War era.30 Turkey, free from the overwhelming power of the nearby Soviet Union, began a flexible neo-Ottoman strategy to reclaim its historical mantle as the regional hegemon in the East Mediterranean.31 Ravaged by an eight-year war with Iraq and U.S.-led economic sanctions, Iran doubled down on its strengths in human capital and capitalized on lessons from the war to develop as an unconventional military power — investing in missile technology and specializing in asymmetric power projection through non-state proxies.32 Recognizing the future potential of hybrid warfare, Iran cultivated its soft power as a prominent bastion for anti-imperialism in the Middle East; it leveraged its sectarian and ideological linkages with non-Sunni communities in the region to form and train militias. America’s fruitless, endless wars in the Middle East, meanwhile, only granted Ankara and Tehran new opportunities to regularly test their capabilities, cement their strategic prowess, and justify their revisionism to the postwar order.
Other historical middle powers from India and Brazil to Indonesia and Ethiopia are similarly reasserting their strategic autonomy and regional import, emphasizing their neutrality and multi-alignment, especially in the wake of the Ukraine and Gaza wars.33 This re-regionalization reveals the immense power of place, geography, and necessity in determining one’s enduring national interests. In breaking the straitjacket of the Cold War and its “Manichaean mentality”, these emerging or returning powers show the renewed relevance of non-aligned diplomacy and a higher degree of sensitivity and adaptability to the realities of multipolarity than their Atlanticist counterparts.34 Their regional focus and resistance to the global agenda-setting of the U.S. and its allies also underscore the new-found geopolitical importance of the BRICS+.35
All these examples highlight that it was only really the North Atlantic Blob that began to conceive of themselves as inhabiting a sanctified fortress of freedom that had to be guarded against the ever-creeping immoral and authoritarian world outside — with NATO as (the Western) Civilization’s gargoyle-like protector pushing back the barbaric forces of history and chaos. But no matter the ideological priors and rationalizations they offered for their globalism, the Atlanticists remain undeniably wedded to the project of the American empire — which took it upon itself to underwrite and promote neoliberalism and liberal democratic society worldwide.
As President Obama’s former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes acknowledged in an interview with Vanity Fair this month, U.S. primacy and global capitalism go hand in hand: “People separate out our military footprint from our financial footprint, but the reason that people have to trust that the dollar is a reliable currency is because it’s literally backed by the United States military, even though that’s not what we say the mission of the United States military is.”36 Indeed, the entire rules-based international order is a token of the American imperium and its neo-imperial, neoliberal arrangement, or to put it in Rhodes’ words, “The more accurate version is that most of the system under which the world functions is US-created, -managed, -perpetuated. So everything from the global financial system to the network of security alliances […] were all built to plug into American wealth.” Put simply, “The G20, IMF, World Bank, NATO” are all “literally appendages of the United States and our interests and our system.”
So the postwar world was made in America’s image. But just as the world orders before it, the U.S.-led liberal international order is historically contingent. And the neo-imperial, globalist drives of the postwar order make it especially unsustainable. The international system is already compelling an adjustment based on the new power distribution. A new world order is now being born, midwifed by the non-Western world as the West continues to willfully resist the tides of change. NATO’s attempts to turn a local European war in Ukraine into a civilizational and existential war for the world, projecting Western interests as global interests and downplaying realpolitik for morality, produced blowback in much of the non-Western world with many emerging powers ignoring or circumventing the Western sanctions on Russia. Those who expressed open dissatisfaction with the North Atlantic’s attempt to drag them into a conflict unrelated to their national interests faced U.S. rebuke in turn.37 On the other side, small NATO members of marginal importance to the overall alliance like Poland and the Baltic states constantly push for maximalist escalation undercutting the larger European powers like Germany and France.38 Germany, for its part, has seen its interests materially harmed by the Nord Stream bombing in 2022 that allegedly involved fellow NATO members.39
Ultimately, as the unipolar period ends, those best able to adapt to the relative decline and overextension of American power will operate at an advantage. So long as Washington regards U.S. primacy as non-negotiable and the North Atlantic nations continue to valorize Western values and the interests of “humanity” over their national interest, they risk being outcasts in the new global order that is being shaped. The upshot of their almost religious devotion to institutional permanence as an end-in-itself and the constant idolizing of the symbolic relics, norms, and procedures of the postwar order, however, is the further diminution of U.S. power and immiseration of the Western bloc — all to underwrite the perpetual expansion of American globalism’s military poltergeist: the NATO alliance. It is strategic and political malpractice.
Re-Centering the National Interest in a Polycentric World
How could North Atlantic states recover a healthy regard for the national interest to compensate for the prevailing sense of uncertainty and loss of strategic direction that plagues Washington and the European capitals today?
First, it must be acknowledged that the process of financial globalization is of mixed results and the allied push to couple the relative successes of global capitalism with global democracy promotion and political liberalization (through coercive means or covert operations) has proved an outright failure. ‘Convergence theory’, the idea that economic development will inevitably produce democratization, has been revealed as a fairy tale.40
Second, it is an undeniable fact that the share of the North Atlantic in the world’s overall economic and especially manufacturing output is not what it once was.41 The ‘global West’ is poorer in relative terms. Unipolarity is over. We are, as Arta Moeini observes, in a “great transition” to a new world order.42 Here it is vital not to enter new cul de sacs — such as by falsely emphasizing the return of bipolarity and promoting old tropes as a ‘New Cold War’ or ‘Containment 2.0’.43 While China’s rise to the level of a great power peer competitor has been spectacular, we should not downplay the systemic impact of the collective rise of so many others as middle powers. Their combined force and autonomous orientation seem to suggest the birth of what Ambassador Chas Freeman has called a “multi-nodal” system — a more diffused multipolarity with multiple economic centers and regional poles that no single power can dream to dominate.44 In such a new environment, the quest for global hegemony is especially ill-advised and could spell the downfall of the great power that attempts it.
Yet that is precisely the course that the U.S.-led bloc, under the guise of NATO, has traversed. In this context, it is urgent, therefore, for Western countries to reprioritize their national interest — evolving their policy frameworks to reflect the necessities of power and focusing on geography, industrial capacity, relative gains, and cost/benefit ratio. From a realist perspective echoed by George Washington, no state can afford to constantly offshore the logistics and supply chain of its defense manufacturing to distant corners of the world away from its heartland and stay strategically competitive.45 The overall success of emerging powers highlights how the reshoring and re-regionalization of vital industries can increase both relative power and domestic solidarity.
Ultimately, security alliances are functional pacts, not sacred cows; they must be viewed as interest-based and temporary rather than values-based and permanent.46 The prevalent liberal internationalist presumptions that overlapping defense commitments and expanding America’s security guarantees are always beneficial for both the superpower and the global order it underwrites are thus categorically false. In their stead, Western realists must cultivate a greater understanding of the dangers of over-expansion, overreach, and overseas military production in the mainstream foreign policy discourse. Ours is not a world of a shining cathedral that must be defended by a gargoyle-like NATO from a sea of heathens wishing to extinguish it in a global theater of conflict. Rather, the world is composed of many different shrines — each soaring onto a distinctive horizon with its own protective genius loci that reflect the unique geographical terrain, strategic culture, and geopolitical circumstances of a particular realm and region.
Regionalism and the national interest are not mutually exclusive notions but are rather complementary. From the perspective of the status quo powers in the West, the structural shifts currently underway will empower more revisionist powers hoping to have more of a say in the architecture of the next global order: if Washington seeks to counteract the forces of revisionism arising in various regional theaters, then it makes far more sense to base its alliances on a single, well-defined objective and limit their scope to a specific region, creating new ones if and where it is absolutely needed to balance against new challenges and geopolitical rivals. NATO would hence cease to expand, with its operations limited to a single mission and area of focus: collective defense of current members in Europe from military aggression by extra-regional powers. The idea of NATO enlargement would be permanently shelved — for too broad or too grand an umbrella would risk turning a lynchpin of security into an open-ended force for escalation and conflict.
A fenced-in NATO that is confined to Europe does not preclude the possibility of forming a new U.S.-led alliance in Asia that is tailor-made for a likely great power competition with China. Should one day The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or ‘The Quad’ of the U.S., India, Japan, and Australia, formalize its defense ties, the new organization should endeavor to remain independent of NATO and protect its operational freedom.47 Establishing such a buffer will prevent it from having to subordinate its regional interests and dilute its focus on the Pacific over some crisis in Europe. In the decidedly regionalized world of today, such partitioning or fencing off of America’s alliance network is both necessary and beneficial. It would be just as ridiculous to ask French soldiers to die for Taiwan as it would be for Japanese ones to die for Ukraine. The sectioning of alliances also creates a sort of regional safety valve, preventing one possible escalation from spiraling into a global conflagration. It also provides Washington with various regional platforms offering it more diplomatic and strategic flexibility.
Washington must work with interested partners in a given region to balance against shared rivals and adversaries, but it should refrain from globalizing any security arrangement to bind the fates of all its allies together in anticipation of a planetary showdown. The United States must also resist the ideological temptation to divide the world into binary alliance blocs by sounding the sirens of some grand crusade for ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, or ‘civilization’ that — while ringing increasingly hollow the further away one gets from the actual locus of the conflict — could still plunge the world into war.48 Instead, America should reconceive and recalibrate its alliances, chief among them NATO, to better match the realities of a multipolar world. Such a task inevitably begins with abandoning a permanent global and totalistic forward posture and prioritizing regional defense and national interest as the cornerstones of U.S. grand strategy.