🌐 NATO IS DEAD 💀

WE HAVE BEEN KILLING IT SINCE 2008, AND NOW WE'RE EFFECTIVELY IN POLITICAL HOSPICE WAITING FOR THE FLATLINE TONE...

On this date in 2008, at the Bucharest NATO Summit, the seeds of today’s Alliance’s death were planted.

I have long argued that the best thing NATO could have done when the Warsaw Pact and the USSR collapsed by 1992 was to have engaged in a thoughtful, well-choreographed, drawdown of the alliance, replacing it with a new, European-wide security architecture that was based on then-current realities, trying to shape the future in ways that benefitted every state.

That would have been logical, beneficial to all member states, and given hope to all countries on the continent that together, they could all - Russia included - find a new way to live together in peace. Instead, in the hubris of “winning the Cold War”, our political elite chose to turn Russia into the successor “enemy” for the defunct USSR, and created the fiction that Russia posed a long-term threat that *only* an expanded NATO could contain.

But just think of the illogic of that claim.

In 1990 there were 16 members of NATO facing six nations of the Warsaw Pact and 15 “Soviet Republics” of the USSR. Once both of the Soviet bloc entities ceased to exist by early 1992, there was no “enemy” bloc and Russia was a rusted shell of the country it had been at the end of World War II. If 16 NATO states could effectively counter the combined weight of the USSR and Warsaw Pact alliance, then those same 16 NATO states could *far more easily* secure Western Europe against the rusted hull of Russia and the drifting nations of left adrift by the fall of the USSR.

Instead, we chose to keep Russia as the ‘enemy’ and then sought to *expand* NATO. There have been five rounds of expansion since, starting the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999, ending with mighty military behemoth in 2020 of North Macedonia (along with their Armed Forces consisting of a *single* combat infantry brigade).

Russia complained at each tranche but was too rusted and powerless to do anything about it in the early years. But at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, Vladimir Putin gave evidence that the weakness of Russia was coming to an end. In response to the early declarations of NATO leaders that Russia had nothing to worry from the fist expansion, Putin asked in Munich:

“I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today?”

Instead of listening to the concerns of the now strengthening Russian leader, the West gave its answer the next year, declaring on April 3, 2008, at the Bucharest NATO summit, that it would invite Ukraine and Georgia into the Alliance. The Russian response was unequivocal and quick.

The very next day, Putin said at a press conference, “We view the appearance of a powerful military bloc on our borders, a bloc whose members are subject in part to Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, as a *direct threat* to the security of our country. The claim that this process is not directed against Russia will not suffice. National security is not based on promises. And the statements made prior to the bloc’s previous waves of expansion simply confirm this.”

Relations between the West and Russia soured significantly after this declaration, especially Russia’s exploitation of Georgia’s attack on Russian peacekeepers four months after Bucharest, which Putin exploited into a short, sharp war of five days, to essentially neutralize Georgia’s entrance into NATO.

But the North Atlantic Alliance would not be placated, and continued to push on for Ukrainian membership, eventually resulting in a war that started February 2022 and continues to this day. NATO set as goals the political, economic, and military defeat of Russia, and has spent years trying to bring down Putin’s Russia.

But despite massive backing from the European members of NATO and Biden’s America, Russia weathered the storm and is now stronger militarily than at any time since the demise of the USSR. NATO, in contrast, is more politically fractured and military weak than at any point since 1991. We have effectively bankrupted ourselves trying to spawn a Russian defeat, depleting our stocks of weapons, armored vehicles, aircraft, and above all, offensive and defensive missile stockpiles.

Once Trump re-entered the White House in January 2025, he immediately fired a shot across the bow of NATO at the Munich Security Conference that February, when Vice President J.D. Vance said the greatest threat to the alliance wasn’t Russia or China, but from “within” and blasted Europe for not embracing democracy as the Trump Administration sees it.

European leaders, however, far from insulted and angry, tried to kowtow to Trump and sought to appease him, which appears only to have made Trump view Europe with more contempt. One of his first objectives in 2025 was to force the alliance members into meeting, not the 2% GDP targets of old, but more than double that, to 5%.

Meanwhile, Russia continued to slowly advance on the Ukrainian battlefield, despite everything the Europeans tried in support of Ukraine, giving more evidence of their paltry military capacity, and further depleting the entire West’s stocks of key ammunition.

Then Trump went beyond the Munich debacle w Vance, and he started seriously talking about “taking” Greenland for himself, regardless of what its protector Denmark said. Instead of pushing back against Trump, they again tried to placate him, but their alarm was raised.

Now Trump has started a war of choice in Iran that he cannot win and is putting pressure on NATO countries to sail to the rescue. None are taking the bait. The president then openly mused about walking away from NATO altogether. Europe, it seems, may be feckless, but they’re not suicidal, and they aren’t going to send their troops or sailors or airmen to die in a Trump debacle.

So, what’s next? Will NATO just forever take it on the chin from a petulant American president? Seems unlikely to me. Too much division within Europe, too much risk of getting sucked into pointless wars, and too much domestic political cost.

Shorn of the laser-focused and genuine unifying threat of the USSR and Warsaw Pact in the early days of the Cold War, NATO is now a relic of a bygone era, unsuited for the realities of the 21^st Century. It’s time to find a successor entity for NATO to provide a continental-wide security arrangement.

It should have happened a long time ago, but now, done wisely or foolishly, it’s on its deathbed. Oh, the organization may survive a few more years in name, but in spirit and utility, it’s a dead man walking.

NATO served the West well for decades and helped preserve peace and enable economic prosperity. But its time has passed and now something new must emerge.