NATO will only fall apart when U.S. imperialism ceases to exist as a threat to the world.
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U.S. President Trump threatened again this week that he would quit the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). He called the military alliance a “paper tiger” and said the withdrawal of the United States from the bloc was “beyond consideration.”
It is extraordinary the spectacle of contempt from a U.S. president towards a supposed pillar of the Western order. And it is amusing to see how European vassals are clutching their pearls, fearful of “daddy” abandoning them.
There is indeed a historic rupture in the transatlantic alliance that has defined eight decades of U.S.-European relations. The rupture is a positive sign of weakening Western imperialist powers, leading to fractious infighting and recriminations. But it is too early to pronounce the end of NATO. That’s because ultimately, U.S. warmongering relies on the bloc as a tool, militarily and politically.
Trump’s contempt for NATO goes back to his first administration (2017-2021), when he first warned that he would take the U.S. out of the transatlantic alliance. Now, he appears adamant that he is going ahead with the threat. In interviews with Britain’s Daily Telegraph and Reuters, Trump indicated that his mind was made up to quit.
Certainly, many European officials believe that Trump is serious and that NATO is in danger of falling apart. Diplomats and commentators on both sides of the Atlantic agree that the alliance is facing the worst crisis in its 77-year history.
The resurgence in tensions stems from Trump’s reckless war on Iran. After five weeks of devastating conflict, the American president seems to be in over his head with repercussions that he did not count on. In a televised address to the nation this week, Trump boasted of “victory” over Iran. But despite his bravado, victory is far from assured. Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz for five weeks and will continue to do so under its control, cutting off vital global oil supply, which is playing havoc with the international economy, including the U.S. Trump’s poll ratings have cratered.
Trump is vexed because European NATO allies have not joined the U.S. and Israeli military attacks on Iran. He has slammed European leaders as “cowards” and accuses the NATO alliance of betraying the United States. “We were there for them in Ukraine, but they are not with us against Iran,” was how he griped this week.
Trump aides like Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, and the self-styled War Secretary, Pete Hegseth, echoed complaints about European nations using the U.S. and NATO as “a one-way street.”
Laughably, this president’s temper tantrums and egomania are in such a spiral of contradictions that they end up exposing his cognitive dissonance with reality. Why is he threatening to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age in the next weeks (a genocidal threat) if Iran is already defeated? If the U.S. has so “eviscerated” Iran militarily, then why is the president pleading for NATO and others to intervene to force open the Strait of Hormuz, which he claims would be “easy” to do?
Trump and his people, like a lot of Americans who believe their national propaganda myths, are of the view that the U.S. is a benefactor and protector of “allies”. They point out that the U.S. contributes 60-70 per cent of the total military spending budget of NATO, and they say, see, our generosity is defending these ingrates.
The reality is that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed in 1949 by Washington, London, and 10 other European states for the purpose of militarizing Europe and providing the United States with a plausible pretext to maintain a vast military presence on the continent. That presence pumped the American military-industrial complex that has always been the engine of U.S. capitalism in the decades after the Second World War. The cover propaganda was that the alliance was defending Europe from the Soviet Union. The reality is that NATO was set up akin to a protection racket run by Washington that gave the U.S. a veto over European political and economic development, and in particular, thwarted normal relations between Europe and Russia.
Trump’s frustration is that he wants to ratchet up the racket, and that explains his mafia-like, churlish threats. Pay up, or you’ll get your windows knocked in. In some ways, he has succeeded. The European nations are now spending 20 per cent on military – largely American military equipment like the F-35 fighter jet – at the expense of social development.
Few people in the mainstream Western media dare to ask, why are there 70,000 U.S. troops on European soil in Britain, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, Spain, the Balkans, and so on? Not only American troops but also air bases, warplanes, and nuclear weapons. To defend Europe? From what? From Russian aggression? Such fairytale nonsense. Just like the fairytale of 70,000 U.S. troops in Japan and South Korea to defend against China.
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the U.S.-led NATO bloc expanded by doubling its membership to the current 32 nations. The alliance should have disbanded according to its own founding official definition. The fact that the bloc continued to grow and encroach on Russia’s borders underscores the real purpose of the alliance as a force projector for U.S. military power and a threat to Russia (in continuation of its original function of aggression against the Soviet Union).
In Trump’s narcissistic, facile view, the Ukraine conflict is a European matter that the United States intervened in like a chivalrous benefactor to defend Europe. This is hogwash. The U.S. instigated the proxy war in Ukraine against Russia by using NATO as its military vehicle at least as far back as the CIA coup in Kiev in 2014.
NATO has always served as a political, propaganda, and logistical tool for U.S. imperialist violence and warmongering over the past eight decades. NATO members joined in to prosecute U.S. illegal wars in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, among other aggressions, thus giving these criminal wars a veneer of “international consensus”. Even today, in Trump’s criminal aggression against Iran, the European NATO vassals are providing logistical bases for U.S. warplanes and giving Trump political cover by condemning Iran for aggression, thereby misdirecting culpability for Washington (and Tel Aviv’s) barbarism against the UN Charter and international law.
Trump’s threats about the United States leaving NATO are ridiculous distortions about the nature of U.S. warmongering and its protection racket known as NATO. He has no idea about the systematic purpose of NATO as a cover for U.S. imperialism, a cover that the U.S. cannot and will not give up, regardless of Trump’s whinging and griping.
This megalomaniac president may throw the toys out of the sandpit temporarily in a hissy fit. He may declare the U.S. leaving NATO, disparage so-called allies, and pretend to be going alone, but the imperial deep state will not permit the disbandment of its transatlantic war machine.
NATO will only fall apart when U.S. imperialism ceases to exist as a threat to the world. But until then, the bloc will remain as an instrument of American warmongering and a racket for militarist capitalism.
