This is a polemic, a style of writing I generally try to avoid. I’m normally a great defender of nuance in political writing, as it extremely rare that one side of a debate has a monopoly on the strong arguments, both practical and moral. But taking a polemical stand does not mean you don’t think there is any value to the opposing argument. The fact that you ignore sound arguments against your position does not mean you think they do not exist. What’s more, sometimes the best relief for political frustration and outrage - and these are certainly frustrating and outrageous times we live in - is a vehement assertion of one’s deeply held beliefs, opponents be damned. That his precisely what I will do here. Enjoy or despise as you see fit.
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Many thought NATO ceased to be relevant when the Soviet Union collapsed. Why, they wondered, should America continue to commit itself to Western Europe’s defense when the decades-old superpower threat to Western security, liberty, and democracy no longer existed? And why should NATO expand its reach into Central and Eastern Europe, into Russia’s historical sphere of influence? Surely that’s only going to enrage the wounded bear, and lead him to take revenge as soon as he is able.
It did not take long after the fall of Soviet communism, however, for NATO (which turns 75 years old today) to prove it was still relevant, and still needed. When genocide broke out in Bosnia, and the Europeans sat on their hands rather than intervene to stop mass murder in their own backyard, the only hope for saving lives that should have been easy for the West to save was America. While it would have been far better to intervene immediately, rather than for two Presidents of the United States to wait for three years while the body count rose, it was thoroughly honorable and humane for Bill Clinton, after the massacre of Srebrenica, to say enough was enough. NATO was the mechanism through which America and its European allies halted the worst mass killings on European soil since World War II.
A few years later, when Slobodan Milosevic began to do to Kosovo was he had helped his fellow Serbs do in Bosnia, it was NATO who stopped him. Rather than dither this time, Clinton, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, and their fellow NATO leaders resolved to act quickly. When Milosevic refused an ultimatum to stop his killings and accept peacekeepers, NATO bombed Yugoslavia for eleven weeks. Whereas the alliance had waited for too long in Bosnia to halt ethnic massacres, in Kosovo it nipped the problem in the bud. While ethnic tensions in the Balkans have not gone away completely - and probably never will, human nature being what it is - the mass ethnic killings of the 1990s have not recurred. NATO deserves much of the credit for that.
The alliance also deserves credit for overthrowing Muammar Qaddafi. In the first year of the Arab Spring, after two other North African autocrats had been ousted by mass protests, Qaddafi faced the beginnings of an armed rebellion against his even more brutal rule. He commenced what would have become a massacre, had officials like Hillary Clinton not prevailed upon Barack Obama to intervene and stop it. NATO helped Libyans rising up in defense of their own dignity to end more than forty years of dictatorial rule.
The civil war Libya experienced from 2014-2020 was not a direct result of Qaddafi’s downfall. The driving forces behind the country’s near collapse were the countries who backed Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar in his attempt to overthrow the democratically elected, United Nations-recognized government in Tripoli. Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and others all decided it was in their interest to squelch the promise of democracy in Libya. It was Turkey, a democracy (however illiberal) and one of NATO’s most important members, whose drones saved Libya in 2020.
NATO expansion into the former Warsaw Pact, and indeed into the former Soviet Union, is often blamed for Vladimir Putin’s aggressive foreign policies in his near quarter century of ruling Russia. But it is noteworthy that, while Putin has directly invaded countries that Moscow once governed, none of these were NATO members. The solidarity instilled by Article V, the knowledge that war against one alliance member really would be war against all of them, has kept Putin from realizing his dream of undoing the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The countries Russia has invaded were those that NATO, in 2008, said would eventually join the alliance but did not offer a Membership Action Plan to: Georgia and Ukraine. Russian forces invaded Georgia that same year, Ukraine six years later. Had they been fully integrated members of NATO, it’s extremely unlikely Putin would have dared to go that far. The alliance’s mistake was not expanding in 1999 and 2004, it was hedging in 2008. It would have been better to give Georgia and Ukraine a clear “no” than to be ambiguous.
Until 2022, Putin paired these invasions with tactics short of armed force to undermine Western resolve: election meddling, hacking, assassinations, use of energy as a weapon. They were pretty successful: they helped get Donald Trump elected (though Russian meddling was hardly the only factor at work), and got Germany hooked on Russian gas while it made its boneheaded transition away from nuclear energy. Then Putin pushed his luck by sending a conventional army toward Kyiv, thinking the Ukrainian capital would fall and NATO would tremble. He reckoned without the resolve of the Ukrainian people, the resolve of NATO members to arm Ukraine and increase their own defense budgets, and the resolve of Finland and Sweden not to be vulnerable anymore and instead join the alliance.
NATO expansion in the post-Cold War world was not a mistake. Shock therapy was. Russia’s economic chaos in the 1990s was a boon for Putin and other unreconstructed USSR fans - and even then, much of the problems were focused in certain sectors, like natural resources. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was a mistake for many reasons, but one of its effects was to increase Russian distrust of the U.S. - indeed, the Iraq War did more damage to U.S.-Russia relations than NATO’s interventions in the Balkans. Another effect was a rift within NATO that took a long time to heal.
Disbanding NATO at the end of the Cold War, or at least declining to expand it, may have looked like a progressive action to take. America’s great geopolitical and ideological rival was vanquished, and the American people could enjoy their peace dividend. Surely the world could move beyond the hostile mentality of the Cold War, and could move forward into a peaceful age of globalization, where market and technological forces could bring prosperity and happiness for all.
How lucky we are that Bill Clinton, who saw himself as a progressive leader in many regards, realized how important NATO still was in the post-Cold War world. The alliance continues to be a vital force for security, liberty, and democracy in the world. May it thrive for another 75 years!