Nato expansion isn’t in itself a good thing

Winston Churchill observed that “jaw-jaw” is preferable to “war-war”, a sentiment with which most rational people, in the majority of situations, would agree. NATO, currently holding a two-day summit at Vilnius, is an organisation intended primarily to deter aggression and consequent war, secondarily to wage war effectively if deterrence fails.

NATO was founded in 1949, so its survival in itself might be regarded as something of an achievement. It started with just 12 members and has since been increased to 31, through nine rounds of enlargement, of which the latest is currently being negotiated. The attempt to induct Sweden as the 32^nd member, apparently being implacably vetoed by Turkey, is suddenly being presented as a done deal. There is much jubilation in Vilnius, but what is really going on?

Why did Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan, recently fortified by an election victory and insulted by anti-Muslim demonstrations in Stockholm, fold so suddenly? Was it simply to acquire 40 F-16 fighter jets from America? If so, can President Biden guarantee the acquiescence of people like Bob Menendez, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and is opposed to arming Turkey in this way? And if there is obstruction in the US Congress, will there not be similar obstruction of Sweden’s NATO membership bid in the Turkish Grand National Assembly?

There is something that does not quite compute about Erdoğan’s sudden co-operation. It is rumoured to be in return for a pledge that NATO member states will facilitate Turkey’s admission to the European Union, but, apart from the fact that sounds like the latest sale of the Brooklyn Bridge, it has become a geopolitical axiom in recent years that Turkey is no longer interested in EU membership. If it began to lose interest when the EU was in happier circumstances, why would its enthusiasm return when France is in flames, the Dutch government has just fallen and Germany is daily confirming its credentials as the sick man of Europe?

So, it looks as if Sweden is set to join NATO, but any cautious person will wait until the signatures on the admission treaty have been blotted before celebrating. At Vilnius, the sudden integration of Sweden feeds well into the official narrative that NATO is stronger than ever before, that Vladimir Putin has shot himself in the foot and, while aiming to prevent NATO expansion has actually driven it.

That is self-evidently true – the expansion argument – but it is far from self-evident that NATO expansion is, of itself, a good thing. In every union or association there is a tipping point: until it reaches a critical mass of a certain number of members it will not be an alliance in any meaningful sense, nor benefit from the additional power contributed by allies; after the tipping point, further expansion begins to dilute purpose, coherence and manoeuvrability.

The question has to be asked: how coherent, purposeful or united can an alliance of 32 nation states be? How long before the incongruent, or even conflicting, interests of different countries hobble the geopolitical responses of the body as a whole? It is true that Greece and Turkey, for example, have coexisted within NATO fairly successfully, but that does not rule out the future possibility of a clash of interests inhibiting the alliance’s response to some challenge.

Then there is the question of moral authority. NATO and its supporters have made much of Russian delinquency in invading Ukraine, painting the conflict there in simplistic Hollywood terms of “goodies” and “baddies”. While a caricature, there is a degree of truth in that portrayal, in that Russia committed the supreme offence against international law by invading another sovereign state. Such an act inevitably sets the sirens blaring and all diplomatic bets, for a period at least, are off.

But, again in Hollywood terms, what is the “back story” to the Ukraine invasion? Is it the case that, following the liquidation of the Soviet Union by Mikhail Gorbachev, the West assured the emergent Russian Federation there would be no eastward expansion of NATO, to threaten Russia’s frontiers? There most certainly was such a guarantee, not in the shape of a formal treaty, but in many informal pledges, of the kind that had been crucial to resolving the Cuban missile crisis.

Eschewing the question of whether an American university’s archive contains a document officially recording that pledge, there are plenty of public instances of the non-expansion reassurances that were given to Russia by those who directed NATO policy in the early 1990s, notably the US State Department which, on 13 February, 1990, informed its embassies that “we supported a unified Germany within NATO, but that we were prepared to ensure that NATO’s military presence would not extend further eastward”.

Britain was also involved. In March, 1991 the Soviet defence minister Marshal Yazov asked then prime minister John Major about eastern European countries’ interest in joining NATO when, according to the diaries of the British ambassador to Moscow, Major told him “nothing of that sort will ever happen”. Major said he “did not himself foresee circumstances now or in the future where East European countries would become members of NATO”.

There were similar pledges from Douglas Hurd and from the French foreign minister. In those circumstances, is it any wonder that Vladimir Putin has been exploiting the contradiction between the West’s promises and subsequent actions in his grievance-led propaganda since 2007? That said, if you think the Ukraine war began in 2022, then it is a black-and-white moral situation, with Russia unambiguously in the wrong.

If, on the other hand, you acknowledge that the war began in 2014, which is an inevitable reality, considering that the biggest geopolitical upheavals – the annexation of Crimea and the secession of the Donetsk republics – occurred at that time, then the moral implications become rather more nuanced.

The Ukrainian “revolution” – actually a coup – violently overthrew a validly elected government, as testified at the previous general election by OECD observers. Because of the then demography of Ukraine, the electorate had a narrow pro-Russian majority. The pro-Russian government had just rejected proposals for Ukraine to reorient its foreign and trade policy away from Moscow and towards EU membership. The EU was massively involved in the events that led to the revolution, the totemic Maidan was awash with EU flags, as well as rainbow and neo-Nazi banners, illustrating the piebald nature of the anti-Russian coalition.

Policemen were killed and regime change was effected by violence such as had not been witnessed even at the fall of the Soviet Union. On the eve of last year’s Russian invasion, Ukraine ranked joint 116^th, alongside Mongolia and Zambia, in the international corruption index of countries. That is the state that is held up by propagandists for veneration as a martyr to Russian aggression.

That does not alter the fact that Russia, by invading sovereign territory, put itself irretrievably in the wrong and must be expelled from the country it has invaded. But the history of the preceding decade does introduce a high level of moral ambiguity. The EU, by inserting a strong propagandist presence into Kyiv and employing agents of influence in its quest to recruit another colony into Brussels’ empire, aggravated Russian paranoia, already provoked by perceived NATO encirclement.

Imagine, instead of Vladimir Putin, a non-psychopath in the Kremlin directing Russian foreign policy – a proper statesman. What would he have seen by 2014? He would have observed that 10 eastern European countries had joined NATO since the disregarded pledges given to Russia in the early 1990s and that the European Union was attempting to detach Ukraine, a major food distributor and trade partner, from the Russian sphere of influence. From this, he would logically have concluded that NATO was aggressively pursuing the encirclement of Russia, that the EU was similarly set on eastward expansion and that Russia was to be denied any sphere of influence at all.

He would probably have reacted less crudely than Vladimir Putin, but it is impossible for any rational assessment to reach any other conclusion than that even a liberal Russian leader would have been seriously concerned by the rapid diminishing of his country’s status and interests. NATO bears some responsibility for that, though it would be impractical for it now to backtrack on its past initiatives; it must not, however, admit Ukraine in the foreseeable future. Instead, at Vilnius, it has turned its summit into an uncritical celebration of a dubious regime, further incentivising Russia to prolong the war indefinitely.

Nor must NATO allow itself to be hijacked by the EU. Under the Biden administration, there is a real danger of this happening. The United States has long preferred, in its foreign outreach, to deal with a single power broker that can deliver its preferred objectives (“Who’s the guy I need to talk to?”). In the 1950s and 1960s America contained communism by dealing with non-Marxist dictators, cynically known as “our bastard”; it was not Sunday school ethics, but it largely worked.

Washington has long favoured the EU for the same reason: it sees it (not entirely accurately these days) as a one-stop shop that can deliver all its European objectives. In that context, Brexit was an annoyance to Washington. That is why America has crudely tried to contain Brexit, by helping Brussels enforce first the Northern Ireland Protocol, then the so-called Windsor Framework, on Britain. It is similarly encouraging limited UK participation in “Pesco” – Permanent Structured Cooperation – a military plan to keep European defence under Brussels and French control.

Professor Gwythian Prins of the LSE has written sobering analyses of this disastrous misdirection of European defence policy, to keep it under the control of Washington’s clients, when the historical flow of geopolitical currents is directing it irresistibly towards eastern Europe, under Polish leadership, a development uncongenial to America.

American intervention in Europe, apart from the Marshall Plan and its NATO defence umbrella, has been uniformly catastrophic. It began with Woodrow Wilson’s cack-handed redrawing of the map of the continent in 1919 that amounted to a blueprint for Adolf Hitler and the Second World War.

Franklin Roosevelt, generally represented as one of the more sophisticated American presidents, on his return from selling out eastern Europe at Yalta, confided his impressions of Stalin to his cabinet: “Stalin has something else in his being besides this revolutionist Bolshevist thing. Perhaps it is to do with his early training for the priesthood. I think that something entered into his nature of the way in which a Christian gentleman should behave.”

But FDR was sophisticated compared to Joe Biden, whose stage Oirishry has banished any vestigial judgement he might have had. He has reverted to Roosevelt’s obsession with liquidating the British Empire so prematurely as to deliver vast tracts of the developing world to Marxism, by trying to suppress UK interests at every level. The dogs in the street know that Ben Wallace is the best candidate to succeed Jens Stoltenberg as NATO secretary general, but Biden prefers Ursula von der Leyen, as part of his plan to merge NATO with the EU.

Ursula von der Leyen’s term as German defence minister resulted in endless procurement scandals, fewer than 20 per cent of Germany’s 68 Tiger combat helicopters and fewer than 30 per cent of its 136 Eurofighter jets being capable of take-off. None of Germany’s submarines were seaworthy and German troops participating in a NATO exercise were obliged to use broomsticks, since they lacked rifles.

Von der Leyen is Vladimir Putin’s dream candidate for NATO secretary general. The fact that such a notion is even being remotely entertained testifies to how badly America has lost the plot. And if Donald Trump returns to power next year, angry and re-energised, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility he could withdraw America from NATO, leaving it as a Macron/Von der Leyen Heath-Robinson security apparatus. “NATO has never been stronger or more focused, thanks to Vladimir Putin.” Be very afraid.

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