NATO- Past Imperfect, Future Tense?

Summoned to Washington after Pearl Harbor by his mentor George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower’s rise was nothing short of meteoric. On Jan 1, 1951, he left NY for talks with Harry Truman and the military chiefs before flying to Europe to build his new command.

Writing to friends and relatives, he told his son John, “I consider this to be the most important military job in the world.” Journalists wrote enthusiastically of his charisma, intelligence, competence and an infectious grin. It was this ‘star power’ on which a young NATO was dependent to turn around its fortunes. Few would ever be more genuinely personally committed to the idea of a Trans-atlantic alliance. The next 18 months would only occupy a few pages in his future biographies, sandwiched between his win over Nazi Germany and entry to the White House, but they would set the tone for the next 7 decades of NATO history.

Fast forward to 2025. The US, Europe’s steadfast ally of 75 years, is looking unreliable….even adversarial. What has transpired in the 1st month of Trump’s 2nd term is akin to the giant version of that old board game Risk, with the future of the West hanging in the balance.

First, America’s defence secretary told America’s allies that his country was no longer the “primary guarantor” of European security. Hours later, Trump reached out to Putin to discuss an end to the war in Ukraine without consulting Ukraine or Europe’s leaders. Then on Feb 14th, at the Munich Security Conference, JD Vance effectively backed the hard-right AfD. When the US Treasury Secy turned up in Kyiv, Zelensky hoped he’d be talking about urgent financial assistance. But what came his way was a memorandum demanding Ukraine’s mineral wealth in its entirety. Zelensky had “an hour” to agree! Countries that were treated by the US as enemies, notably Russia, are suddenly America’s pals. In just 10 days, decades of carefully-curated pillars of transatlantic alliances have crumbled. Worse still, there are another 47 months to go!

Ukraine holds vast reserves of rare-earth minerals, vital to high-tech manufacturing. For Trump, the main draws are titanium (used in paint dyes and aerospace) and lithium (critical for EV battery production that could help him reduce his reliance on China and Russia). At the conference, the Americans demanded Ukraine pledge “$500bn worth” of natural resources as a back payment for past military aid. Zelensky is expected to sign a minerals agreement with America “very soon”. Compared to this protection racket, the Treaty of Versailles appears to be a love letter!

On the streets around the Vilnius summit in July 2023 Ukrainian flags outnumbered those of NATO and the hosts themselves, while advertisements on the buses proclaimed: ‘While you are waiting for this bus, Ukraine is waiting to become a NATO member’. In a blizzard of unilateral concessions last week, Trump suggested that Russia should re-join the G7 along with a public acknowledgment that Ukraine would not join NATO or enjoy the alliance’s protection for any European peacekeeping forces there.

Europeans now worry about the wisdom of having their security underpinned by today’s America, raising urgent questions about whether the NATO alliance can survive. Some Ukrainian officials blamed the West for only giving them enough weapons to survive but not to win. By siding with Europe’s adversary, Trump has done grave damage to its greatest asset: the deterrence embedded in NATO’s commitment to collective defence. In many ways, how the war in Ukraine ends will shape NATO’s future.

China has vowed to bring Taiwan back under its control by 2049, the year of the NATO anniversary, which is also the centenary of the communist civil war victory there. (A leaked 2023 memo warned of war over Taiwan as soon as 2027). Today the US is on the cusp of having two nuclear peer adversaries each with ambitions to alter the global status quo by force, if required. Any war with China might be accompanied by a Russian attack in Europe, creating parallel crises on both sides of the world to inflict maximum strain on allied forces.

As Peter Apps writes in his book Deterring Armageddon, at some point in 2049 the leaders of NATO — if it still exists - will likely gather in Washington to celebrate the alliance’s centenary. “Should they fail to be there, there are 3 likely reasons: NATO has collapsed; it has been superseded by something else; or it has finally failed to stop the catastrophic war Bevin, Hickerson and Achilles built it to prevent.”

There is a big risk that Europe is being redrawn when they are not at the table. And if you are not at the table, you are on the menu! Forget art of the deal, what we are witnessing now is the art of the kneel - before Putin, and the art of the steal - of Ukrainian minerals! In trying to stop imperialism by Russia, what we are seeing in return is imperialism by the US.

Churchill once remarked: “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” History will likely judge the recent events as shameful and anyone staying silent will be deemed complicit. Paraphrasing Edmund Burke, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

The history of NATO has never been predictable and the same applies to its future too. US ambassador to NATO Donald Rumsfeld once said that the alliance had a lucky habit of being “saved” once a decade by a new crisis between the West and Kremlin.

The world awaits the knight in shining armour!