( Five minute read)

At NATO’s founding on April 4, 1949, President Harry S. Truman described the creation of the Atlantic Alliance as a neighbourly act taken by countries deeply conscious of their shared heritage as democracies that had come together determined to defend their common values and interests from those who threatened them.

After years of fighting disastrous wars, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya, NATO can now forget about them – whatever the enduring human disasters they leave behind.

Today, NATO has thirty members, including ten countries that used to be members of the Warsaw Pact or were part of the Soviet Union and continues to grow.

Only once in its seventy-one-year history, in the aftermath of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, has the alliance needed to invoke the mutual defence obligation.

After Russia began its aggression in Ukraine in February 2014, few (including Russian President Vladimir Putin) would have expected NATO to move so quickly from crisis management to a fundamentally new defence posture. But the alliance has done just that, and it took less than six months to get there.

So what exactly will be decided that is so earth-shattering?

It is the biggest strategic shift in NATO’s posture in a quarter century,

NATO is entering a new phase in its history with its reputation now so bound up with the fate of Ukraine that, in the unlikely event that Russia makes substantial military gains in the conflict, Kyiv cannot be allowed to lose. NATO’s future will be rendered hopelessly irrelevant if it loses, as it well might, the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

With the United States now paying for almost 75 percent of its cost, things may look rosy for NATO today, but climate breakdown, not wars, are the biggest threat to global security. The war in the Ukrain is very widely seen as a massive diversion from this much more significant challenge. Spending billions on the military may make for high profitability but is entirely missing the point when it comes to the greatest security challenge facing the entire world. Military alliances like NATO won’t solve our greatest security threat – THE CLIMATE

To make matters even more rosy, military budgets are rising, lots of new weapons are being developed and existing ones produced in huge numbers. Both will lead to more sales for the armourers as countries across the world rush to buy new kit, even if their armed forces have no connection with the war in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s defence minister, Oleksii Resnikov, put it more bluntly: “Our Western allies can actually see if their weapons work, how efficiently they work and if they need to be upgraded. For the military industry of the world, you can’t invent a better testing ground.”

Questioning the need for NATO and America’s role in it isn’t new.  

NATO has been an alliance dedicated to military protection for well over 70 years, but it is a military alliance is unsuited to meeting the world’s greatest security challenge: Climate breakdown. NATO will have to change in order to keep going, that might just lead to a badly needed change in NATOs priorities.

In other words, a continued existence of NATO is essential not only because it allows the US to expand its influence worldwide, but also because NATO is the umbilical cord that militarily connects the US with Europe, keeping the latter dependent on the former. By ensuing a continuing relevance of NATO in the present geo-political context, the US hopes to maintain its own relevance for Europe.

Put it another way, whether in Ukrain or Kosovo or Afghanistan, NATO serves chiefly to camouflage and thereby legitimate what is substantively a unilateral action by the United States.

To my mind the American idea that NATO reinvent itself as the security core of a global club of democracies against China at present, owes more to wishful than to strategic thinking.

Underlying this is the increasingly dominant view that global climate breakdown and the many consequences of that evolving catastrophe, especially for poorer people, are a far greater challenge than the war in Ukraine.

Let me state the obvious:   You don’t have to be a military general to know that climate change is going to bring wars.

The Climate Clock countdown that tracks the deadline to stay below 1.5°C of global warming will flip from 6 years 0 days 00:00:00 to 5 years 364 days 23:59:59 for the first time in history on Saturday 22 July 2023.

Europe must guarantee its security all by itself.

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