NATO Archaeology: What’s NATO Really For?

June 2022: PART I & PART II

Part I

When the perennial Ukraine Problem flared up again earlier this year, the world’s political analysts seemed to be in agreement that the showdown between the forces of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian president Vladimir Putin was, at least in part, a referendum on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Putin will never tolerate NATO on Russia’s doorstep, the argument goes. He prefers war to having NATO as a neighbor. Therefore, the current fighting in Ukraine is at least as much about what NATO has been doing since the Cold War ended as it is about anything going on in Russia or Ukraine.

Whether NATO, the Washington-led alliance launched in the aftermath of World War II, had expanded too far beyond its original borders is a matter of taste. The 1949 signatories to the North Atlantic Treaty were Belgium, France, England, Denmark, Luxembourg, Canada, Italy, Norway, the Netherlands, Iceland, Portugal, and the United States. At this writing, NATO and its various affiliate groupings—“Enhanced Opportunities Partners,” “Individual Partnership Action Plan” countries, “Istanbul Cooperation Initiative” countries, and more—comprise dozens of nations worldwide, many of them having nothing to do with the Atlantic Ocean (such as Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Colombia, and Japan). Sweden and Finland are also clamoring to join. If international joinerism is your thing, and if institutional imperialism floats your boat, then you are probably among those who think that NATO expansion is grand. If not, then probably you aren’t. Putin is emphatically in the latter camp. Ergo, the invasion of Ukraine.

But the antagonism between the Russians and NATO, although it hardly began with Putin, does not explain all there is to know about NATO’s rationale. In fact, I think the Russia-NATO enmity is not at the heart of NATO’s reason for being. It is, if anything, a convenient pretense for keeping NATO going. What NATO is really for, in my view, is not checking the Russians, but keeping the Gulliver of Germany tied down and out of commission. NATO is not about Russia. It never was. It was always about the Germans, the real danger in Europe.

Consider this. The Russian military is not very good. In Ukraine today we are seeing classic Russian maneuvering, and I think even Vladimir Putin’s most ardent supporters are now beginning to admit that Putin and his generals do not know what they are doing.

For example, the Russians form ridiculously long attack lines along straight roads, virtually begging to be flanked and annihilated. They seem to have remarkably poor intelligence, despite Ukrainian and Russian being almost the same language and Ukraine and Russia being neighboring countries (and despite the fact that Russia already occupies parts of Ukraine). The Russians do not know how to shoot, and they do not know how to fight. They surrender en masse. The POWs the Ukrainians capture appear to be barely out of high school. Russian generals are easily assassinated. Russian ships are sunk without returning fire, without any apparent knowledge among the crew of an imminent attack until their ship’s hull explodes.

The Russians commit war crimes with abandon, raping, looting, massacring, torturing, and marauding like berserkers. They apparently have little to no military discipline and even less training in the Geneva Convention or other basics of modern warfare. Russian equipment which falls into Ukrainian hands is almost invariably cheap, old, and poor. Russian missiles are often found in the middle of fields or in parking lots, not even close to the buildings in the vicinity which were presumably the real targets. Russians bivouac like hamsters, strewing debris everywhere and evincing zero idea of how to keep military order in camp, or even how to make a camp which is not readily overrun by the enemy or infiltrated by spies.

And Russians are absolutely terrible at PR. On this front, Russian diplomats have been outclassed by their Ukrainian counterparts at every level. The Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, was called out by his counterpart Sergiy Kyslytsya in late February at the UN over the just-started Russian invasion, for example. Kyslytsya was compelling, poised, forceful, engaged. The world leaned in and paid attention. Ukraine won many new supporters that day. Nebenzya, by contrast, looked like a dejected actor who had just been passed over for understudy to Dr. Goldfinger. And that was more or less the high point of Russian charm operations over these past three months.

None of this is new in basic form. Anyone who has read War and Peace will recognize the Russian strategy of sacrificing Russians for the sake of Moscow, the gross incompetence slathered over with ludicrous national pride. In War and Peace, the Russian leadership, such as it was, falls back endlessly into the Russian heartland, letting the invading French under Napoleon feast on Mother Russia. When the weather turns, the French freeze to death. This scene repeated, mutatis mutandi, at Stalingrad. Is this a strategy, or just a luxury afforded by having a tundra for a homeland?

And when the Russians are on the invading side, they die in ditches after raping locals by the score.

They are drunken barbarians in either case.

In short, although Russia (and the Soviet Union was no different) is certainly capable of causing tremendous damage (not least of all to Russia itself), it is hardly an adversary worthy of an alliance spanning nearly half the globe. One builds fences to keep the monkeys in, but one does not send the USS Abraham Lincoln to patrol the perimeter. A zookeeper with a pellet gun will do.

Now consider Germany. Germany was in the middle of both world wars, and she held out for many years on both occasions. Germany can be carved up and she will always reunite, stronger than before. Germany can be bombed into the Stone Age, and by the time the sun comes back up she will be in the Bronze, and a week later she will be exporting automobiles again. A week after that she will have occupied Czechoslovakia. Germany can maneuver, too. The Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe were extraordinarily disciplined killing machines. They were commanded, ultimately, by a frothing madman, and so Germany was once more ground into the dust. But even then Ivan faltered. The hapless Russians gave up millions to the German army and entered Berlin only after the Allies had dismantled the Wehrmacht from the west.

The Allies and the Russians then bisected Germany, hoping to keep her down forever. But Germany always rises. And so it was that the Allies devised NATO, not as a way of countering the Soviet Union, but of keeping Germany always under liberal domination. The Treaty of Dunkirk, the germ of NATO, was aimed at both the Soviet Union and Germany. France and England, the two signatories to the treaty, had been stung by the Russians, but both had been gutted and gored by the Germans. You need to keep the Russians on a leash, but when it comes to the Hun you need to sleep with one eye open. When the western half of Germany got its guns back, it was only on the condition that West Germany join NATO. It was then, and only then, that the Soviets got serious and set up their own NATO, the Warsaw Pact, in response.

The Americans never had it in them to invade the Soviet Union. Gary Powers in his airplane, and proxy wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan and elsewhere, were as close as the Americans were ever going to get to squaring off with Ivan. The Cuban Missile Crisis? Exactly. That was in Cuba. But the Americans were willing, and still are, to stay in Europe to make sure the Germans don’t go off the reservation anymore. And what really kept the Russians up at night was Germany. Still does. The Americans would go home someday. The Germans would remain. And then it would be 1939 all over again. And the Americans would likely get drawn back into the meat grinder in Europe, the crank of which always turns on an axis somewhere between Munich and Berlin.

As the war in Ukraine drags on in 2022, and as talk on the news programs continues to center on NATO and Russia, let us not forget what the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is really for. It is useful for keeping Moscow preoccupied, and Russian stupidity is always at least equally useful for justifying NATO’s existence. But NATO is about Germany, not Russia. If NATO were to disappear, then it would be Germany, not Russia, which would dominate Europe once more. The Americans realize this, as must all the other countries in NATO. And so here we are, seventy-seven years after the fall of Berlin, and NATO getting bigger and bigger the farther out we go. There can never be enough NATO to hold Germany down forever. Dig deep under NATO and you will find a Germany just waiting to reclaim its rightful place as ruler of the lands west of the Ural Mountains.

PART II

After writing the above draft, I shared it with some colleagues. It started a very good exchange, just as I’d hoped. My colleagues shared good and invaluable critiques and counter-arguments. I am very grateful. With their permission, I include some of those critiques and counter-arguments below, in bold and in no particular order, with my responses in regular font beneath.

1/ I wouldn’t say “perennial” Ukraine issue. Ukraine was invaded this year. That hasn’t happened in the past.

Perhaps it’s not right to say “perennial.” But certainly Ukraine has been a bone of contention between NATO and Russia since the very moment the Russian Federation came into being, and since before then, too. My thinking here is guided by John Mearsheimer, whose work on Ukraine and European-NATO history has greatly informed by view of the current situation. Ukraine is the contact-point of the see-saw. Russia (and the USSR before that) wants and has wanted to balance against the West at Ukraine.

The invasion of Donbas in 2014 was partly this, partly access to resources and ports, and partly expansion of the Russian ethno-state to blanket Russian speakers in the area.

Perhaps one could also stretch the Ukraine problem back into the early Soviet period. The Holodomor was not about Ukraine and the West. But it was certainly about Ukraine (and the “kulaks”). The Holodomor has been brought up many times in recent months. It’s part of the historical memory of the region. Maybe it’s a stretch, but in this sense the Ukraine problem can be seen as perennial, or at least long-standing.

2/ You say we have NATO, “ergo” Russia invaded. The fact that NATO is there is probably one reason for the Russian invasion, but I’d guess that there were others. It wanted the natural gas in the Dombas, for example.

This is a fair point. The Donbas invasion was probably only tangentially related to NATO.

3/ The focus of the article is on the “reason” for NATO. I have a couple of misgivings, here. The first is that it’s simply an empirical historical question. Why did the US and its allies create NATO? Were they worried about USSR? Or about Germany? That’s the question, right? I doubt that one can answer this in the abstract. I would think that you need to devote a career to government document repositories, CIA memos, biographies of US and western leaders, to really figure this one out. Maybe you’d find that they were more worried about Germany than the USSR, but I kind of doubt it.

It’s most certainly an empirical historical question. At the same time, not all of it, at least I don’t think so. There’s a lot of iceberg below the waves. Coming out of WWII, the Americans would probably have been much warier of the Germans, even though in a ruined country, than they would have been about the Soviets, allies during the war at least, allies of a certain sort. And then all the horrors of the Holocaust are becoming common knowledge at that time as well. The Russians one can handle. They can be walled off and kept at bay. But the Germans are different. I think building one’s castle on top of one’s enemy’s rubble makes a lot of sense in terms of psychological security.

So, maybe this is empirical. But maybe not all of it is.

4/ Do remember that the USSR had ICBMs and nuclear warheads. It turns out that they don’t have a great military, but it doesn’t strike me as irrational to worry about them anyway. After all, North Korea has what I’m sure is a total non-starter of a military. But it seems to have nuclear bombs. Even before it got the nukes, it had poison gas bombs. Given the nukes and the poison gas, I would think it’s worth our efforts (and Japan’s and S Korea’s) to have an alliance to fence them in, no matter how incompetent their military might be. It’s the same reason that Israel is so worried about Iran’s nuclear program.

This is a very good point, but I don’t see how it necessarily follows that one must therefore have NATO or any other transnational organization. Absolutely, the Soviets and the Russians had and have nuclear weapons. So, apparently, does the DPRK. So, the countries in the vicinity of those places will want to have nuclear weapons, too, to counter the threat. But NATO has frustrated that natural parity, hasn’t it? In other words, why not just let Germany have nuclear weapons to counter the USSR’s/Russia’s? I think the answer to this is also the affirmation of my thesis in the essay above.

5/ If you mean this piece to be controversial, you will have succeeded. I can’t get on board with NATO’s raison d’etre being to hem in Germany. There was much criticism in the US at the time of the administration’s decision to allow the “Soviets.” read Russians, to take over the east of the country, and especially Berlin, which we really didn’t have to, and which the Germans, knowing what the Russians would do to them, begged us not to. Recall how sick FDR was at the time, and how clueless he’d kept Truman. The Russian invaders then behaved just as barbarically as you describe them doing in Ukraine. The West Germans were scared witless of what would happen, and really wanted NATO as a guarantee that we wouldn’t let the Soviets invade them as well. Hence our troops were positioned as tripwires in places like Fulda to make sure that the invading Russians would have to kill Americans first and therefore bring the US into the fight. So provide reassurance that the US wouldn’t abandon them.

I think this very good response makes my case for me! The Americans allied with a communist nightmare to keep the Germans down. Then it split the spoils, that is, Germany, with the communists. Better for Germany to be carved up and placed partly under the rule of Russians than to have Germany united and capable of starting another world war.

Surely, the West Germans were terrified of the Soviets. I would have been terrified, too. But who gave half their country to the Soviets in the first place? What is the security guarantee of Washington worth? Nothing, in my view. Which is why NATO is about keeping Germany down. NATO was never about providing Germany with security, but about securing Germany in place, thus providing security to the United States.

6/ Post-USSR and German unification, Bonn/Berlin was at first reluctant to support the expansion of NATO (more incompetent untermenschen to support, perhaps) but quickly realized that they’d now have a barrier between Germany and Russia, which was good. The main problem at that time, however, was not with Russia but with absorbing the former East Germany, since decades of “socialism” had turned the Ostis into lazy welfare recipients (which was uncomfortably close to the truth). Meanwhile, the Ostis complained about being “colonized” by the snooty folks from the west. It wasn’t until Angela Merkel, an Osti, became chancellor that the bridge was reconciled. Perhaps irrelevantly, her first husband, Herr Merkel, as you can tell from the ---el ending, was a Swabian, from the west. With regard to the EU, she was consistently supportive, even when underwriting the horrendously managed Greek economy and allowing unlimited immigration lost her votes and energized the right wing.

The Germans have been so emasculated by some eight decades of liberal hegemony that they have become culturally suicidal. This works perfectly if one is a New World Order-er in DC. The Germans endlessly underwriting the profligate spending of the Greeks is the same, in the end, as the Germans opening their doors to endless immigration (read: invasion). The German elite will support the EU until Germany dies. At which point NATO will have served its central purpose. Liberalism uber alles. (A divided, then “reunited,” Germany works perfectly in this set play.)

The resurgent German right is the enemy of both Moscow and Washington. So we are back, in part, to 1939 again. Must be time to have a NATO parade through the Rhineland.

7/ Post WW II Germans became complacent, peace-loving, unwilling to support the military. It wasn’t until Putin brought the war to Europe’s doorstep that they began to take him, and the supportive Chinese, seriously. Finally agreeing to up their contribution to NATO to the 2% it was supposed to be all along. It’s probably too late. IISS recently described NATO as having lost its “muscle memory” after the USSR disintegrated.

Most of this makes my points above. “Muscle memory” is a good turn of phrase. Maybe so, but the momentum was all that was really needed at that point.

On the other hand, the American elite may have made a fatal mistake by swapping, especially during the Obama years, Putin for the illiberal bugbears of old as the main enemy of DC. The Bidenists seem honestly to believe that Putin is an existential threat to mankind, Washington included. This miscalculation may end up reigniting the flame of German Valkyrie-ism. Then, as I said above, we’re back to 1939.

8/ I take issue with the claims that Russians are doing all the atrocities. The Ukrainians appear to be eager to match the Russians in grotesquness by shooting collaborators (“people we don’t like”) and torturing Russian prisoners. The Russians as Soviets were certainly much worse than anything that has come out of Putin’s “special operation,” I think, being officially goaded by state media to kill, kill, kill anything that moves. Stalin said it was ok for the men to ravish the vanquished women (see McMeekin’s Stalin’s War). I'll allow that the Russians have evolved, at least a little, since the death of Stalin.

I have no doubt that the Ukrainians are guilty of atrocities, too. The Ukrainians are master media manipulators, possibly getting help from the CIA and NSA in packaging their war as a heroic exploit against a DC-created enemy.

Have the Russians marginally civilized since 1945? Not sure. My guess is that they’ve probably gotten even worse. There was some Orthodox residue in Russia in 1945. Now, it seems the official religion is vodka and nihilism. Mass rapes, mass graves. If anything, Stalin imposed discipline through sheer terror. Today, the Russian soldier doesn’t have even that.

9/ Apparently American (and US Allies) soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have lashed out at civilians as well. “Lashed out” is a mild generalization. Given their circumstance, and endless, pointless, police actions encumbering each soldier with rules of all types, I can see where the frustration comes from. Soldiers are not trained to be community builders.

Very good point. I think Putin understands this very well, about what soldiers are for. They loot, burn, kill, plunder, and rape. That’s why he sends them to Ukraine.

10/ The relentless propaganda war/disinformation from Mao via Chiang's Republic and a very compliant Western media that Japan was responsible for an “Asian Holocaust” has since been disproven. So, I tend to discount claims of “war crimes” from either side. I want to see who eventually “wins” and then see where the chips fall. (The Croatians did their fair share of murder and torture against Serb civilians during the Yugoslav war of the 90s, but they were not on the losing side.)

Completely agreed. My honest assessment: the Russians are barbarians, but they are going to win. Putin will keep digging deeper and deeper into Ukraine. Moldova will become a satellite state. The Baltics will be stuck. Poland will have some very, very hard choices to make.

NATO will not survive the resurgence of Russia. Germany will realize that NATO is its fetter and not its shield, and will revise strategy accordingly.

--Jason Morgan is associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, Japan