What is Nato really for?
Nato is back.
WITH THE INVASION OF UKRAINE, Vladimir Putin has single-handedly revived the fortunes of the North Atlantic Treaty Organi sation, returning it to the top of the foreign policy agenda. Nordic states that once prided themselves on independence from the organisation are now eager to join. The German government has pledged an unprecedented increase in defence spending, which means increasing its contribution to Nato. US military strategists dream anew of opening a Nato franchise for the Pacific, while EU bureaucrats plan a new Nato for the internet. Former liberal hold outs and sceptics of the alliance have learned to love Nato in much the same way they learned to love the CIA and the FBI during the Trump years. The old sheriff of the cold war has regained its focus, and, to the surprise of many, has proved itself to be a remarkably spry and capable force in the fight against Russia.
Nato’s return to the spotlight has been accompanied by a renewed debate about its history. Every interested party has a different story to tell. For Moscow, Nato has long been a project to subjugate Russia and reduce its influence to a memory. For Washington, Nato began as a way of protecting western Europeans from themselves and from the Soviet Union, but in the 1990s it became a forward operating vehicle for democracy, human rights and capital. For eastern Europeans, Nato is the sacred pledge to keep Russian tanks at bay. For most western European states, Nato has provided a bargain-price American nuclear umbrella that allowed them to fund social welfare rather than armies, when they were not using their Nato obligations to justify austerity. For the rest of the world, Nato was once an Atlantic-based, defensive alliance that quickly transformed into an ever-farther-afield, offensive one.
For all that Nato is central to a certain conception of Europe – or even the west – few can say what, exactly, it is. Crammed into a four-letter acronym is something more than a simple military alliance. Nato is no longer particularly “Northern”, nor “Atlantic”, nor bound to a “Treaty”, while calling it an “organisation” almost makes it sound like a charitable enterprise. Part of the reason Nato’s shape can be difficult to discern is that the alliance has, at least in the west, won a long war of public relations. In the 50s, Nato sent travelling exhibitions into the hinterlands of Europe to explain the benefits of the alliance to
