Collapsing Empire: 'NATO is Dead'

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On March 3rd, Timothy Ash of elite British state-connected ‘defence’ think tank Chatham House made a series of startling proclamations in an interview with Bloomberg. His topline message was stark - “NATO is dead.” He spoke following the very public February 28th Oval Office fallout between Volodomyr Zelensky and Donald Trump. The impact of that debacle reverberates today, with questions abounding over continued US aid and intelligence sharing with Kiev, pending the Ukrainian leader’s signoff on a White House-endorsed minerals for security agreements deal.

Branding the catastrophic summit an “ambush”, Ash declared that Trump and his deputy J.D. Vance had “laid out very clearly” that the military alliance was to all intents and purposes moribund, with no hope of recovery. He noted other comments made by the US President at the Oval Office meeting indicated an evident reticence by Washington to intervene military to protect the Baltic states should they end up at war with Russia, in seeming breach of NATO’s Article 5:

“It should be crystal clear now to European leaders that NATO is dead, we can’t rely on US security guarantees, they’ve come and spelled it out to us…NATO is more or less dead already…Even raising doubts about whether America would stand behind some NATO states says it all…We cannot rely on the Americans any more. We have to move on, we have to think about our own national interests, our own security, we have a very difficult transition period.”

Ash’s analysis is evidently echoed by European leaders. A day later, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen outlined a €800 billion plan to “rearm” the bloc. Many member state chiefs reportedly “largely endorse” the plan, which calls for Europe to “become more sovereign, more responsible for its own defence and better equipped to act and deal autonomously with immediate and future challenges and threats.” Nonetheless, polls indicate European citizens oppose increased defence spending, and contractors warn this grand scheme will “take time” to realise.

If NATO truly is dead, it represents another long-overdue nail in the Empire’s coffin. It is also yet further confirmation that the US-dominated unipolar order, which has wrought untold death, destruction and misery over the past quarter century, is no more, and never to return. Residents of the Global South can breathe a collective sigh of relief - meanwhile, in a bitter irony, the same Western states that aided and abetted Washington’s unchallenged hegemony now find themselves defenceless.

‘Riot Squad’

The unipolar world was forged in an incendiary baptism of airstrikes and atrocity propaganda in Yugoslavia, March - June 1999. For 78 straight days, NATO relentlessly blitzed civilian, government, and industrial infrastructure throughout the country, killing untold innocent people - including children - and violently disrupting daily life for millions. While the US oversaw the ruinous campaign, both publicly and privately, British Prime Minister Tony Blair was an ardent advocate of even greater belligerence against non-military targets, despite the grave concerns and warnings of government legal advisors.

NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia

Then again, NATO’s assault was in itself completely illegal, conducted without UN Security Council approval. Such an intervention would’ve been unthinkable during the prior decade. Throughout the 1990s, Washington carefully constructed the chimera of a world united behind US leadership by ensuring UN backing for all its overt imperial actions across the globe. The bombing of Yugoslavia represented an unprecedented, highly controversial break with this strategy, specifically intended to serve as an exemplar thereafter.

An eerily prescient April 1999 New Statesman article noted NATO’s unauthorised bombing was no “one off”, but “just the beginning” of a “brave new world”, in which the military alliance acted autonomously as a worldwide “riot squad”. In this context, whenever China and/or Russia could plausibly use their Security Council vetoes to block US intervention overseas, NATO would simply invoke the UN Charter’s self defence clause to strike whenever and wherever its members perceived a “threat”, without hindrance or any consideration for international law:

“The threat doesn’t come in the shape of main battle tanks…but from the fear of huge refugee flows, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction: bags of anthrax spores or phials of nerve gases which can’t be seen, can’t be verified and may or may not exist. But as long as there are rogue states out there with a grudge against the West and a location near oil reserves, the US will be ready to face down the threat.”

As the New Statesman correctly prophesied, the implications of this paradigm shift were “enormous”, with “the potential to undermine the entire postwar international security system,” and fatally subvert “UN legitimacy.” The outlet went on to record how NATO’s longstanding members had been successfully railroaded into agreeing “to the principle of out-of-area operations”, due to fears “the US could unilaterally conclude its own military agreements with Eastern European states” outside the military alliance’s established “framework” if they resisted.

In return for serving as the Empire’s dependable, unquestioning dogsbodies, protecting US economic interests abroad, and purchasing all Washington’s exorbitantly-priced, barely functional military equipment, European governments were granted a sense of invincibility courtesy of NATO’s Article 5. In the meantime, their armies and industrial bases could be left to rot, safe in the delusion America and newer alliance allies would come to the rescue and do the fighting and dying for them if they were ever attacked. As George Soros wrote in November 1993:

“Through NATO…the US would not be called upon to act as the policeman of the world. When it acts, it would act in conjunction with others…The combination of manpower from Eastern Europe with the technical capabilities of NATO would greatly enhance the military potential…because it would reduce the risk of body bags for NATO countries, which is the main constraint on their willingness to act.”

‘Shiny Deals’

The Ukraine proxy war has brought this suicidal upshot of the unipolar world into sharp relief. Despite the Trump administration’s determination to end the conflict, European leaders show no sign of backing down, desperately scrambling to make up the vast shortfall in financial and military assistance abruptly created by the cessation of Washington’s aid. As yet, no credible solution to this glaring deficit between rhetoric and reality has been proposed. Even Ukrainian leaders admit “nobody can replace the US when it comes to military support.”

This hazardous disconnect was writ large in Timothy Ash’s Bloomberg interview. Despite his urgent calls for European governments to get to grips with the fact they “cannot rely on the Americans any more,” he contradictorily acknowledged Europe suffers from acute issues around “military production”, and “we have to rely on the Americans” to stump up the materiel necessary to keep the proxy war grinding on. Ash suggested Europe simply pool its collective “cash” to purchase the requisite arms for Ukraine:

“I don’t think it’s beyond our abilities to put together a finance package…we still have $330 billion in Russian assets in our bank accounts that our governments haven’t done anything about…What we should be doing is pitching to the Americans…Trump likes big shiny deals, we should go to the Yanks and we should say ‘we want to commit over a 10 year period to buy between $500 billion to a trillion of kit from you guys’…Trump would not say no to that.”

Fond of “big shiny deals” Trump may be, but Ash assumes Washington has the ability to supply Europe anything at all, irrespective of the profits involved. As a July 2024 investigation by Pentagon-funded RAND concluded, “extraordinary” levels of “consumption and demand” for US-made ammunition, vehicles, and weapons in the proxy war have already rendered the country’s existing stockpiles threadbare. This, combined with a ravaged “defense industrial base”, means America is “unable to meet” its own “equipment, technology, and munitions needs”, let alone furnish its allies.

RAND’s dire conclusions were echoed on March 3rd by White House national security advisor Mike Waltz. In slamming Zelensky’s failure to accept Trump’s peace plan, he cautioned “the time to talk is now,” as US “stockpiles and munitions are not unlimited.” This unambiguous message apparently remains unreceived in Brussels, Paris, and London, with deranged schemes to halt Russia’s inexorable battlefield advance issuing daily. Perhaps European leaders believe NATO and the unipolar world it enforced can be resuscitated, with themselves at the helm?