NATO's Global Ambitions: A Danger to Peace and Prosperity

September 06, 2024

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Not satisfied with the current tragic debacle in Ukraine, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) - as the militarized embodiment of transatlantic colonial aspiration - has now set its sights on being a global neocolonial instrument. Today, NATO is an instrument of principally US foreign policy with European characteristics. However, extending from its north European footprint, NATO now seeks to expand, project, and entangle itself in the affairs of regions in Africa and, more particularly, Asia. This was the clear message emerging from the NATO congregation recently in the United States, marking the organization's 75th anniversary. In doing so, NATO exposes not only its colonialist roots but also its insecurities and limitations.

For nations and peoples that have struggled to shake the yoke of colonialism over the past century, this revitalized ambition of NATO is a cause for considerable concern. NATO's militarized ambitions, in conditions of material constraints, are likely to destabilize regions rather than bring peace and prosperity. These ambitions also divert the focus of resources from NATO member nations' own economic woes. Only by rejecting NATO's expansion can regions such as those across Africa and Asia stand a chance of crafting the local institutions necessary to sustain multipolar peace and prosperity.

Put plainly, NATO today evinces a hankering for Western unipolarity in a world in which multipolarity is already an existent reality. Its doctrine and the realities impacting its ambitions are anathema to prosperity and peace.

NATO's Colonialist Birthmarks

NATO was founded in 1949 ostensibly as an alliance of 12 states in Western Europe and the United States to deter Soviet aggression. Less remarked upon are NATO's colonialist connections, particularly in terms of its links to the exercise of colonial power in Africa. According to Guyanese historian and political activist Walter Rodney, in his 1972 book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa:

"In the 1950s, when most Africans were still colonial subjects, they had absolutely no control over the utilization of their soil for militaristic ends. Virtually the whole of North Africa was turned into a sphere of operations for NATO, with bases aimed at the Soviet Union. … The colonial powers actually held military conferences in African cities like Dakar and Nairobi in the early 1950s, inviting the whites of South Africa and Rhodesia and the government of the USA. Time and time again, the evidence points to this cynical use of Africa to buttress capitalism economically and militarily, and therefore in effect forcing Africa to contribute to its own exploitation."¹

According to Kwame Nkrumah, a leader of the Ghanaian liberation movement and Ghana's first president, in his Challenge of the Congo (1970), NATO countries operated at least 17 air bases, nine naval bases, three rocket sites, and an atomic testing range in North Africa.² Additionally, NATO countries had military missions in at least 10 other African countries. Furthermore, Western European powers continued to exploit raw materials for the production of nuclear weapons in the mines of Congo, Angola, South Africa, and Rhodesia. The French footprint across West Africa continues today, though recent events in the Sahel suggest that the colonial footprint in that part of the world is in retreat.

In his 1968 Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare, Nkrumah called for countermeasures to be taken by African nations to challenge NATO - clearly at the time with little impact.³ NATO's influence in Africa was at times indirect, as the case of Portuguese colonialism shows. Portugal is a founding NATO member. It was one of the least developed countries within NATO in the years after World War II, and yet it was able to launch colonial wars in Africa. It conducted wars in Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique. It was able to do this, according to Guinea-Bissau's founding father Amilcar Cabral, because of NATO's assistance.⁴ Through Portugal and NATO, the US was able to maintain its domination over Africa.

NATO's military activities ran in parallel to the political and economic colonial dimensions of the broader "European project." Bar a few momentary "lapses," European elites continue to evince a collective amnesia in relation to the bloody origins of the post-war European project itself.⁵ When the EU's precursor, the European Economic Community (EEC), was formed in 1957 (by way of the Treaty of Rome), rather than signaling the death knell of European colonialism, it re-articulated a notionally more palatable form of integration of Africa into the European project on the back of Ghana's independence from the British that came into effect a few weeks earlier. However, rather than representing a so-called "year zero" in terms of relations between Europe and Africa, the Treaty of Rome marked out a new chapter on colonial subjugation within the broader historic frame of Eurafrica.⁶ Indeed, at the time, Kwame Nkrumah described the treaty as little better than the Berlin Conference of 1885.⁷
 

European powers (and Western powers more generally) were deeply entangled in the "civilization" political culture that has dominated Western colonialism since the late 1400s, and the European project was a variation on this historical theme. Evidence of this could, for example, be found in the 1962 Declaration of Paris issued by the Alliance Convention of NATO Nations:

"The Atlantic peoples are heir to a magnificent civilization whose origins include the early achievements of the Near East, the classical beauty of Greece, the juridical sagacity of Rome, the spiritual power of our religious traditions, and the humanism of the Renaissance. Its latest flowering, the discoveries of modern science, allow an extraordinary mastery of the forces of nature. … Thanks to that civilization and to the common characteristics with which it stamps the development of peoples participating in it, the nations of the West do in fact constitute a powerful cultural and moral community."

Far from merely being a defensive alliance created to forestall Soviet expansion, NATO and its allied European project were deeply imbricated in the Western civilizational mission that underpinned and rationalized historical colonialism. Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, NATO's principal role focused on European powers' ongoing relations across the African continent. After the end of the Cold War, however, NATO expanded its horizons. It acted in contravention of international law when it bombed Yugoslavia in 1999.⁸ It assisted the US in its illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. While the UN Security Council authorized NATO's intervention in Libya, NATO states violated that authorization to pursue their own objectives in that country.⁹ Consequently, Libya was destroyed, and instability catalyzed across North Africa.¹⁰ NATO is ostensibly a "defense alliance," but it's hard to imagine such an alliance undertaking these kinds of offensive activities.

In Europe itself, NATO has persisted in an expansion program after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. This expansion exacerbated regional insecurities as NATO came to the Russian border. Russian leader Vladimir Putin had cautioned as early as 2007 that the eastward expansion of NATO would generate tensions and increase the risk of conflict. US political scientist John Mearsheimer drew attention to the risks of Western provocations as early as 2014.¹¹ He wasn't the only one.

Globalizing Ambitions and Material Limits

NATO is a military organization. It has buttressed the Western colonial project since its inception and, in more recent times, has acted as the military subordinate of American foreign policy. Much of this effort has, to date, focused on Europe and Africa, but is now turning toward Asia. The Asian turn has been rationalized through the linking of China's trade with Russia as representing a threat to European security. Ipso facto, in the name of protecting European security, NATO must by necessity train its sights on China.

NATO's Asian ambitions are coupled with American geopolitical considerations, particularly with respect to China. The concern is that China now threatens American primacy in the Western Pacific/East Asia and must be confronted. The argument, in its simplest terms, is that China has modernized its military and seeks to secure the position of the Asian regional hegemon. This is, for the American political elite, unacceptable; in fact, the idea of China as a peer is incommensurable with American exceptionalism. China's economic development was, for the Americans, something that was made possible by the generosity of the US. The expectation was that China would, through the effects of interacting with the post-Cold War global liberal economic order, transform itself in the image of the Americans and in ways that aligned with American interests. By the mid-2010s, however, the American establishment came to see that China had, in fact, not changed in the ways expected despite its economic development. Indeed, senior Washington figures in policy and strategic circles had come to the view that Beijing had "defied American expectations."¹² This view confirmed the assessment contained in the 2017 National Security Strategy that China was a "revisionist" force that sought to supplant the US in the "Indo-Pacific region."

In this context, China had to be contained militarily and economically. The Trump and Biden administrations have since embarked on a plethora of economic policies aimed at containing China's economic development and curtailing its growth. The effectiveness of these initiatives is doubtful, but I will not go into the economic issues in this essay. The issue that warrants consideration is, rather, the hard power dimensions of military capacity, which go to explain a number of US-led initiatives, including the proposed expansion of NATO to the Asia region.

If one part of the Washington consensus is that China is the greatest threat to US primacy in Asia, then the other aspect of the consensus is growing concern about the extent to which the American military system can meet the demands of the "two-theater war" doctrine. Michael O'Hanlon, Senior Fellow and Director of Research in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, in a recent article in The National Interest,¹³ explicitly asks the question, evincing the evident concern and alarm across the defense fraternity. The assessment is not groundless but raises critical questions of both the American posture and that of NATO more generally.

Resource constraints explain why the US has actively sought to inveigle NATO into the Asia theater, along with other moves by Washington to secure the financial and productive support of client states, former colonies, and subimperial allies. Yet, there are serious doubts whether any of these initiatives can meaningfully address the supply chain and productive capacity limitations that now beset the entire Western defense supply chain system.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the emergence of what can be called the 30 years of American unipolarity, few observers questioned the military dominance of the United States. Between 1991 and 2019, the US expanded its global military interventions under various guises. In this period, it initiated on average 3.7 military interventions per year. This compares with the annual average of 2.4 interventions between 1946 and 1990. American security doctrine saw all parts of the world as America's dominion. America's security was a question of global security. The US has around 800 military bases across the globe and pursues kinetic interventions wherever and whenever it sees fit. Its military and defense budget was designed to enable the United States to fight two wars at any one time.

America's regional and global military preponderance is now in disarray. Its productive and supply chain capacity limitations are now exposed to the steppes of Ukraine and the ever-expanding demands of the unfolding conflict in West Asia. US President Joe Biden once responded to doubts about America's capacity to "fight two wars," asserting that "we are the United States of America, for God's sake, the most powerful nation in the history of the world." That's hubris speaking.
The reality is a military-industrial complex that has insufficient repair and replacement capabilities when measured against the realities of peer conflict.

A recent Reuters investigation found that the collective West's capacity to manufacture 155 mm caliber artillery shells has been seriously depleted through years of miscalculation and neglect.¹⁴ Stockpiles have been depleted in the face of the war of attrition in Ukraine. Production defects are rife in existing manufacturing systems, contributing to an inability to ramp up production to meet the demands of a peer conflict. Even as efforts are made to increase production, capacity expansions across NATO (including the US) cannot match the output volumes and growth we see in Russia. According to a CNN investigation, in terms of artillery munitions, Russia is outproducing NATO by a factor of three.¹⁵
 

In February 2024, the Pentagon received a report from Govini, a defense software company, that evaluated America's defense contractor supply chain risks. The Govini report "Numbers Matter: Defense Acquisition, US Production Capacity, and Deterring China" concluded that:

"US domestic production capacity is a shriveled shadow of its former self. Crucial categories of industry for US national defense are no longer built in any of the 50 states. With just 25 well-constructed attacks, using any of a variety of means, an adversarial military planner could cripple much of America's manufacturing apparatus for producing advanced weapons. Under the current US government approach, industry cannot meet production demands to support allies under fire and deter war in the Pacific."¹⁶
 

America's defense industrial supply chains are highly dependent on international supplies. The extent to which the sector is reliant on non-American supply chains is hard to fully catalog, given the complexity of the supply networks involved, but Govini notes - as a case in point - that the US defense sector imports various components and materials from over 10,000 Chinese enterprises.

The US Congressional Commission on the National Defense Strategy report, issued in late July 2024,¹⁷ concluded that the United States is no longer militarily capable of prosecuting its global ambitions. The report observed, for example, that "unclassified public war games suggest that, in a conflict with China, the United States would largely exhaust its munitions inventories in as few as three to four weeks, with some important munitions (e.g., anti-ship missiles) lasting only a few days. Once expended, replacing these munitions would take years." More generally, the report concluded that America's defense industrial capacity is inadequate for its strategic ambitions, confirming the assessments that have emerged over the past few years that the unfolding battleground failure in Ukraine began to raise serious doubts about Western military capabilities.

The Commission also recognized the inability of the United States to address its military production requirements on its own. Instead, mobilizing its various networks of allies globally was identified as necessary if the United States was to match capacity with ambition into the future. In this context, the growing array of minilaterals in the Asia Pacific is evidence of this strategic turn. American capacity limitations are being augmented by the resources of allies such as Japan, the Republic of Korea (ROK), and Australia.

In terms of the enlistment of Australia, the AUKUS arrangements are the most noteworthy. The proposed acquisition of American nuclear-powered (and nuclear-weapon-capable) submarines is synonymous with AUKUS. The shift away from conventional submarines, originally contracted from France, to US nuclear submarines has sparked intense public debate in Australia and, to some extent, has also amplified American concerns about its own resourcing requirements and limited capabilities. In the US, members of Congress have raised doubts about the capacity, let alone the wisdom, of providing nuclear submarines to Australia. The concern is simply that the American submarine sector is presently incapable of meeting America's own requirements, let alone being able to deliver for anyone else. An August 2024 Congressional Research Service report identified that the current submarine output capacity is between 1.2-1.4 per year, compared to the US annual procurement of 2 vessels. This situation has resulted in a "growing backlog of boats procured but not yet built."¹⁸
 

These American Congressional assessments have underscored the doubts that some Australian critics have expressed about the practicalities of the AUKUS submarine deal. In response to these doubts, Australian Submarine Agency (ASA) boss Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead recently pleaded for patience but acknowledged that the program will be slow, is likely to experience setbacks, and is expensive. These admissions did little to assuage concerns.

As for Japan's contribution of additional Patriot air defense missiles, there are serious doubts as to both capacity and timeliness. These aren't easy bottlenecks to resolve, especially when the adversaries continue to deliver expanded outputs.

Dangerous Times

NATO's expansion into Asia is taking place in conditions of heightened US displacement anxiety. The unfolding defeat in Ukraine and the failure of American naval power to contain the Houthis in the Red Sea are visible examples of the material limitations that exacerbate these anxieties. The US and the West broadly are no longer in a position to play catch-up, according to American commentator David Goldman; rather, Goldman's "Hail Mary" is to commit billions of dollars toward direct energy technologies that "may" enable the West to leapfrog their adversaries.¹⁸ This is a high-risk strategy that has not been accepted by the military fraternity. Rather, at present, the preferred response is to "double down." This means increasing military expenditure where possible, and enlisting allies and their resources, into the program of recovering American preponderance. Given the capacity gap that has now emerged between the Western military-industrial complex and those of the Russians and Chinese,¹⁹ it is unlikely that the West can, in any meaningful period, re-establish a "balance of power in its favor" in Asia. That horse has already bolted.

The pursuit of a "balance of power in its favor" is likely to catalyze greater regional instability rather than bring stability to Asia. The idea of "balance of power" is a post-hoc descriptor, not an effective in-situ evaluation metric. Without perfect information, there can be no adjudication of the "balance of power," leading nations to pursue build-up strategies that trigger what is known as the "security dilemma." For the Americans, there can be no real balance of power in the strictest sense of the concept because "balance" is always oxymoronically understood as American primacy. Without preponderance, the US cannot be confident in there being a "balance" suitable for them.

In a recent lecture delivered in New Zealand, Australian scholar Professor Hugh White reflected on the dynamics impacting the security architecture of Asia.²⁰ He proffered three broad scenarios:

1.A return to US primacy in the region;

2.The emergence of a new configuration in which the US remained in Asia as a "balancing power" but not a hegemonic power; and

3.The retreat of the US from the region overall.

White's assessment was that the first scenario had, in effect, zero chances of materializing. The demonstrable hard power constraints that are now evident cannot be wished away. But, so long as the US and its sundry allies in the region believe that the pursuit of American primacy remains both legitimate and possible, Asia will experience intensified geopolitical turbulence rather than less. NATO's entry into Asia doesn't improve the situation; it makes it worse. For White, given their druthers, the countries of Asia (except perhaps Japan, though I have suggested that this isn't necessarily the case) would prefer the US to leave the region altogether if it would be unwilling to embrace a new role as "balancing power."²¹
 

The ambitions of NATO to expand to Asia must be understood in the context of American anxieties and the loss of US primacy in the region, coupled with the colonial hangover of the European project. The question for the countries of Asia broadly speaking is: if the US cannot accommodate China as a peer power in the region, what price to regional stability, security, and prosperity are they willing to pay to pander to unrealizable American and European colonial ambitions?

As an extension of American geopolitical ambitions, NATO's Asian expansion is anathema to the capacity of the region and its nations to craft and sustain the institutions necessary for a regionally meaningful peace. ASEAN centrality is at risk; the Western powers have not yet given up on the centuries-old ambitions of colonial subjugation, but perhaps it's time that they be told, politely but firmly, that it's time to accept a new settlement - a settlement of equals. 

 

 

Please note: The above contents only represent the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views or positions of Taihe Institute.

 

This article is from the August issue of TI Observer (TIO), which delves into the mixed messaging evident between the 2024 NATO Summit and the Paris Olympics, exploring the geopolitical implications of NATO's expansionist agenda and the observable tensions during the Olympic Games, while looking ahead at the prospects for international cooperation amidst these growing challenges. If you are interested in knowing more about the August issue, please click here:

http://en.taiheinstitute.org/UpLoadFile/files/2024/8/31/1038537745b0bb03f-1.pdf

 

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