Lily Lynch
This year’s Nato summit was supposed to be a muted, celebratory affair. In contrast with last year, when President Zelensky aired his fury about Ukraine being denied a clear path to membership, it was to be cohesive and restrained. Before gathering, the outgoing Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, had emphasised the importance of predictability, stability, and unity.
If there were fissures, they had been smoothed over: deviant Hungary, long a blemish on the pact’s public-facing unanimity, had agreed not to block military aid to Ukraine provided it would not have to partake in any Nato operations there. All members of the alliance were in total agreement on the basic facts of the war, Stoltenberg insisted. Under Biden’s steadfast leadership, he asserted, the world had united behind Ukraine.
The self-mythologising PR was fitting for a summit that was also the 75th anniversary of the alliance’s founding. And 75 years after the 12 original signatories of the North Atlantic Treaty gathered in Washington to pledge collective defence, the alliance and the world look very different. NATO has always cast itself as a moral arbiter, disseminating “values” and ideology, while simultaneously fostering member states’ dependency on the United States and securing American hegemony over Europe. But this vassalisation has reached a new stage since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The invasion brought a Cold War alliance of questionable 21st-century utility roaring back to life; the long-time neutral holdouts of Sweden and Finland have even opted to join. During the Cold War, NATO counted many of its most ardent critics among left-wing opponents of US militarism; today, its most prominent skeptics are on the Right, and include Donald Trump.
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