Summit to mark NATO’s 75th anniversary
The NATOization of the Ukraine war and the Europeanization of NATO

NATO is celebrating its 75th anniversary as a war alliance and considers itself to be more necessary and more alive than ever before. Although it is not directly at war, it refers to the war in Ukraine as the “greatest security crisis in generations.” Russia’s violently asserted opposition to NATO’s eastward expansion has given the alliance back the enemy that constitutes its unity and that it had lost with the abdication of its system rival. And for the past two-and-a-half years, its proxy war in Ukraine has proved to be a productive force for the alliance’s power, extended its deployment area to 32 states, and added fuel to the members’ rearmament efforts, the financial level of which now finally largely meets the alliance’s requirements. As the strongest war alliance in military history — “today NATO is more powerful than ever before” (Biden) — NATO’s leading powers are committing themselves to the task of resecuring the world order they regard as their own, and diplomatically preparing the ground at their summit for a redefinition of their alliance: “Now is the right time to reposition the alliance for the future and the changed security situation” (German chancellor Scholz). Public discussions of this repositioning gyrate around a possible reelection of the alliance’s most powerful critic (Trump), who questions the significance of the Ukraine war for the US world order and boasts that he could end the war within 24 hours. The practical steps that political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic are preparing, valuing NATO as the collective instrument of their world order policy,^[1] are largely discussed in the media as precautionary measures to make the alliance — in its unrelenting will to continue the Ukraine war and with regained collective strength — “Trump-proof.” The strategic content of “modernizing NATO” for a “new era of collective defense,” however, is not simply a precautionary measure taken against the future eventuality of a new president in Washington.

1. NATO takes over the coordination of the Ukraine war and defines itself as the power that guarantees that Russia won't win

“There are no cost-free options with an aggressive Russia as a neighbor. There are no risk-free options in a war. And remember: the greatest costs and the greatest risk will arise if Russia wins in Ukraine.” (Stoltenberg, opening speech, July 9, 2024)

With these words in his opening speech, the NATO Secretary General calls on the members of the alliance to rally behind the NATO war efforts as the only option. He brushes aside the national concerns of some Eastern European members, assuring that NATO is far from reaching its limits after a two-and-a-half-year war of attrition against Russia while its proxy is progressively wearing out. NATO is determined to reverse the war results achieved by Russia and under no circumstances to allow Ukraine to be defeated. It has the necessary forces, which gives it all the options to freely decide on the extent of its support, and decides to escalate the war accordingly:

The alliance acts as guarantor of Ukraine's war success and, with the decisions of the Washington summit, takes over control of its further organization and equipment. While the Ukraine contact group in the Ramstein format is being continued under US leadership, which has so far coordinated all arms deliveries from individual states, NATO creates a new command (NSATU — NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine) with headquarters in Wiesbaden, which is to take over this task in the future. With this, NATO abandons its previous formal separation between itself and the arms deliveries from individual member states, which it had used to emphasize that — although it had taken care of supplying arms and supervising the conflict — it was not the party that took all relevant decisions on the course of the war. Departing from its previous formal organization as a “coalition of the willing” under US leadership, the military alliance institutionalizes itself as the leader that continues with maintaining and rearming the Ukrainian warring party, declaring itself the official central coordinator of the Ukraine war.

By taking over control and bundling the relevant competencies in new and expanded NATO structures, the member states agree on organizational commitments within their alliance that are designed to “ensure increased, predictable and coherent security assistance for Ukraine in the long term and to strengthen support for Ukraine by allies and partners.”^[2] They underscore their collective determination with a commitment to a “minimum basic funding” of €40 billion for the war in Ukraine. As an immediate measure, Ukraine’s air defenses are supplemented with additional Patriot systems in order to enable the NATO proxy to continue to hold out against Russia’s military superiority, and to continue to function as the party-at-war for its suppliers despite undergoing constant bombardment. The political purpose, however, goes further: in the NATO-Ukraine Council’s definition, it is a contribution to an “integrated air and missile defense architecture for Ukraine,” which it is building up “to enable the most efficient use of Ukrainian air and missile defense capabilities and to ensure Ukraine’s transition to full interoperability with NATO.” As a further decisive step in this “adaptation to Western doctrine,” Ukrainian president Zelensky can also be pleased with US Secretary of State Blinken’s commitment that one year after establishing the Western fighter-jet alliance, its sponsors will really deliver the first F-16 fighter jets this summer. The NATO proxy is thus enabled to enter into active air warfare against Russia, which aims at breaking Russia’s air superiority and the ensuing advantage in its warfare. In terms of its own power as a superior military alliance, NATO is gradually transforming the Ukrainian armed forces into a NATO army by supplying weapons and providing the pertinent training under the technical title of interoperability. A high-ranking general’s permanent deployment in Kiev is the personal embodiment of this, its public confirmation.

In its final declaration, NATO asserts its strategic claim on Ukraine as the country’s “irreversible” path into the alliance.^[3] Ukraine’s capacities are being recklessly exhausted in the ongoing war it conducts as the Western proxy, which erodes the foundations of its sovereignty, yet at the same time it receives from its Western sponsors the promising prospect of becoming a member of the military alliance and a NATO frontline state. The Western military alliance aims at turning Ukraine into the exact opposite of what Russia wants to achieve with its war: a neutral and demilitarized Ukraine. It escalates the ongoing proxy war with longer-range weapons and licenses for their use, and it calls on Russia to withdraw its troops immediately — from Ukraine (and Transnistria and Georgia to boot).^[4] It appears unimpressed by everything Russia has achieved in two and a half years of war, does not allow its war goal — Russian defeat — to be adjusted in view of the current war situation, and so categorically rejects the Russian war aims and peace conditions.

Because of this determination to continue and escalate the Ukraine war, NATO's repositioning points at a larger issue beyond it.

2. NATO defines itself as peacekeeping force for Europe and opens up the war front against Russia needed for this

With its role as the power that secures Russian defeat in the Ukraine war, NATO revises its fundamental purpose as a war alliance. Its specific quality lies above all in the mutual assistance clause as set out in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which obligates all members of the alliance to regard an attack on any one of them as an attack on all of them — the rigor of which is aptly expressed in the phrase that warns that the alliance stands “ready to defend every square inch of NATO territory.” An attack on one partner immediately involves all NATO members in war and welds them together in their mutual obligation in this existential question of state sovereignty. In this elemental question of war and peace, NATO members have thus relativized their sovereignty in favor of a collective preparation for war and of the combined military power of the alliance — and so focused their reason of state on participating in the American monopoly on world order. The superior conventional and nuclear military power of the USA is the historical basis and the further guarantee of preserving this fundamental contradiction. The constitutive element for the construction of this alliance was the existential threat to the western NATO partners to which they were exposed by the American enmity toward the Soviet Union and which they made their own without being able to endure it on their own. This made subordination to the American superpower indispensable for everyone. With the Ukraine war, NATO has redefined the former purpose of its alliance and assigned itself a new long-term task: it reaffirms its determination that NATO power is irreconcilable with Russian power, and opens up a new cold war front for Moscow. It defines Russia as a threat to NATO and the “Euro-Atlantic security architecture” and commits itself to the prime task of disarming Russia to such an extent that it no longer poses a threat to Europe and, accordingly, to the Western world-peace order.^[5]

In the current state of the war, this first means that NATO not only safeguards the escalation of its proxy war, but expands its deterrent power as a whole, i.e., enables the allies to take an active part in war in the event of a direct NATO-Russia confrontation. As an immediate step, NATO decides at its summit to expand its “forward defense” capability by strengthening the combat-ready forces on the eastern flank, and puts its troops on high alert. The deployment of NATO forces in Finland is meant to use the newly integrated members for an immediate increase in power and an enhancement of NATO’s already superior offensive power. To increase its deterrence power, NATO allocates to its members in the ongoing war preparations their respective operational areas and tasks, following an allied war scenario against Russia under its command. It lists their existing and yet-to-be-procured means of their national sovereignty as elements of the allied power potential against Russia, making sure that they become a part of NATO’s available military assets. In a “new generation of defense plans,” NATO refines its internal coordination of war scenarios in which it exercises practical cooperation in war, following the Steadfast Defender 2024 model and using “real capabilities” so that the flexible military capacities can be mobilized “at short notice and without prior notice.”

To help with planning an allied war against Russia in the long term, NATO creates a central procurement agency^[6] which coordinates the needs requirements that its war preparations impose on each member. NATO assesses the capacities that are collectively available, firstly, with regard to their size, and ramps up the arms production capacities for the ongoing hot and cold wars as part of the “NATO Defense Planning Process” (NDPP). The financial resources designated for this purpose, the scope of which was given a productive boost by the war in Ukraine, are far from sufficient for NATO’s ambitious, growing need for force, and the first calls to raise the 2% target have already been made. Secondly, it critically assesses the quality of its collective deterrence power and, in line with its increased demand for escalation dominance in the allied war to be prepared against Russia, ‘discovers’ numerous “gaps” in its previous military superiority.

In order to close one of these key “gaps,” Scholz and Biden agreed on the sidelines of the NATO summit to station US medium-range missiles with a range of over 2000 km in Germany starting 2026. So for the first time since the withdrawal of the Pershing missiles in 1991, the leading NATO power once again supplements the offensive capabilities of the alliance with various high-tech variants of a type of weapon that it had previously barred itself from using under the INF Treaty by mutual agreement with the Russian adversary. What is claimed to eliminate an “imbalance” in land-based medium-range weapons with Russia conversely enables NATO — which lays great store by this reversal — to eliminate Russia’s ability to keep the superior NATO forces at bay and to push back their deployment in the event of war, and to significantly weaken the enemy’s ability to continue its combat operations by attacking so-called “time-critical high-value targets.”^[7] The core task of this type of weapon is therefore to overcome Russia’s ‘anti-access/area denial’’ capacity. These weapons reflect the Western military alliance’s decision to deprive Russia of its ability to defend itself and its assets in a conventional war; on top of that, they undermine Russia’s nuclear deterrent power. For all types of these conventional medium-range missiles, which are difficult to intercept, early warning times are significantly reduced, and the new hypersonic missiles in particular enable NATO to carry out disarming precision strikes against the Russian nuclear weapons arsenal — which drastically increases the risk of starting a nuclear war of annihilation; experts speak of an “increased incentive” due to the “use ‘em or lose ‘em” scenario.^[8] And this is done in a conventional way, even without making use of the “warhead ambiguity” (the optional nuclear armament) of this type of weapon, which is of course always included as part of the plan. Either way, with this rearmament, NATO is shifting the risk of a transition to nuclear escalation to Russia.

3. The Europeanization of NATO — a redefinition of the relationship between the transatlantic allies

By declaring itself the power responsible for maintaining order in Europe, NATO has subscribed to the permanent task of stripping Russia of its power. This raises the question for the alliance of how it will organize its revised goal in the future within its structures and between its members. Taking the offensive in driving the European peace-order forward, NATO at its summit — first diplomatically in the form of numerous declarations of intent — launches a new distribution of tasks between the transatlantic allies, ​​which follows the imperative that Europe must assume more responsibility within NATO.

In contrast to the Cold War against the Soviet Union, in which the European NATO partners were assigned by the US leading power the status of being its strategic transatlantic outpost and acquired the appropriate weaponry, the European pillar is now designated to take on a more independent role in the new cold war against Russia. The basis of this new role assignment is the increase in power of the European NATO allies in two ways: their number in NATO’s eastward expansion has continuously grown over the last 25 years, expanding the European NATO territory close to the Russian border, and they have enhanced their military capacities by more than the addition of the armed forces of the new members. In particular, the latest reinforcement through the accession of Sweden and Finland in the course of the Ukraine war adds new quality to NATO as the new members will close NATO’s eastern flank around Russia and Belarus, give the Baltic Sea the status of a NATO inland sea and enable the alliance to open up a northern front against Russia. This increase in NATO’s power in Europe encounters a strategically weakened Russia, which is losing its traditional spheres of influence and former military allies, sees itself encircled by NATO deployment on its doorsteps, and, in addition, is exhausting its conventional military power in the current war of attrition in Ukraine.

Despite and because of this new position of power the European NATO pillar has achieved, the superior nuclear deterrent power of the US remains indispensable for them in opening up a new cold-war front against the Russian nuclear power. The project of Europeanizing NATO to disempower Russia is based on the world power’s superior nuclear deterrence to back up the conventional escalation of the proxy war and the allied war preparation of the European pillar. In the new role assignments, the US retains its status as the ultimate guarantor of NATO’s escalation dominance, and it keeps its grip on shaping the ongoing hot and the new cold war. While engaged in the project of Europeanization, the US makes sure in a chain of bilateral military agreements with the European NATO allies that the expansion of NATO and the build-up of conventional “forward defense” gives America every opportunity to equip the European front with American weaponry and to tactically shift US nuclear weapons forward. The US anyway reserves sovereign control and the rules of engagement for these weapons for itself.^[9]

The leading power, however, is now increasingly calling on the Europeans to take on NATO’s upcoming dual task. While the US arranges the Europeanization of NATO, allocates competencies, and expands its overall supervision of the European front, the Europeans are meant to share the burdens of both the hot and cold war. Biden is taking up the criticism by the Republican Party that the Europeans are comfortable in their own skin in the wake of American arms deliveries and under the US nuclear umbrella instead of themselves taking care of the war on their continent, thus pushing them far beyond the demand for increased military spending. The US demands from its European allies in principle that the European NATO pillar make the military disempowerment of Russia its own concern. It is the obligation of the European NATO partners to assemble the competencies and weapons required for this. In this way, the world power will obtain complete freedom to determine its own priorities in dealing with the existing or emerging war fronts of its world order.^[10]

The US tasks its European allies with arranging the military side of the NATO-Russia confrontation; at the same time, the Europeans are offered the opportunity to take their own sovereign decisions to some degree in this fundamental imperialist power question. With the ensuing burdens of war — after all, the danger of the NATO deployment area turning into the battlefield of an escalating NATO-Russia war is not new — the leading power also offers them part-leadership, i.e., greater participation in its world-order policies. This meets with a strong strategic self-interest of the leading European powers, their political determination to assert themselves as a force for order in Europe on the basis of NATO. The Europeans take this new division of tasks as an opportunity for a mutually agreed emancipation within the alliance, i.e., to establish themselves in the alliance as a newly self-reliant European power bloc on the basis of nuclear backing from the US. The Europeans, on their part, task the US military power, which denies Russia its nuclear escalation potential by threatening a devastating nuclear strike, for their ambitious task of disempowering Russia as part of a NATO operation, expecting a conventional NATO war against the Russian nuclear power to be fought and brought to a successful end.

The fundamental nature of this NATO alliance, unaffected by the new division of tasks within the alliance, becomes clear when compared with the EU project that most European NATO member states are pursuing at the same time. The transition from an economic alliance to a geopolitical power that is on a par with the global powers, considered imperative by the EU’s leading powers — “so as not to be crushed between the power blocs” — regularly fails because of the issues of sovereignty it raises among the states, not least among the protagonists of the European quest for global power themselves. The relativization of the sovereignty of the members in an alliance of sovereign states which is entailed in the subordination of state power to a common political will, goes far beyond the collectivized reason of state already realized in the EU. It directly affects the core of state sovereignty and accordingly requires a superior power of the caliber of the US world power. It is this European deficiency that makes NATO the sole, indispensable cornerstone of the ambitions of the Europeans in their decision on incompatibility with Russia in the current war situation — in precisely the war with which Europe wants to become an independent peace power. This is why the European ambitions to gain autonomy as European Union from the global American power, at times lively, sometimes critical of NATO, are currently retreating into the background. As there is no imperialist alternative to the alliance, NATO and its leading power, the US, take a superior and patronizing stance towards the ambivalent dual nature of its European members as EU and NATO partners. In its final declaration, NATO praises the EU as a “unique and important partner” and chalks up its economic support for Ukraine as a contribution to its war goal. It praises the EU as an auxiliary force at an “unprecedented level” of cooperation and “recognizes the value of a stronger and more effective European defense that makes a positive contribution to transatlantic and global security and complements and is interoperable with NATO.” By emphasizing the “development of coherent, complementary and interoperable defense capabilities,” the transatlantic military alliance simply insists on the identity between European rearmament and NATO’s increase in power, and discreetly warns against unnecessary double work.”

© GegenStandpunkt 2024