NATO Is An Aggressive, Not A Defensive Organization (Why Russia Fears It)
Under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), military action can only be initiated if it meets the following condition:
Text of Article 5:
“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”
Clearly, Article 5 prescribes a defensive response to an aggressive action against one of the signatories.
The following is a summary of NATO’s aggressive history, including several instances in violation of Article 5 as well as in violation of the UN Charter (from pages 97 – 115 of the book War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict by Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J.S. Davies).
NATO MYTH VS REALITY
“If NATO had a history of genuinely keeping the peace and avoiding war, its growth would probably not be perceived as such a dire threat by Russia. But it does not. Under their original Cold War missions, NATO and the Warsaw Pact scrupulously avoided direct combat with each other. The Soviets didn’t come to the rescue of leftists in Greece or Turkey, and NATO refrained from a military response to Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Both sides accepted the “Iron Curtain” between East and West as an enduring border between their spheres of influence.
“But for NATO, that all changed with the end of the Cold War, as it looked for new missions and new justifications for its continued existence in the post-Cold War world. In 1992, NATO deployed ships and planes to enforce UN sanctions against Yugoslavia, which was disintegrating under pressure from largely Western-backed nationalist movements. Then NATO launched its first-ever combat operation to enforce a UN-authorized “no-fly zone” over Bosnia. U.S. warplanes shot down four Bosnian Serb warplanes in 1994, and NATO conducted hundreds of air-strikes in 1994 and 1995. Under the Dayton peace accords, NATO deployed up to 60,000 peacekeepers in Bosnia from 1995 until 2004. This military intervention in Bosnia’s civil conflict transformed NATO from a purely defensive alliance designed to deter or repel an attack on its members into an offensive one.
“In Bosnia, NATO used military force against an insurgent movement that had not attacked or even threatened a NATO member. For decades afterwards, Bosnia remained a dysfunctional, poverty-stricken ward of the international community. The unraveling of Yugoslavia led to an even more intense and controversial NATO military intervention in 1999. Presented as an attempt to stop Serbia’s ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, NATO launched a war—without UN approval—to carve out an independent Kosovo from the remains of Yugoslavia, which by that point was composed only of Serbia (including Kosovo) and Montenegro.
“Like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, NATO’s bombing of Serbia and invasion of Kosovo were clearly illegal under international law. When U.K. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that the U.K. was “having trouble with our lawyers” over NATO’s plan to violate the UN Charter, Albright told him to “get new lawyers.”
“For 78 days, the arsenal that NATO had built to defend Western Europe from a Soviet invasion was unleashed on Serbia, pummeling it with 23,000 bombs and missiles that killed hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians. The CIA and NATO’s main ally, the Kosovo Liberation Army’s Hashim Thaci, who later became president of Kosovo, was eventually put on trial in an international court at The Hague for horrific war crimes committed under cover of the NATO bombing. In particular, he was charged with responsibility for the murders of hundreds of prisoners to harvest their internal organs and sell them on the international transplant market.
“NATO justified its invasion on “humanitarian” grounds, but evidence strongly suggested that its bombing created a humanitarian disaster instead of averting one. The NATO bombing destroyed roads and rail lines; smashed water treatment facilities, electricity generating plants and other civilian infrastructure; and demolished public buildings, including the main TV station in Belgrade. The United States even bombed the Chinese Embassy. NATO claimed that this level of force was necessary to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Kosovars, but the Yugoslav government insisted that the mass exodus from Kosovo took place as a direct result of the bombing. Lord Carrington, a former Secretary General of NATO and chair of the European Conference on Yugoslavia, denounced NATO’s handling of the situation, concluding that NATO bombing not only failed to prevent ethnic cleansing, but had actually caused it.
“These operations outside the Atlantic region expanded much further after the crimes of September 11, 2001, in the United States. In less than 24 hours, NATO invoked Article 5 for the first time in its history and then played a major role in the military occupation of Afghanistan. The United States carried out the initial bombardment and invasion, but the UN-backed International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was set up to train new Afghan military forces in December 2001, using forces mainly from NATO countries. In 2003, NATO formally took command of ISAF and fought in Afghanistan for the next 18 years. The disastrous 20-year Afghan war led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, the displacement of millions, and the destruction of much of the country’s infrastructure. The quagmire ended in August 2021 with the humiliating rout of Western forces and the return of the Taliban government the United States had removed from power 20 years earlier.
“In the case of Iraq, NATO was bitterly divided over the illegal 2003 U.S.-U.K. invasion. France and Germany were strongly opposed; only Denmark and Poland sent special operations forces to take part in the invasion. But after the U.S. appointed an Interim Iraqi Government in 2004, NATO conducted a military training mission in Iraq from 2004 until 2011. As in Afghanistan, the invasion and occupation of Iraq caused widespread deaths, injuries, and displacement, and the ensuing chaos revived Al Qaeda and spawned the Islamic State. In 2018, NATO began a new military training mission in Iraq, taking over from U.S. forces whose presence in Iraq was no longer welcome.
“NATO’s role in Libya was another disaster. After the UN authorized a no-fly zone over Libya in March 2011 to protect civilians during a rebellion against the government of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, NATO and an alliance of Arab monarchies used the UN Security Council resolution as a pretext for a totally unauthorized and catastrophic regime-change operation. They covertly invaded the country and dropped thousands of bombs, leading to the brutal assassination of Gaddafi and the removal of his government. The result was at least a decade of civil war, militia rule, instability, and chaos, spilling over to cause a tragic refugee crisis in the Mediterranean and intractable insurgencies in neighboring countries.”
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