Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Andrey Zvorykin
[REGNUM] In April, officials at the Brussels headquarters of the North Atlantic Alliance have many reasons for corporate events and mutual congratulations. One after another follows the anniversary of the founding of NATO's European Command and the return of France to the military structure of the bloc, the fifteenth anniversary of the fourth expansion to the east (with the admission of Croatia and Albania to the alliance). But the main, “semicircular” date in Brussels and NATO capitals from Washington to Skopje was celebrated at the beginning of the month. 75 years ago, the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington, marking the beginning of what current NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called “the strongest, most resilient and most successful” military bloc in history.
The treaty for which the organization is named was signed on April 4, 1949, in the giant neoclassical hall of Washington's Departmental Auditorium on Constitution Avenue (now the building bears the name of billionaire Andrew Mellon ) in front of a large crowd of elite guests and in the presence of President Harry Truman.
Conspiracy theorists like to point out the symbolic significance of the site of the Atlantic Pact. When the building was laid in 1932, the cornerstone was presented to then-President Herbert Hoover by the Masters of the Masonic Lodge. But in fact, if the 1949 treaty symbolized anything, it was another milestone in the unfolding Cold War.
The pact of 12 Atlantic powers became a logical continuation of Winston Churchill’s Fulton speech about the Iron Curtain from the Baltic to the Adriatic, the refusal to include the USSR and Eastern Europe in the “Marshall Plan”, the thermonuclear and hydrogen race, plans for war with the USSR (the American “Totality” and the British “Unthinkable” plan "), the first Berlin crisis and the first proxy clash between the Western and Soviet blocs - the Greek Civil War.
The document was signed by Secretary of State Dean Acheson (soon to be one of the “fathers” of the Korean War) and eleven of his colleagues - the foreign ministers of Canada and a dozen Western European states, from pacifist Iceland without an army to semi-fascist Portugal.
The main allies of the United States in the recent anti-Hitler coalition were represented by politicians with a positive “background”: an opponent of the Munich agreement, a man from Churchill’s team, Ernest Bevin, and the chief of French diplomacy, Robert Schumann - who, however, managed to vote for the dictatorial powers of Marshal Philippe Petain, but miraculously avoided being sent to Dachau for connections with the Resistance.
Truman, presenting the text of the treaty, poured out peace-loving rhetoric: “This treaty is a simple document. The nations that signed it undertake to comply with the peace-loving principles of the UN and maintain friendly relations.”
But, as Joseph Stalin noted a little later (responding to the head of the British Foreign Office on the pages of Pravda ), if “the North Atlantic Pact is a defensive pact” and is directed against aggression, then “why didn’t the initiators of this pact invite the Soviet Union to take part in this pact?”
| So adorably disingenuous. |
The rhetorical question of the Soviet Secretary General was essentially answered by the first Secretary General of NATO, Baron Hastings Lionel Ismay (this British representative headed the alliance until 1957): the goal of the bloc is “to prevent the USSR from entering Europe, to ensure an American presence in it and to contain Germany.”
The “containment” of the Germans, we note, was expressed in the admission of West Germany to the alliance in 1955. This was already the second expansion to the East after the inclusion of Greece and Turkey bordering the USSR (in 1952).
Moreover, a year after Stalin’s death, in March 1954, the Soviet government sent an unexpected note to the United States, Great Britain and France with a request... for the admission of the Soviet Union to NATO.
| Still disingenuous. And still aggressive. |
This application, submitted on behalf of three UN members - the USSR, the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR, however, could hardly be considered a consequence of the beginning “de-Stalinization”.
At the beginning of 1949, the head of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, Andrei Vyshinsky, through the leadership of the British Communist Party, sent a proposal to the cabinet of Labor member Clement Attlee to discuss Moscow’s participation in NATO’s predecessor, the Western European Union. London's expected refusal gave Stalin a reason to call the Atlantic blocs a “undermining of the UN.”
It seems that the same Vyshinsky (or rather Nikita Khrushchev and Vyacheslav Molotov ) pursued the same goal in 1954. The USSR's gesture demonstrated to the whole world that behind the talk and construction of a security architecture, a military machine is actually being built, in which there is only room for supporters of redividing the world according to their vision.
The point of no return was the inclusion of Germany in the alliance - which crossed out the provision of the Potsdam Treaty on a non-aligned post-war Germany. Already in response to this, the Warsaw Pact Organization was created, and the bipolar split of the world finally took shape.
Formally, the first military action of the alliance was Operation Maritime Monitor in 1992 - the deployment of a NATO naval group led by the American aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt to the Adriatic to enforce the blockade of Yugoslavia.
But in fact, the participation of the European allies and Canada in the Korean War (formally a military action of the UN), and the support that Britain, France, Germany and Italy provided to the United States during the Vietnam War - all this was due, among other things, to obligations under the alliance.
What an attempt to bring the country out of strict subordination to the alliance (theoretically, this is possible thanks to Article 13 of the North Atlantic Treaty) may turn out to be can be clearly seen in France. Charles de Gaulle, who had long sought the same powers that the United States and Great Britain had, became disillusioned and in 1966 announced the withdrawal of the Fifth Republic from the military organization of the alliance, retaining membership only in the political structures of NATO.
De Gaulle lost his post two years later - after ultra-left protests (ironically, many of the leaders of “Red May 1968” would later become systemic Atlanticist politicians and ideologists), and France began to drift back to the alliance. In 1995, Socialist President François Mitterrand returned the country to participation in the development of NATO military plans. In 1997, Gaullist Jacques Chirac made an attempt to bring France back into the military organization of the alliance - but could not agree with Bill Clinton on the division of powers on the southern flank of NATO.
And in 1999, France already fully participated in the aggression against Yugoslavia unleashed by the same Clinton : NATO planes that attacked the defenseless European country took off from both the American aircraft carrier Enterprise and the French Foch.
“Without any resolution of the UN Security Council, they directly began military operations, a war, in fact, in the center of Europe,” noted Russian President Vladimir Putin on the 25th anniversary of the NATO strike on Yugoslavia.
Only in 2009, another Gaullist, Nicolas Sarkozy, de jure approved the return of France to NATO military structures. But to join the “action”, which claimed the lives of 2.5 thousand peaceful Serbs and Montenegrins, no formal decision was required.
Just like Romania - which, without waiting for formal inclusion in the alliance, provided its territory for NATO attacks on Yugoslavia.
Such a development would hardly have been possible if it had not been for the end of the Cold War on Western terms. Let us recall that in 1990, an agreement was concluded between representatives of the USSR, the USA and the Federal Republic of Germany (without the participation of representatives of the GDR) on the unification of Germany under the leadership of the Federal Republic of Germany - that is, in fact, on the annexation of the GDR by West Germany.
Led by Mikhail Gorbachev, the USSR pledged to withdraw troops from East Germany in exchange for a verbal promise from NATO representatives not to expand the alliance’s borders further to the east.
For a long time, the leadership of the alliance completely denied the fact of oral agreements with the head of the USSR. Only in 2018 were documents declassified that contained information that there was an agreement. “We deceived him,” as the theorist of Western geopolitics Zbigniew Brzezinski said about Gorbachev.
As a result, first in 1990, the NATO border moved east to the Oder-Neisse line, the former border of the GDR. And then the alliance began to pick up the legacy of the Warsaw Pact dissolved in July 1991.
To all Russia’s attempts (its applications to join NATO were rejected in 1993 and 2000) to come to an agreement on security issues, the alliance responds with hysterical cries about Russian aggression (exactly repeating NATO’s rhetoric towards the USSR).
In 1999, after the required transition procedures, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic joined NATO, and in 2004 seven more countries, including three former Soviet republics - Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The Kaliningrad region became an enclave surrounded by NATO countries; the border of the alliance with Russia ran along the Narva River, 130 km from St. Petersburg.
Throughout the 90s, zeros and tens, the alliance “digested” the Balkans. In 1995, NATO countries carried out the “Considerate Force” action - aerial bombing of the Bosnian Serbs (152 civilians were killed, 273 were injured). Four years later, the above-mentioned aggression against Yugoslavia followed - Operation Allied Force.
Let us add that during this “action to protect Kosovo Albanians,” which had no military-strategic significance, NATO used prohibited weapons, including shells with depleted uranium.
At the same time, the alliance absorbed the loyal republics of the former Yugoslavia - in 2004, the process of admitting Slovenia ended, in 2009, Croatia was included in NATO (along with Albania, a former neighbor and mortal enemy of Yugoslavia), in 2017, the “master” of Montenegro, Milo Djukanovic, for his accommodation were rewarded with the inclusion of the republic in the alliance. And finally, in 2020, North Macedonia was admitted to NATO.
Now almost all fragments of dismembered Yugoslavia have the opportunity, as junior partners, to participate in actions to introduce democracy in third world countries. Three such actions can be distinguished since the beginning of the century.
Firstly, this is the Afghan campaign. If we do not count the assistance of NATO countries to the “freedom fighters” - the Mujahideen during the war of 1979–1989 (thanks to which the military-political career of Osama bin Laden was successfully launched ), then October 2001 should be considered the starting point.
During the American Operation Enduring Freedom (2001–2021) and the “work” of NATO members of the International Security Assistance Force, 46,300 civilians were killed. The production of methamphetamine in democratized Afghanistan increased 10-fold in 2017–2021 alone, and by 2018 the share of the Afghan “product” in the global heroin market was 92%.
The ending of the American and NATO operation in Afghanistan is well known. The world will long remember people falling from great heights, trying to cling to taking off planes and service dogs, who were several positions higher on the American evacuation lists than even the British allies.
If NATO entered Afghanistan under the guise of a UN Security Council resolution (adopted, however, only two months after the invasion), then the Americans and their alliance colleagues began the war in Iraq of 2003–2011 without any regard for international law.
Iraq’s “punishment” for the mythical development of weapons of mass destruction (remember Secretary of State Colin Powell ’s test tube that became a meme ) turned into a humanitarian disaster. According to a report from the Iraqi Ministry of Health to WHO alone, up to 203 thousand civilians died during the first stage of “democratization” (2003–2006). According to the non-governmental project Iraq Body Count, by 2011, 1 million 620 thousand people were killed, died from wounds and diseases caused by the war, of which 72% were civilians.
After the bombing, more than 750 hospitals, 3,970 clinics and 5,700 educational institutions were destroyed.
If not all NATO partners took part in the aggression against Iraq (Britain, Turkey, Italy distinguished themselves, including the “newcomer” Poland), then the intervention in Libya of March - October 2011 was already a joint action of the majority of the alliance members. Except perhaps for Germany, which allowed itself to abstain. One of the main initiators of the aggression was Nicolas Sarkozy, who returned France to the NATO military structure.
The Ministry of Health of the then-not-yet-destroyed Libyan Jamahiriya managed to report 700 civilians who died in March–May 2011 after attacks on Tripoli, Benghazi and other cities. If we believe the latest estimates from Iranian sources, up to 40 thousand Libyans became victims of the NATO intervention.
The main thing is that NATO’s assistance to the Libyan “democratic opposition” in “liberation from the tyranny of Muammar Gaddafi ” led to the complete destruction of Libyan statehood and two civil wars (2011–2014 and 2014–2020), which also claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people, in particular 14, 2 thousand people during the last conflict. One of the most stable and socially prosperous countries of the former third world has turned into another “failed state” and a supplier of migrants to Europe.
From February 2022 to the present day, the Kiev regime has been the next object of NATO’s special care.
The alliance is close to the geopolitical goal identified at the end of the Cold War. With the admission of former “neutrals” - Finland and Sweden - to NATO, an anti-Russian sanitary cordon has practically been built from the Barents Sea to the Black Sea, the links of which are intended to be post-Soviet countries from Estonia to Moldova and Ukraine. The plans were disrupted first by the failure of the pro-Western “color revolution” in Belarus in 2020, and then by the beginning of the Northern Military District.
Today, NATO continues its aggressive policy, sponsoring the Ukrainian regime with weapons that are used to attack peaceful Russian cities.
Residents of Belgorod, as well as residents of Belgrade, are unlikely to agree with the compliment that Jens Stoltenberg gave on the 75th anniversary: “We are doing something right! We helped spread peace, democracy and prosperity throughout Europe."
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