Does NATO Still Exist?

By Dmitry Orlov<

As it says right on the NATO web page, "NATO is a political and military alliance of countries from Europe and North America." Note the order of the adjectives: it is political first and military second. This is by no means an accident: NATO happens to be militarily insignificant. Its only success is in dismembering Serbia to create Kosovo. Destroying Libya hardly counts as a success. But NATO has certainly been successful politically, becoming much larger. Between the collapse of the USSR and the beginning of Russia's Special Military Operation in the former Ukraine, it absorbed Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia. NATO had plans to ingest the Ukraine and Georgia as well but choked, then settled for the more digestible Finland and Sweden as consolation prizes.

Expansion is one of NATO's main functions. Newly ingested nations have to have their militaries trained and equipped with mostly US-made weapons according to mostly Nazi German-inspired NATO standards and this requires a huge, sprawling bureaucracy. Another major function of the NATO bureaucracy is planning and organizing training exercises in the course of which various NATO member militaries collaborate on attacking Russia or repelling Russian attack (because there are no other enemies to think of) undaunted by the facts that attacking Russia would be pure suicide and that Russia has no interest whatsoever in attacking any NATO member countries (but stands ready to destroy them if they attack Russia).

This last parenthetic clarification needs some unfolding. Although NATO is supposedly a defensive organization, it hasn't actually ever defended any of its members. It has participated in various US-led offensive operations (in former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan). NATO charter's Article 5 stipulates that in case of attack against a NATO members, other NATO members have to hold consultations on coming to the aid of the suffering NATO member, but each member gets to decide what aid to offer (it could be limited to mailing it a box of delicious lollypops). More importantly, there is no stipulation that if a NATO member is attacked, other NATO members have to voluntarily commit suicide by attempting to defend that member.

Let us consider a specific example. Suppose that Russia decides that it has finally had enough of British meddling in countries close to Russia's borders and decides to fix the problem once and for all. A choice weapon to use would be one of its new Sarmat missiles. These missiles are fired from a mobile launcher, take a few minutes to deploy, fly arbitrary paths through the stratosphere (making them impossible to intercept) and carry 10 hypersonic reentry vehicles, each of which independently maneuvers precisely to its target and carries a nuclear charge of between 800 kilotonnes and 2 megatonnes. One such rocket, delivering 20 megatonnes, would be sufficient to neutralize Britain politically and militarily for all time, meaning that there would be nothing there for the rest of NATO to defend.

There would still be the question of vengeance, but what NATO members would be willing to commit suicide by attacking Russia in a futile attempt to avenge Britain? None, really. As for British retaliation, Britain does have four Vanguard-class submarines armed with increasingly unreliable American-made Trident II D-5 ballistic missiles, but it is entirely uncertain whether any of them would be launched in response and in any case Russia has missile defense batteries that would intercept them. This is all purely hypothetical, of course, because the Russians are patient to a fault and will in all likelihood just sit back and watch the British establishment degenerate at its own brisk pace, being just a decade or two away from becoming entirely harmless. On the other hand, if Russia were to destroy Britain prophylactically, none of the remaining countries would even dream of bothering Russia for a good long time. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," as the British like to say.

Let us therefore leave aside the silly notion of NATO's mutual defense doctrine as a bedtime story for mildly retarded children and focus on NATO's actual core competencies: expansion, weapons procurement and military training exercises. While the expansion part of the NATO bureaucracy is now happily chomping away on Sweden and Finland, it is hard to ignore that the failure to engulf and devour the Ukraine and Georgia has stopped the NATO enlargement juggernaut in its tracks.

Georgia's absorption into NATO was aborted quite swiftly. In 2008, during the Summer Olympics in Beijing, the Georgian military, under NATO and Israeli tutelage, attacked Russian peacekeepers in neighboring South Ossetia. The Russians then rolled into Georgia and took barely a week to thoroughly humiliate the Georgian military. Peace was restored, although some Georgians still fester over their defeat and join up with the Ukrainians as mercenaries, thereby achieving two defeats for the price of one. The Georgians were quick to realize that going to war with Russia was a bad idea and that NATO membership would make them vulnerable rather than secure, but there remained the possibility of being engulfed and devoured by the European Union. This possibility persisted until 2024, which was marked by the failure of a color revolution attempt. Georgia's EU-installed president (a French national) was dethroned and civil relations with Russia were restored.

NATO's attempt to engulf and devour the Ukraine has been in the works since 2014 and is still a work in progress, although most sane people now consider it an impossibility for a number of excellent reasons such as a lack of undisputed, secure borders and an ongoing military conflict with Russia. It all started with the overthrow of the legitimate, elected government in Kiev and its replacement by a unelected, illegitimate one appointed personally by Victoria Nuland of the US State Department. The people of Crimea would have nothing to do with these new rulers, and neither would the people of Donetsk and Lugansk regions. Crimea swiftly seceded and voted to join the Russian Federation while Donetsk and Lugansk remained as separatist regions within Ukraine. The Kiev regime then launched what it called an "anti-terrorist operation" against these two regions. In response, Donetsk and Lugansk organized local resistance forces.

Why did the Russians accept Crimea but did not immediately accept Donetsk and Lugansk? The simple answer is that Russia understood that war was inevitable but needed time. It used that time to build new weapons systems (Kinzhal, Tsirkon, Oreshnik, Poseidon, Sarmat/Avangard, etc.), launch 42 warships, 11 nuclear attack submarines and 11 diesel-electric submarines and to reorganize its military and its defense industry to prepare it for modern combat.

Fast-forward to 2022. The volunteer resistance forces, merely 30 thousand men, held a defensive line for 9 long years, suffering some 10.000 mostly civilian casualties from Ukraine's relentless shelling of residential districts. By February of 2022 the Ukrainian army was finally ready to crush the resistance. The two regions prepared for this inevitability by holding independence referendums, declaring independence and asking Russia for military assistance. Russia responded by recognizing the newly independent republics and agreeing to offer military assistance. These were all perfectly legal maneuvers in accordance with international law with Kosovo providing the legal precedent. The Russian army struck exactly one day before the planned Ukrainian attack and thwarted it. Soon thereafter, a negotiated end to the conflict was reached between Kiev and Moscow: the Ukraine would leave Donetsk and Lugansk alone, disarm, repeal anti-Russian laws and swear to military neutrality.

However, NATO would have none of that. Boris Johnson flew to Kiev and ordered the Ukrainians to fight "to the last Ukrainian" and that is exactly what the Ukrainians have been doing ever since — for three years running. That is not what is surprising; after all, NATO shouldn't be expected to let go of its victims so easily. What is surprising is that the Ukrainians have been quite willing, for three years running, to fight this futile war "to the last Ukrainian," suffering disproportionately higher casualties than the Russian side, while their eventual defeat has been guaranteed all along. But this is a topic for another article — one best written by a team of clinical psychiatrists with expertise in suicide cults. In any case, the short of it is that NATO has lost twice in a row: in Georgia and in the former Ukraine.

"What's the difference?" you might think. "Another country, another fiasco — NATO should be accustomed to endless defeat by now." But the former Ukraine is different. First, the Ukraine is by no means a trivial case. It is right in the center of Europe and is the largest country in Europe by area. Second, the war in the Ukraine is not between the Ukraine and Russia, as Western propaganda would have you believe. Rather, the Ukrainians are just pawns, willing or (increasingly) unwilling, in a proxy conflict between the United States (with the rest of NATO in tow) and the Russian Federation. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that it is a "proxy war," in these exact words; who are we to argue otherwise? Defeat in this proxy war would not be so bad for the United States — hiding behind an ocean and not saddled with too many Ukrainian refugees (a few hundred thousand are about to be expelled, together with some Haitians and some Syrians). But it would be a disaster for the EU (Poland and Germany especially) where Ukrainian refugees/migrants number in the millions and their ranks are likely to swell further in the course of Ukrainian defeat. European leaders, unpopular as they already are, dread the reputational damage they will suffer as supporters of the Kiev regime who have imposed austerity on their populations in order to lavish funds on Kiev and the refugees.

The Ukraine is a localized problem, but there is a global problem: NATO is running out of countries to engulf and devour. Like a cancer, NATO has to grow all the time (or an entire army of well-paid NATO bureaucrats would have to be dismissed for having nothing to do). They have already swallowed all of the tiny nations: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania; Montenegro and (Northern) Macedonia. And so NATO had no choice but to gobble up previously neutral Sweden and Finland.

There is, however, an issue with having Sweden and Finland join a military bloc. Sweden, you see, signed the Treaty of Nystad with Russia in 1721, in which Sweden, having been defeated in the Northern War, swore to military neutrality. And Finland, after its disastrous dalliance with Hitler, signed with Russia the Treaty of Paris of 1947, in which Finland swore to… military neutrality. Now, the act of abrogating one's responsibilities as they are spelled out in a peace treaty generally means an automatic return to a state of war. By accepting these two countries, NATO was expanding its membership by two countries that are now automatically in a state of war with Russia, thereby violating Chapter 8 of the NATO charter. Perhaps Yanis Varoufakis, economist and former Greek minister of finance, had a point when he said that Europe is now "the stupid continent."<

What would such a war look like? More humiliation for NATO, we must suppose, but will it be the same sort of humiliation suffered by NATO in the former Ukraine or something more severe. We must bear in mind that for Russia the Ukrainian territory is a special case because it is historically Russian territory (Malorussia and Novorussia is what it had been called for centuries) peopled by people who speak Russian as their main and native language, were baptized in the Russian Orthodox church and are culturally Russian. Yes, they have been brain-damaged to the point of hating who they actually are and embracing a fake, synthetic identity. A Ukrainian is a Russian who was forced to stop being Russian but went beyond and stopped being human. Atrocities committed by Ukrainian troops in Russia's Kursk region attest to the fact that these are brain-damaged monsters.

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