Nato is weakening America
Europe, not America, is calling the shots
BY ARIS ROUSSINOS
Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.
arisroussinos
September 27, 2023
Nearly three quarters of a century after Nato’s founding, Britain has slid down its league table of political and military power: from a near-peer ally of the United States to more or less open vassalage. To witness the conquered mindset of the British establishment, one need only read a recent article deliberating on what is to be done with the British Army, plummeting in numbers, capability and international esteem. It proposes to reshape our land forces as a collection of Special Forces units at America’s disposal: “we are likely to fight as part of a coalition in future, so why not be the sharpened tip of the American spear?”
On the one hand, the very idea of formalising Britain’s role as Washington’s most loyal and reckless auxiliary, without even the hint that Britain may have vital strategic interests of its own, strikes the reader as a shameful metric of national decline. Yet on the other, it is merely a frank acceptance of Britain’s true role in the world.
Just as the Five Eyes alliance, promoted as a valuable forum to share secret intelligence, can be more accurately viewed as a means to ensure the Anglophone intelligence establishment orientate themselves towards serving US foreign policy goals, the Nato alliance is as much a Cold War means of organising satellite states to serve imperial interests as was the Warsaw Pact. The distinction between Moscow’s loyal network of European generals, securocrats and pet politicians and those of present-day Washington is barely perceptible. Yet, in recent years, the value of the Nato alliance has declined markedly, both to Washington insiders increasingly disgruntled that the United States finds itself subsidising the defence of rich but feckless European states, and to some European leaders such as Macron, who famously termed the Cold War relic “brain dead”. The alliance’s most recent adventures, in Afghanistan and Libya, were disasters both to the countries fated to host its intervention, and to the European states who suddenly found themselves hosting the unwanted human floods that followed.
https://unherd.com/2023/09/what-nato-sceptics-get-wrong-about-ukraine/
