General The Right Honourable The Lord Ismay, KG GCB etc., the first Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, was probably holding a glass of port after an excellent dinner when he growled his famous remark: “Nato was designed to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”
How well did that work out?
Not all that badly. The alliance certainly kept the Russians out of Western Europe (if they ever hoped to advance any farther). It persuaded the Americans to keep their army in Europe throughout the Cold War. Indeed, there are still bits of it in Europe today. And Germany never threatened any country again, although Nato played only a small role in that.
But after only four months of United States President Donald Trump 2.0, Nato is effectively dead. It gradually lost its sense of purpose after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and by 2019 French President Emmanuel Macron said it was “brain dead”. Its prospects rose a bit after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, but it was a false alarm. The United States really has joined the other side.
Not only does Trump see Russian President Vladimir Putin as a trusted friend and role model, but he has comprehensively trashed the European delusion that the US would come to its defence if Russia invaded. You cannot find anyone in the European Union’s defence ministries who believes that Washington would risk a nuclear war to defend European cities.
It was always hard to believe, actually, but the American nuclear guarantee was the foundational doctrine of Nato’s deterrence strategy and an article of faith for all Nato members for three generations. Now it is gone. Here is Germany’s new Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, speaking on the night he won the election last February.
“My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the US. I never thought I would have to say something like this ... But it is clear that the Americans ... are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”
Europe is putting its money where its mouth is, with a US$168 billion loan scheme for arms purchases by EU members. The idea is to create a “Nato-minus” (everybody except the United States) which functions in much the same way and serves much the same purposes — but everybody knows that it cannot be achieved overnight.
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The Nato-minus countries (not an official designation) have enough money, technical expertise, and sheer numbers of people to defend themselves without American help, but they cannot do it right away for two reasons.
One is that they spent less than the US on defence during the long years of peace because America’s imperial mindset let them get away with it. The other reason is that the division of labour among the Nato members left them short of specific items like surveillance aircraft and nuclear weapons. So, now they are scrambling to fill the holes, and it will take a while.
As Hans Kundnani, author of The Paradox of German Power, put it: “Up to the point when the US says the security guarantee is over, you have to do everything you can to hold it together. When there is no short-term alternative, it would be reckless and irresponsible to say screw the US I don’t think (Chancellor) Merz is going to do that.”
No, he won’t. For now, American military power remains indispensable for Europe even though it is unreliable. The emerging European consensus is that this very awkward situation will persist, gradually declining in scale, until around 2030. That is a very long time to hold your breath, hoping desperately that nothing goes bang in the meantime.
Nothing lasts forever, and when old alliances start to shift the changes can go very fast and very far. For example, the collapse of the guarantees provided by the old alliances will probably lead to a rash of new nuclear weapons powers in Europe (Germany, Poland?), the Far East (Japan, South Korea?) and maybe the Middle East as well.
Everybody deplores this trend, but finds reasons why they have to play their allotted parts in this tragedy anyway. Few admit that this is the default outcome on any planet where a highly territorial species that has lived in small groups that were perpetually at war with one another for most of its evolutionary history develops intelligence and then a technological civilisation.
The 80-year-old ban on territorial conquest has served us well, but it is being ignored by the current generation of leaders in Russia, China and the US. We are carrying a huge amount of unacknowledged and unnecessary cultural baggage from our long past, and until we recognise it for what it is we can’t get rid of it. (But it can get rid of us.)
Dyer is a London-based independent journalist. His new book is titled Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers. His previous book, The Shortest History of War, is also still available.
