Trump threat exposes NATO’s future as European-led alliance

By Gwynne Dyer, International Columnist

Asked on Wednesday if he would reconsider his decision to pull the United States out of North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Donald Trump said, “It’s beyond reconsideration. I just think it should be automatic.” So that’s a definite “maybe.”

He’s very cross at the moment because not one of NATO’s 31 other members has agreed to support his illegal surprise attack on Iran. He didn’t tell them he was going to do it and Iran is totally out of the area covered by the NATO treaty, but he feels betrayed. And he’s probably quite surprised that they aren’t begging him to stay.

Trump is a slow learner, so he’s only now being confronted with the fact that the “North Atlantic” aspect of the alliance actually went dead about a year ago. Canada will remain a NATO member if it dares but, other than that, it’s now in practice a strictly European alliance.

This is a major shock to the system, but it’s long overdue. The Soviet Union, the threat NATO was created to deter 77 years ago, vanished 35 years ago and the current Russian state has barely half the population of its predecessor. It can’t even conquer Ukraine, let alone overrun all of Western Europe, so NATO became “an alliance in search of a role.”

Trump or no Trump, this situation could not endure forever, and the long-postponed demise of that traditional NATO alliance is not a geopolitical catastrophe. NATO 2.0, an alliance with no American input, would be quite adequate to ensure the safety of western and central Europe, although, in the short term, it’s a bit lacking in terms of nuclear deterrence.

Even this shortfall on the nuclear weapons front is less problematic than the experts would have us believe. True, it’s quite a come-down from the 5,500 warheads of the old American-led alliance to the 600-odd British and French nukes potentially available to a new Europeans-only NATO, but China gets along fine with around 600.

Who controls those nuclear weapons is a bigger problem: would London or Paris actually use their nuclear weapons to defend Poland, for example? But exactly the same doubts were already there with the old American nuclear guarantee: would Washington really put American cities at risk to deter a Russian nuclear strike in Europe?

Military planners often say that strategists discussing nuclear war are like virgins discussing sex. The doubts and the unknowns are so great that all plans and calculations are hypothetical.

Therefore, since the only rational goal is deterrence, it’s best not to question the existing arrangements too closely. They have, at least, prevented the use of nuclear weapons in war for 80 years.

The larger question, even less often discussed, is whether we must have a global system of military alliances at all.

We know where they came from. We have no direct knowledge of how human beings behaved politically before the advent of civilization but all the anthropological evidence from studies of first contact with hunter-gatherer groups suggest that they lived in perpetual conflict with their neighbours and habitually created alliances to give them superior numbers in battle.

Those early videos of New Guinea highlanders or Yanomamis in the Amazon lining up and chucking spears at each other for a day every once in a while, with the “battle” called off as soon as anybody was killed or wounded, led some observers to think that these were mainly ritual events, not real wars. They were wrong.

Those events happened once or twice a year, but the two sides were usually alliances of several different groups – and if, one day, some of one side’s allies failed to turn up, the stronger side went for broke and there was a massacre. Over their lifetimes, about 30 per cent of male hunter-gatherers were killed in wars. Male chimpanzees suffer similar losses.

The actual casualty rate in civilized warfare is never that high, but the earliest civilized groups, like the Sumerian city-states more than 7,000 years ago, made the same kind of alliances, and so have all their successors down to the present. They always found specific reasons to justify their wars but the pattern is unmistakable.

So here we are, forging the next set of alliances. It could be Europe and China – both still loyal to a “rules-based international order” – versus Russia and a U.S.-dominated Americas, but it could be something else instead. And where’s India in all this?

The very best outcome would be no world-spanning military alliances at all, but old habits are hard to break.