Way back in April 1949, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was founded, its first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, had no doubts about the new military alliance’s purpose – ‘to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down’. One can’t argue with immediate results, but the long-term fallout is something else again.
NATO is very much a product of the post-World War Two military standoff between the US and the late (and little lamented) USSR. But, like so many of the products of the Cold War (huge military budgets, wars throughout the Global South, national security paranoia), NATO has not, as many hoped, withered away. Far from it: since the collapse of the USSR it has expanded eastward, with most countries of the former Warsaw Pact joining. Today it counts for 70 per cent of the world’s total military spending. The most recent candidates for membership, Georgia and the Ukraine, have set alarm bells ringing in Moscow.
