A book by Medea Benjamin and David Swanson (2024) 

REVIEW 

Parke Burgess- Board Member of Traprock

January 11, 2025 

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) tends to get deferential treatment from the mainstream media and, consequently, the majority of people in the United States. In the popular imagination, NATO is simply an extension of the Allies who had triumphed over evil in World War II with the mandate then to keep at bay the Soviet Union and its dreaded communist ideology. This conventional notion still prevails: never mind that the Soviet Union collapsed more than 30 years ago and NATO is going stronger than ever, pursuing purposes that are far from clear. 

By the time of NATO’s founding in 1949 the Soviet Union had cloaked itself behind the “Iron Curtain,” in Churchill’s phrase, with a buffer of satellite states designed to protect itself from the armies and nuclear weapons of the West. These states included East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary; but within the Soviet Union were also the now-independent Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) as well as Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, among others. Arrayed against the Soviet threat were NATO’s twelve original members: the United States, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United Kingdom. 

As a consequence of this history, and the mythologies operating on the American psyche throughout the Cold War and since, NATO has mostly retained its halo in the popular imagination. This deference rests on four premises: 

1. War is necessary so long as evil exists in the world. Hence, NATO serves as a requisite counter-measure to such evil and solely for that purpose; 

2. NATO is an international organization and thus represents the will of many nations united against evil; 

3. NATO stands for what is good and right: its members are advanced democracies fighting to promote justice in the world; 

4. Peace can be secured only through strength. The threat of collective military action among the NATO states is required to prevent war. Therefore, NATO makes the world safer for all by making war less likely. 

These premises are hardwired into the American psyche and, today, most Americans unquestioningly accept them all. This, of course, inhibits any kind of scrutiny of what NATO actually is and does, and it forecloses any critique that might emerge from such scrutiny. Behind this veil of ignorance NATO is allowed to operate with alarming abandon. 

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In NATO: What You Need to Know, Benjamin and Swanson systematically dismantle three of these premises. Directly attacking the first premise, however–that war is necessary so long as evil exists–seems to lie beyond the purview of the work. Because their critique of NATO leans 

so heavily on a principled rejection of militarism, it would have been helpful to lay out the basic case against it: War is not necessary; once the true costs are counted war is generally more evil than whatever evil it was intended to defeat; the cure is worse than the disease; and so on. Fortunately, this case has been made very well in many other sources (including by these authors). Nonetheless, this book would have been more persuasive if it had laid out the general case against militarism and then tied its arguments to that foundation. 

The book begins by providing important historical context that tends to get overlooked. The original treaty had a fairly narrowly defined purpose and scope and it was conceived in conjunction with the U.N. Charter, explicitly referencing, for example, the “desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments,” and “to refrain in [its] international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.” The authors go on to show in excruciating detail how far NATO has strayed from these principles. Roiling underneath this history lies the contradiction of militarism, that the lofty goals for world peace explicitly laid out in the U.N. Charter are fundamentally incompatible with a military enforcement mechanism. As A.J. Muste understood so well: “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.” Militarism is certainly not the way, for it never remains content to play a passive or merely deterrent role. As long as we continue to invest in militarism, its inherent toxicity will menace our communities with the terrifying and relentlessly dehumanizing threat of violence–and sooner or later it will breach its bounds, breaking out in virulent paroxysms of brutality, just as it always has. 

It should come as no surprise, then, that a major theme of the book concerns NATO’s alarming mission creep since 1949. The narrow scope of the original treaty, to promote the security of the North Atlantic countries especially against the threat of the Soviet Union, should have been satisfied by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But instead of folding up shop NATO went into overdrive, repurposing itself without bothering to update its founding documents. Prior to 1991, NATO had expanded modestly, adding Greece and Turkey in 1952 (nowhere near the North Atlantic!), West Germany in 1955, Spain in 1982, and a reunified Germany in 1990. But since 1991 there has been explosive growth. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were added as members in 1999. In 2004, NATO added the three Baltic states, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Since then have been added Albania and Croatia (2009), Montenegro (2017), North Macedonia (2020), Finland (2023), and Sweden (2024). Ukraine and Georgia are now “partners” in the process of gaining NATO membership. 

Benjamin and Swanson document how this growth 1) expanded the alliance well beyond its North Atlantic purview; and 2) used the collapse of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to further isolate Russia, despite its already much weakened condition. This vigorous policy of isolation drew repeated condemnation not only from Russia, of course, but informed observers–people like George Kennan and William J. Burns–who counseled that this policy would render Russia more volatile and Europe less secure. This history calls into question the first and fourth premises above: NATO’s purposes have strayed and expanded; and this has made the world less safe. Most notably, NATO’s expansionism probably forced Putin into his aggressive stance in Ukraine and likely bears considerable responsibility for the war, just as Kennan and Burns 

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had warned. But this is hardly an exceptional case. Benjamin and Swanson examine NATO’s role in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s, Afghanistan (and, less persuasively, Iraq) in the 2000s, and Libya in the 2010s, showing how NATO dramatically and needlessly increased the violence and casualties in each case. 

Benjamin and Swanson show in some detail how NATO has always been an extension of U.S. military power. They point out, for example, that the person named Secretary General of NATO (as far as we can tell given the secrecy of the organization) has always been the choice of the United States; and all Supreme Allied Commanders Europe–all 20 of them–have been from the United States. These facts suggest that the U.S. holds disproportionate power within the organization and calls the shots. As a consequence, NATO can lend the veneer of internationalism to military adventures designed by, and strictly in the interest of, the U.S. government. As long as the public accepts this mirage, the U.S. can engage in these adventures without drawing scrutiny or the ire of those put most at risk. So much for the second premise that NATO represents the will of an international, or at least European, consensus of nations. 

The book also raises the obvious point that the member countries do not in any meaningful way represent the ‘forces of good’ to be arrayed against the ‘forces of evil.’ Between its formal members and its “partners” (a problematic category of nations aligned with NATO, often on the way toward membership) NATO has embraced relationships with several countries that the World Population Review designated as autocracies in 2024. This includes member states Turkey and Hungary, and partners Ukraine, Serbia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Pakistan, and Afghanistan. 

Benjamin and Swanson provide abundant evidence that a major consequence of NATO activity, indeed its actual agenda, is to increase militarism itself–that is, spending on and deployment of weapons and other military infrastructure–in countries all over the world, so long as they can be 

bent to the will of the United States. We can see this in Trump’s demand, in his first administration, that every NATO member spend 2% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP)–not 2% of their budget but their total economy–on their own military. Trump has recently suggested the number should be 5% of GDP. (The U.S., by far the most militaristic country on Earth, currently spends 3.5% of GDP on “defense.”) 

To see what these numbers mean for a few member countries of NATO, see this table: 

	2% of national budget	2% of GDP	At 2% of GDP, percentage of national budget that would go to military expenditure	Actual expenditures in most recent year for which there is data
United States	$135 billion	$583 billion	8%	$820 billion (13.3% of budget)
Germany	$10 billion	$116 billion	22.5%	$67 billion (13% of budget)
Montenegro	$71 million	$1.62 billion	43%	$114 million (3% of budget)

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Notice the pattern: as the countries become smaller, the percentage of their budget required by the 2% rule dramatically increases. Clearly, this metric of 2% of GDP works to the advantage of the larger countries, and particularly the United States. But the pressure to comply forces all member countries to invest vast portions of their resources into the purchase of weapons and other materiel to prepare for war. It takes little imagination to see how this works to the spectacular advantage of the major military contractors around the world, and especially in the United States. It seems fair to ask: Is this in fact a major motivation for this requirement, indeed for NATO itself? 

However that might be, perhaps we should ask an even more important question: Does all this spending protect these countries, or the world as a whole, from the ‘forces of evil’? Does it make us collectively more safe? This book documents many ways in which it does quite the opposite, making war more likely. Among these, none is more perverse than NATO’s nuclear game of chicken with Russia and China. As Benjamin and Swanson point out, NATO expansion is playing havoc with the (already absurd) policy of nuclear deterrence. By placing nuclear weapons ever closer to the Russian border, leaving Putin literally no time to react in the event of a real or imagined attack, the ‘logic’ of deterrence (such as it is) is profoundly undermined. Pressing ever more tightly up against his borders–for example with new military bases in Poland and Romania capable of launching nuclear missiles, or the deployment of virtually undetectable F-35 stealth bombers potentially armed with nuclear warheads–Putin is left little room to maneuver. This practically dares him to fire preemptively if he wishes ever to fire at all. And due to his extreme isolation (in combination with a dangerous mixture of hubris and delusion) he may. The hair trigger that would unleash nuclear armageddon is becoming ever thinner, more sensitive, and so more prone to…WOOPS! 

This, of course, is an outrageously reckless and immoral path and it is being pursued with unyielding determination by NATO, the U.S. government, and the corporations that are enriching themselves in the process–and these are not three independent actors but three faces of the same military-industrial complex. 

You cannot read this book and fail to be horrified, alarmed, and outraged. If NATO was conceived, like the United Nations, in the desire to realize the dream of world peace, it has become ever more the nightmare of global death and extinction. The story NATO as told in this book reveals the basic logical contradiction of “peace through strength.” Preparations for war do not make war less likely but much more so. Violence, or the threat of violence, never secures a true peace but always devolves into war. There is no problem that violence solves, after all. Violence is the problem. If we want peace in the world–and who in their right mind doesn’t–NATO and the military-industrial complex it represents must end. Review of NATO: What You Need To Know © Parke Burgess page 4